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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand the criteria. He'd like to move into DC, but DC is too expensive. So he devises a filter that spits out (among a small number of other optimal locales) the Mission and Russian Hill in San Francisco. Both are among the most expensive places to live in the country.

For that matter, optimizing mostly for walkability, the filter spits out Lakeview in Chicago. But Lakeview is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Chicago, and isn't significantly more walkable than many cheaper neighborhoods here.

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Likewise, Capitol Hill in Seattle is a very expensive neighborhood -- if you want to buy. However it's chock full of rental units. I suspect that apartment rental costs in Capitol Hill aren't anywhere as extreme as trying to buy a house. I'm not sure that makes it "affordable" by any normal definition, though.

Also on a re-read, I note that the author was not using housing prices as a measure of affordability:

> Affordability wasn’t hard; I mapped all the census tracts in the country that had a median income within $10,000 of mine, both above and below.

I can't speak to other neighborhoods, but in the case of Capitol Hill I suspect that this measure is a poor proxy for affordability. Capitol Hill residents might be disproportionately people who are willing to pay a premium to live in the City.

Instead of using income as a proxy for affordability, using actual cost of rent by census tract would be way better. The ACS data he used includes Rent values and property values, both of which are a much better measure of affordability than income.

Or the sort of data provided by Kwelia.

[1] http://kwelia.com

That's going to be a terrible measure of affordability. Measuring affordability by median income will tell you that Loudoun County, VA (a suburb of DC) is the most expensive place in the US to live. However, it's actually much cheaper to live there than to live in DC, which is cheaper to live in than New York or San Francisco.

Renting on the hill has gotten pretty absurd as of late. The new Sunset Electric building on 11th and Pine has 350 square foot studios going for almost $1700 (http://www.urbnlivn.com/2014/07/06/sunset-electric-taps-into...)

That is absurd. I think I paid about $900/month for an 800 square foot apartment back in the late 90s. The situation today is probably exacerbated by Amazon's move to South Lake Union. But whatever the case, it definitely doesn't sound affordable.

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