Forget about having a house with a shop/garage unless you're willing to spend a million and a half, though.
Closest "real" hiking trails start along Skyline Boulevard - there's plenty of them but it is not close.
20 minute driving time includes Rancho San Antonio, Stevens Creek County Park, Villa Montalvo, and Lexington Reservoir, all of which are perfectly adequate half-day hikes. Make it 30-40 and you also get the Los Trancos/Montebello/Russian Ridge area, Castle Rock, Almaden, Calero, Garin/Dry Creek, and Don Edwards.
Almost anywhere else in the country, that $2200/mo will get you quite the spread; you can trade off between square footage, neighborhood, and commute time, but you're going to have very nice accommodations if you're willing to put that much money up. In SF, you're lucky if you can get a 1-bd for that, and LA is only slightly better.
While the price of goods doesn't fluctuate as much, housing is a HUGE factor. If you want something functional for a family of 4 (or if you just like a lot of space), you are going to be paying at least $4000/mo in these tech hubs, or living 60 min+ away.
Florida also has no income tax, v. California's rate between 7.5% and 13.3%. That is a big dent too.
One other note. If you have the skills, look for remote work in companies that pay rates that are higher than you get paid in your local market. It's a great way to make the COL differential work even more in your favor.
[0] http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micr...
I truly don't understand why anyone would live in Florida unless they were growing sugarcane. The climate is extremely hot and damp, and there is Zika according to the CDC. So what is good about Florida?
True, in the summer it becomes a hellscape, but 5 months of paradisiacal weather is better than most people get. ;)
Florida has reasonably priced housing (for the most part), plenty of land, and with almost 20 million residents, there is tons of variety across the state; from most population centers, it's a relatively easy drive to more than enough to interest anyone, no matter what you're into (except maybe skiing).
It's very scenic with palms swaying, beautiful sunsets and beaches, many lakes and an abundance of interesting wildlife.
Florida also has no state income tax, strong homestead protections, pretty-OK gun laws, and otherwise mostly-sane state policies.
Zika is a non-issue at this point and there are only a tiny handful of cases of local transmission. Florida is a large state and only the very tip of the peninsula was impacted by local transmission. However, it's always wise to avoid mosquito bites.
There are lots of reasons to like Florida. :)
TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.
At least for HS, MV High has come a very long way since my time and would probably lead the "affordable good school" category in the area.
Translation: it's expensive to live where rich people live. "Good schools" is a flimsy proxy for wealthy, exclusive suburbs.
Where I'm from, "good schools" is a nice way of saying "it's a white neighborhood". I would not feel good about letting "good schools" influence where I live, or buy a home.
Eh. The Bay Area isn't where you're from. Actually, relatively few people in the Bay Area use the term "good schools" at all because they tend to have few children and the idea of school quality isn't on their radar.
> wealthy, exclusive suburbs
Honestly if you wanted to say Bay Area residents were coding racism into how they talk about where they live, you could point to the San Francisco fetish where people AVOID suburbs like Oakland and the East Bay, though honestly that's _actually_ because of all the public-transit-accessible hipster coffee spots in the one and the violent crime and strip-mall Starbucks and sprawling freeways with hours-long commutes to work from the other.
There is no need to inject race. Plus, in the bay area, many good schools are comprised of mostly minorities.
Good schools in the bay area just mean good schools, as based on standardized testing methodology, class sizes, dollars per student, extracurricular activities available, and acceptance rates to selective colleges.
You can definitely pay a lot of money to send your child to good private schools.
Citation needed. I have lived in this country for a long time, and have never hear it used in this manner, and Google searches turn up nothing.
> pretending like the comment is "injecting" race into the discussion ignores American history
"Pretending". Way to jump to conclusions. If you're proposing that an innocuous phrase like "good school" is forever tainted by history, that is a small and petty view of the world. That's like saying "honky tonk" has racist connotations because of the word honky.
Here for instance was a fair housing organization filing a lawsuit suggesting that real estate agents used "good schools" as a proxy for race in attempts to racially steer buyers.
Its in the normal lexicon enough for Urban Dictionary to consider that the top definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=good%20school...
I'm not suggesting saying "hey they are doing a great job over there, my kid goes to a good school" is enough to assume that the person is saying their kid goes to a white school, but in the context of a discussion about real estate pricing, distance to city centers, etc, the term "good schools" has connotations.
That you are unaware of them is fine, but it wasn't the original commenter that injected those connotations, they've been around for a long time.
Urban dictionary and one isolated lawsuit doesn't a pattern generally make.
I can accept that this term has been used in a certain way as a code phrase signifying something else, but that's been true of so many phrases and terms that it loses all significance. (Is nice restaurant also coding for no minorities?)
The original statement that's objectionable is I would not let "good schools" influence where you live and buy a home, which is ridiculous. Taking school district reputation and test scores when buying a house is neither racist or something to be ashamed of, no matter how many quotes you put around "good school".