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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can. I live in such a place. Housing around $200k for 4br, 2ba, decent salary, etc.

I don’t know what your vision of cultural infrastructure is, but I feel culturally satiated.

> I don’t know what your vision of cultural infrastructure is, but I feel culturally satiated.

Multiple theatres, a decent opera house. A regular meetup for my favourite obscure card game. Being able to reasonably expect that essentially all the bands I like will play my city sooner or later.

This more or less describes every medium-sized U.S. city, from Cincinnati to Nashville to Phoenix to Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Cleveland and so on.

There may be specific things you care more about that one city might have more of than the others, but, in general, all cities have this stuff (and it's a tragedy of human flourishing that people on the coasts think they don't).

Not to mention the plethora of 100k sized cities that too have all of these things. Grass is greener syndrome.

Certainly not the case for a typical 100k-sized city, unless my hometown is unusually badly off. One and a half theatres, no opera house at all, an MtG community but nothing for anything smaller, most bands didn't bother going there on their tours.

I don't know about 100k. That seems small. I'm talking about metros of well over a million people.

But, also, don't get confused by looking only at the statistics for core cities. People look at, say, St. Louis, see that it has only 300k people, and stop there. But that's a wildly misleading number that's really more of a reflection of the fact that lots of people in the U.S. live in what are called "suburbs," even if those "suburbs" are actually still part of the urban core.

The St. Louis metro has 2.8 million people. 1.3 million of those people live in the core, urban city/county. That 300k number isn't useful at all. It's based on silly, irrelevant historical border-drawing.

The same can be said for most Rust Belt cities.

All these cities are car-centric. You cannot reasonably get around there on bicycle or public transit.

That's basically true as a default state. But you can make it work if it's something you care about. Most of those cities have at least one walkable neighborhood that's (more or less) car-optional. I think you'd still want to own a car for those things that can't be accomplished without one, but you could live most of your daily life on foot.

I used to live here, for example:

https://goo.gl/maps/RAYSkfs4Dtn

That's two blocks from a Whole Foods, walking to everything else you'd need, and 4 blocks from the light rail, which can take you to each of the region's two largest employment centers (Downtown and Clayton), its two largest universities, and the airport.

Where do you live that a decent 4br/2ba goes for 200k? I’m in the Midwest and that’s at least 100-150k lower than I’d expect in an urban area (rural communities, sure - but not the city).

My sister is in Tulsa and has a _very_ nice 4+2 (or maybe 3+2, idr, but it's a well-built, big house on an acre); it cost her $250k. Where I live (central Illinois, 200000 person metro area), prices are even lower.

My reference is Madison/Minneapolis where I’d respectively price a decent 3br at 250/350 in cheaper areas.

Rochester and Buffalo are this affordable, and have the added benefit of being in New York State.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Being in NY is a negative, not a positive. NY has some of the highest taxes in the country and much of the money gets funneled to NYC.

They're affordable because not many people want to deal with 10 feet of snow every year (unless there are nice big mountains nearby, which NY state does not).

I bought my 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house in Richmond, Va for 250k and it takes me 7 minutes to bike to work. I could have gotten a place in a less desirable part of the city for even cheaper. It is a pretty bike friendly city.

Are you seriously comparing a big village of 200k people with the almost 4M people of Berlin?

  I’m in the "Midwest" and that’s at least 100-150k lower than I’d expect in an urban area.

The parent was not talking about Berlin, but about affordable housing in an urban environment. I would hardly classify Richmond as even a mid sized city despite the fact it's metropolitan area population is over 1 million, but it is definitely urban. I can walk to anything I need and like I said, bike to work. I mean it is the capital of a state so not exactly a "village"...

I think the point that is missed isn’t that Richmond is “better” than Berlin, but that among the thousands of cities and towns in the United States, some of them offer most or all of the amenities that are being discussed at a reasonable cost!

I doubt there is anyplace on the planet that fully meets the HN-Platonic ideal of a magical land with no cars, cheap rent in exclusively brand new or prewar mid-rise building, and bountiful jobs at hundreds of tech companies.

>Where do you live that a decent 4br/2ba goes for 200k

Ask a bunch of middle managers in a downtown office what they would consider too far of a commute for their current job.

Housing prices will fall off a cliff somewhere between the median response and the max response.

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