Well, then you have to live in Yakima! ;)

There are excellent inexpensive places to live in Washington that offer a lot more than Yakima does. Spokane, for example, is still very inexpensive compared to Seattle and offers a lot more in terms of both city life and accessible outdoor activities. It's too bad the dev scene there is pretty limited (Itron and Seven2 are really the only companies that I can think of off the top of my ahead employing devs, and the salaries are nothing to write home about). Of course, if you're doing remote work anyway, this isn't really an issue.

Yep, I was following my now fiancee.

There are a lot of great mid-size cities out there--a hundred of them to choose from--and they're all cheap.

There's this prevailing attitude by city dwellers that living outside of NY, SF, Seattle, or <insert your tech hub here> is death, but that is an attitude borne from a lack of experience about life.

Life is sometimes great in midsize cities, and in many ways they offer more for less.

As someone who has only ever lived in dense urban metropolitan cities, can you tell me about some of the things midsize cities offer more of?

More apartment for your money, plentiful parking, more elbow room at restaurants, more say in civic life (if that is important to you). You can just "breathe" easier and aren't constantly "wound up" as tightly as a defense mechanism against being jostled, hustled, dealing with long waits. It's a little hard to appreciate until you're in it. Not the best if you're looking for a wider dating pool, need top flight arts and entertainment every weekend, or if you can't/don't keep a car.

As someone who is leaving Austin soon, this hits... home. And it just took enough life experience to arrive at this conclusion.

Austin is a midsize city.