Until this year, I lived in the same place I grew up, one of the highest cost-of-living places on the planet: NYC. Until the pandemic, the goal of owning a home did seem totally out of reach for me, even with my remote SV tech job salary.
Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and even ethically.
I now own 15 acres of land with two houses on it. The median income in this part is <40k/yr and yet it's safer, friendlier, healthier, and best of all, much freer. High cost of living is a true killer of communities and the more expensive your area is, it's quite likely it's also a lot less free.
If you can leave the major cities in the US, it's possible for life to become a whole lot nicer.
Unsure why you're getting downvoted for this -- it makes good sense, and many could benefit from this kind of thing. I have a friend who moved from NYC to Ohio recently. He was bellyaching about it a lot (the move was for work), since he thought he would be so sad to leave the cultural opportunities of NYC, etc. Instead he has found that a) Ohio wasn't so bad after all, b) his stress-related conditions have evaporated, and c) he has more time to pursue what he loves doing in that environment.
Any hint that dense urban living is not the optimal lifestyle for everyone gets downvoted here. For example, here's my super-controversial anecdote from yesterday, that people took time out of their day to try to bury: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450896
Well there's also the angle of people moving from the big city into a small rural community and gentrifying it. A good friend of mine had to deal with this trend in Bozeman and was ultimately pretty much forced out by it.
There's definitely a tension between bringing money and people into communities that need them and bringing a lot of money and people and different preferences into communities in a way that makes them less good for the people already there.
You gotta keep hyping up the big cities: talk about the usual cliches like the food, the movie scenes, the 'culture'. Keep cities popular so everybody stays there and leaves land in the countryside for the rest of us.
I plan to do the same in a couple years, my hometown is unaffordable, with tech like Starlink coming online and the pandemic making remote work more common I can foresee a subset of tech workers choosing this path if they feel alienated in the larger tech cities.
Has there been any culture shock for you? As someone who grew up in NJ, I'm always interested in hearing how other tri-state area people deal with moving from an urban to a rural environment.
Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and even ethically.
I now own 15 acres of land with two houses on it. The median income in this part is <40k/yr and yet it's safer, friendlier, healthier, and best of all, much freer. High cost of living is a true killer of communities and the more expensive your area is, it's quite likely it's also a lot less free.
If you can leave the major cities in the US, it's possible for life to become a whole lot nicer.