I've not seen any stigma for being close to family. I've seen a lot of stigma for staying in some crappy place with poor opportunities, which looks like "being close to family" if you grew up there, but it's not the same thing.

The problem is not being near family. It's being near family and working in the fields that we want, or for pay that can support our own families the way we want to. I couldn't get a job paying better than $60k a year in the town my parents live in as a programmer. And there are so few I'd be lucky to get even that.

It was the same for me. Where I'm from I'd have been very lucky to have made the equivalent of 20k USD per year as a programmer and there were/are very few positions available.

There isn't exactly a stigma regarding living in close proximity to your family. The thing is that previous generations fled the cities for the suburbs (partly because of racism), and since then we've realized suburbs are awful places and people are starting to move back. Most people's parents live in the suburbs, so if you want to live in a city you can't live nearby.

Manufacturing also died, so the lower-middle class jobs that were in industry on the outskirts of the cities (that became the suburbs) are gone or going.

I'd love to go back to the rural area I grew up in - it's a much better quality of life, stuff is half or one-quarter of the price they are in an urban area, and there's 1/100th of the population. But there's almost literally no employment opportunities. The one major paper mill in the area is folding, and there's going to be an exodus as the hundreds of people people that work there, and the thousands in the supporting industries, get laid off (not to mention further downstream effects, like school teachers or healthcare workers that become redundant as population crashes). There's nothing that's going to fill that void.

Why are suburbs awful places? I'd much rather live in a small city or large town with suburban-like neighborhoods than the over-priced and tiny apartments of a large city. 80K here is like 120K in a metro area, and I don't have to pay for parking or take public transportation.

In the end it's a matter of taste, but several reasons:

- Affordable suburbs usually carry lengthy commutes of unpleasant stop-and-go driving. City dwellers can walk to work or read on a train. Lower commute time is strongly associated with overall happiness. I share your preference for driving over public transit, but not in commuter traffic.

- Children have essentially no independent mobility until age 16, and then only if they have their own cars. In the suburb I grew up in, I'd estimate that mothers spend ~30% of their waking hours driving their children around.

- Though there may be good restaurants, art, theater, museums, etc. in the city, going to such things becomes a special occasion. Life instead centers around malls and multiplexes.

- Many find sleepy streets dull, uninspiring, even suffocating. For some, proximity to centers of human activity is a great deal more valuable than space.

- If you live in a city, you can go out drinking without committing DUI or spending $40 on a taxi.

- Many find the maintenance of a house, tons of unnecessary rooms, a lawn, etc. to be an unbearable and outrageously expensive bore that provides no value. I can think of many things I'd rather do on a weekend than put new siding on my garage, and many things I'd rather do with 5 figures than fix my roof. My home is a place to eat and sleep; I'd much rather invest time and energy and pride into other things.

And city dwellers don't have to pay for a car.

In most cities, they probably do or have fairly restricted ability to get around. NYC or even SF aren't typical of the US as a whole.

Zipcar, Car2Go, and Uber have done a lot to alleviate that. Car ownership is definitely not needed in Seattle, Portland, NYC, SF, and probably many other cities. In the rest of the US, most exceptions are because the US doesn't do cities well, largely due to the perception in the mid-to-late 20th century that white people had abandoned the cities and left them to black people, and America doesn't care about black people.

Something like 50% of all trips are by car in SF! I'm guessing NYC is better.

Where do you live? Most US cities aren't really urban - they were designed for cars, not people. Do you feel the same way about SF or NYC?

For young people in industries that pay CoL increases in cities (most of the hn crowd, I expect), high cost of living is a plus. Typically your entire salary scales with cost of living, so you can save more in expensive cities and then move somewhere cheaper later in life.