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Comment by dsiegel2275 | Hacker News Reader

This is easy. Pittsburgh.

Consistently ranked as a top city in the US, and world, to live in, in no small part due to the comparatively cheap cost of home prices, rent, and living in general. For example, there are nice neighborhoods in the city where one can buy a three bedroom, 2000sq foot house for < $150,000. I think that would buy a closet in the Bay area.

With Carnegie Mellon University here, the 'intellectual' and more specifically the tech scene is thriving. I work for (and take classes at) CMU and see this first hand. Numerous big tech companies have set up shop near campus (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc). There are many, well funded, startups operating out of the city as well (e.g. Duolingo, Petuum), most of which have spun out of CMU.

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Pittsburgh is great. I live in a city you've never heard of and pay $1125/mo for a one bedroom apartment. A good friend of mine lives in Pittsburgh and pays $1200/mo for a 5 bedroom house (rental) in an unpopular but safe and growing neighborhood of Pittsburgh proper. The cost of living is insanely low and Pennsylvania is a low tax state (flat 3.2% person income tax), which compared to California can equal a few hundred dollars a paycheck for the higher incomes.

Keep in mind though that a lot of San Francisco and NYC folks move to Pittsburgh for a year or two then leave because it's not San Francisco or NYC. Public transit sucks. Traffic is really bad during rush hour (not SF bad, but it is one of the worst in the state, probably second only the Schuylkill Expressway going into Philadelphia). Nobody lives downtown because there are no supporting services downtown like grocery stores or anything like that. You 110% need a car to live there.

> Nobody lives downtown because there are no supporting services downtown like grocery stores or anything like that. You 110% need a car to live there.

Is this by design? Or is there an opportunity for grocery stores, etc. to address a city planning deficit?

It's just a heavily commercial area. Parking is expensive compared to the cost of living (~$400-500/mo for a garage downtown with no access restrictions which will probably be close to or maybe more than half your rent) and that coupled with the lack of services just makes it very hard to make the case for moving downtown. Even if the services came in, you would still absolutely need a vehicle to survive so when you compare downtown to a 30-45 minute rush hour commute it's a hard sell for sure.

> Public transit sucks.

There is a light rail/trolley line from downtown into the South Hills area. It's great if you live next to it or can get to a park & ride. I hit it on the weekends to bike the trails along the rivers downtown. I haven't used the buses much, but the few times I've needed them, they weren't bad.

The thing that makes Pittsburgh traffic bad is the topography. Outside of downtown, nothing is a grid, and you'll likely have to go through a tunnel. Not only are they narrow (2 lanes in each direction), everyone seems to practically stop for them.

As a daily user of the PortAuthority bus system, it's far from "Sucks".

$100 all-you-can-ride per month means I don't even think about cost, and the Transit app makes route planning super easy.

And it should be getting even better at bus prediction in a few months, Port Authority's installing new sensors. Right now they disabled a bunch of them so Transit's not that helpful but it'll be very good soon.

Plus they've got an API that I'm using to build my own personal route intelligence around. :)

Looking forward to the Show HN!

I wonder how to reconcile your point about lack of public transport, supporting services and liveability downtown (seems like it's not liveable) and the parent's claim about Pittsburg being top rated city in the world for liveability.

It depends on your definition of liveability. If you require the ability to get an apartment downtown, do all your shopping downtown, and commute downtown without buying a vehicle, Pittsburgh is not liveable. But I would argue that outside of NYC and maybe {San Francisco,Chicago,DC}, no US city is liveable by that definition.

I think it's very liveable if you're realistic about what liveable means in a mostly suburban part of the US - driving into downtown for work and pleasure, and leaving for everything else.

> think it's very liveable if you're realistic about what liveable means in a mostly suburban part of the US

Yeah, for me "livable" means "not suburban." I'm one of those people who came to Pitt thinking it would be like mini-NYC and was massively disappointed.

As you mentioned, if you want to live in a big house here, the prices are a steal... but on the other hand, if you want a nice studio or one-bedroom, the market is just OK. I'm paying $1,300 for my one-bedroom. On the other hand, if I lived in Manhattan I could get a similar place for $1,800 and I'd make at least $15K more a year in salary... so I don't know if the cost of living here is really all that good for what you get.

I meant on the parent's point that it be top rated liveable city worldwide, which to me can't possibly rhyme with bad public transit and nothing reachable by foot. At least if you use a workdwide benchmark. But I've never been so maybe I just don't have a sense for it!

Downtown is very small (less than 0.5 square miles) in Pittsburgh and it just isn't very residential (nor is it intended to be). There are other parts of the city that are much more walkable and while there aren't many trains the bus system isn't bad

I really wish we had any kind of nightlife downtown. It's pretty cool at night but there really isn't much to do apart from a few good restaurants on Penn Ave. I was in Center City, Philly, a few months ago and it was exactly what I wish we had downtown.

One thing to consider about Pittsburgh, especially compared to the bay area, is the weather. The winters are going to be a bit harsher in / around Pittsburgh than they would be in the SF bay.

I've been to Pittsburgh a lot. I agree with this 100%!

What is the driver of the local economy? Ie most people wind up working at/in _____ .

How hard is it to find good doctors and red Chile.

UPMC is a massive ($19B) primary healthcare provider and insurer with 40 hospitals and 600 doctors' offices. According to their own stats, 41% market share for western Pennsylvania. It's hard to argue that you can't find a world class physician in Pittsburgh, let alone just a "good" one.

Red chiles are pretty ubiquitous across the US, especially in urban areas; are you referring to something specific?

After losing all but 1 steel mill about 40 years ago, it's quite diverse. There is lots of healthcare (UPMC, Highmark), finance (PNC, BNY Mellon) and sports (Steelers, Penguins, Pirates), with plenty of retail and manufacturing. There's a little tech, but it's not big compared to healthcare and finance (check back if we get Amazon HQ2). This list is accurate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_in_Pittsb...

Source for world ranking?

https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2018/08/17/heres...

How is the tech scene around Penn?

Penn is in Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh

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