Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

I understand the appeal of living in a big city with... people and all, but honestly your dollar goes much further outside city limits. $1,000/month for a 220 sqft living space would be met with absolute disbelief around where I'm from (Rochester, NY, USA).

Location really is everything. Around here, you'll get about 2,200 sqft of living space in a less than 10-year old colonial house with a 2.5 car garage, 2+ acres of landscaped yard, for about $1,500/month. That's ownership, and only about 30 minutes from a large-ish metro area (1M in Greater Rochester). Traveling to NYC / BOS / PHL? By car: 6 hours, by plane: 1 hour.

With telecommuting being as accessible as ever, I have a hard time understanding why people pay these prices for such abysmal living spaces.

View on HN

One of the things I think people who haven't spent a significant amount of time living in dense cities miss is that you do very little "living" in your apartment.

I spend maybe two hours a day awake in my (reasonably large for SF) apartment during the week, tops. The rest of the time I'm at work or out in the city somewhere; I treat the local downstairs basically like my living room.

It's not a lifestyle for everyone, but I consider the entire city my living space and I don't think it's abysmal at all.

That's a good point, and you're probably right about folks who haven't lived in large cities like that. Everyone's experience is different, I guess I was just expressing my own personal experience against the article.

To be fair, Rochester is not really a place...

What?

Sorry. RIT grad, I'm not going to bore everyone with the list of usual complaints about Rochester, lets just say out of all the people I know who are from Western New York and went to RIT, I am still in Rochester. It has one thing, and that's cheap housing compared to where everyone else has gone.

Well, that's precisely the problem with Rochester. It's not the place, it's the people.

That's why organizations such as this exist:

http://coworkingrochester.com/ http://interlockroc.org/ http://refreshrochester.org/ http://rochestermade.com/

If you don't like something about where you live, either change it, or move. Complaining about it for the sake of complaining won't change anything.

I am not sure what you've just tried to tell me.

It's the people? That move away? So, move away? :)

I had heard of half of those organizations. Thanks for the link. Do you do Barcamp?

I'm saying that the reason you think Rochester sucks is because people just complain about Rochester sucking without actually doing anything to improve the situation.

Silicon Valley isn't great because of its location, it's because of its people.

In other words, if you don't like like it in Rochester, either make it better (support local tech organizations, be proud to showcase work in Rochester, etc) ... or just leave. Complaining isn't going to do anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com