Chicago. Chicago is an honest-to-goodness world city with skyscrapers and trains and everything. A luxury condo in one of them can run you less than be down payment on a rundown shack in a far-flung Bay Area suburb. Unfortunately the tech scene there is mostly in the old-school business IT tradition and in suburban office-park hellscapes.

The winters are also... bracing, to say the very least. If you like feet of snow, it’s great, otherwise maybe not so much. I love to visit, but I wouldn’t last a year.

Winter is a tooling problem. The tools are straightforward and Chicago is well-practiced in their use. You put on a coat. The city plows. You drive a 4WD car carefully. It works out.

Compared to paying half your “upper middle class” salary for living conditions that most Americans would identify as poverty (roommates, paper thin walls, 1970s fixtures, no dishwasher, garbage disposal, laundry, or parking, etc) due to game-theoretically intractable politics, it’s nothing.

> You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.

That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me. In fact, it’s the exact same reason I can’t live in the south. Y’all have heaters; they have AC. It all still means I’m trapped indoors and miserable much of the year. No thanks.

Proper winters are AWESOME. Skiing, winter hiking/camping.. Lots of things to do.

Year-cycle puts a nice rhythm in life. November is time to bring out tea, books, warm socks and reflect the year that is about to pass. Then first signs of spring comes, everybody is out celebrating and there's a deep-rooted feeling that rough time has passed and now you can relax for a bit.

I couldn't live somewhere without proper 4 seasons. I did stay in non-snowy areas for extended period of time more than once and it's just.. sad. On the other hand, it's probably upbringing&culture.

Moved to Montreal from Vancouver and this is exactly what I noticed. There's something the seeps into the people that live in regions with a proper 4-seasons that doesn't happen elsewhere.

> > You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.

> That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me.

Dunno about the GP, but I live in Cleveland and I spend plenty of time outside in the winter. Even here, skiing (downhill and XC), sledding, hiking, camping, and ice fishing are all doable in the winter.

If you want to pay at least double (if not triple) digit dollars per year to avoid significant snow, that is of course your choice. But there shouldn't be any expectation that everyone should be be able to do so. (Or that such would even make sense in the aggregate--not everyone can live in California.)

Three times the US population could live in California at Hong Kong density.

I live in Belgium, so your assumptions really couldn’t fly farther from the mark.

That's changing. My wife made me go to a restaurant in the western part of Chicago and i remember looking around at all of the names/types of stores and saying "something about this feels Silicon Valley like pretentiousn..." and the advertised apartments were expensive as hell by most people's standards..

Sure enough Google and some other big dotcoms were building or moving into the area. I want to say the Morgan area?

Pretentious shopping is not a new phenomenon: see the Magnificent Mile. But yes, there is a tech cluster starting to appear in the West Loop (not to be confused with the much larger poor Hispanic West Side).

Part of it stems from the meaning of the term, "city." While they may be incorporated as cities, three names that jumped out at me from your list are Lawrence (KS?), Santa Fe, NM, and Bend, OR, each of which has a population of < 100,000.

By comparison, Sunnyvale, CA, which feels distinctly like a suburb, has a population of close to 150,000.

One downside of moving to a small town for an opportunity is that, if that opportunity flops, it may be much harder to find the next one without having to move again. Whereas in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, etc., the next opportunity is likely in the office park next door, where they want you to start "yesterday"...

No. I don't know what list you looked at, but Lawrence, Kansas is not a place with job growth or much opportunity that doesn't involve driving to Kansas City every day or working for the university in some capacity.

Maybe I'm being a little bullish there. Let's say Overland Park instead (which is not such a bad commute from Lawrence anyway).

Well, okay, sure, but then you're in Kansas City. And KC certainly isn't expensive, of course, it's dirt cheap. But even Kansas City is really thin on the specialized jobs which people typically move to big, expensive cities to get. Unfortunately, it missed a handful of really critical opportunities that would have given it a better technology sector. But most of those misses weren't the city's fault. I I mean if you weigh it against Wichita or OKC or Omaha or Saint Louis, Kansas City is one of the best in the region. I think it doesn't hold a candle to Denver, but it's a good city. If I had to live in the middle third of the country, the KC area would be one of my top choices. I like to compare it to Nashville, because if you look at it through a layer of abstraction, it's got similar cultural form and character. Anyway, that went sideways. But yeah, if I was going to be working in KC, I would drive from Lawrence, because otherwise Lawrence is a phenomenal town. It's hard for people living there to see it with objectivity, but it's one of the best cities I've ever spent time in.