Personally, I have the opposite opinion. I took a pay cut to leave Seattle ( I lived in Chicago before that, I've lived in dense metro areas for many, many years now) so I could go live in a smaller town.

I can actually afford a house. My dog has a yard to play in. I haven't been mugged since I left! No one uses my doorstep as a bathroom. My neighbors actually come say hi to me and are invested in forming relationships knowing I won't just up in move in the next year due to housing costs. We have decent enough restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, movie theater, mall, etc, and if I really want to, I am within driving distance of the city (edit: for a day trip, no way in hell would it work for me as a commute). Yet, I haven't been back since I left.

I think it's more nuanced than your comment indicates. You might be surprised how many people might take up an offer from Google to move to the boonies (I'm at least one).

One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

> Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

A train which sometimes get you there in 45 minutes, sometimes in 60 minutes, sometimes gets cancelled because of (Amtrak signal problems | disabled Amtrak equipment in the Hudson tunnel | overhead wire damage | $ PROBLEM_OF_THE_DAY).

He says while crammed in to an NJTransit train.

NJT is a mess but Metro North is pretty great. I walk to the train and then walk GCT to our office on Park. I grew up in Queens and my commute to Manhattan is shorter now when I live 30 miles outside the city. But I also pay for that with Westchester taxes.

This is absolutely true, from what I've been hearing NJ transit has just been getting worse and worse since I had used it on a daily basis.

It has been going slowly downhill since I moved here two years ago. I'm glad I don't have to go into Penn any longer. Hoboken has its own problems, but at least the NJT cancellations are rare and the trains usually get there within 5 minutes of when they are supposed to.

>Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

Not to be a ass, but where? And please don't just point out a home with no pictures you just found on Zillow, but a place where you've actually been to which has decent property taxes, decent schools, and is safe? And actually a 45 minute commute, not 45 minutes if you ignore the 20+ minutes it takes to drive your car from home to a train station and pay $50+/month to park for a reserved spot.

I ask this because I used to live in a NYC area highrise and always used to think over the about the seemingly fantastic deals in the suburbs. Then I started looking and realized real-estate websites and Google Maps commuting are a far cry from reality.

Look, you wont find this in the towns with the absolute best schools, and it is only possible to have this sort of commute if you work on top of the lower manhattan path station or penn station. Additionally, prices could've have risen since I last checked, and property taxes in NJ will always be high. But towns ranging from Maplewood to Cranford fall in this price range. Note when I say sizable I'm talking the ~2000 sqft range also.

Maplewood is a great example of homes that look amazing at first glance on real estate websites, but the high property taxes cause your mortgage payment to jump significantly.

Here's a great example. 36 Ball Ter, Maplewood. $550K, ~2200 sqft, interior looks newly renovated, looks really nice in pictures. $15.5K(!!) in taxes. With 20% down you're still looking at $3.5K/Month(includes property taxes) on a 30 year mortgage.

If you look at the price history on Zillow or Trulia, it looks like it was flipped (I think that's when the interior renovation was done) late 2017/early 2018, and the price went up to $750k and has plummeted since then. So the property tax assessment is probably on the pre-renovated value, not the renovated value. So whomever purchases this house can expect a fat tax increase when the town reassess the value.

Also, look at the prices between the East and West side of Maplewood. The East side is fairly close to areas that lots of people would prefer not to live in due to safety concerns.

Again, I'm not trying to be an ass or attack you. I'm just trying to present some real numbers so people have a realistic view when they think the greater NYC area is a place you can escape to when you want access to NYC with a medium CoL. NYC is a very high CoL area and moving to the suburbs can hurt (e.g. terrible commute) in unexpected ways, and you still have a high CoL compared to the majority of country.

Oh for sure, NJ home prices do not tell the whole picture, but the truth is that even with these high taxes, a Software Engineer at a top company should easily be able to afford to live there, even with a spouse that doesn't work.

3.5k a month is affordable to people who make 130k+ a year, which is less than a new grad makes at Google, where this is absolutely cheaper than anything within a comparable commute to google offices in the bay area at all, or around Seattle in school districts of similar quality.

New York Metro is in no way cheap, and I was never trying to make that argument, just that it can be substantially cheaper than the existing major tech hubs.

Reasonably priced homes within 45 minutes of NYC, via train, are definitely not a thing. You're also not even counting our absurd taxes in places like Morristown, Montlcair, Fair Lawn, etc.

No one I know who commutes from outside NYC/Hoboken/Jersey City into NYC has a door-to-door 45 minute commute. 45 minutes might get you to the train station (if the train is running on time), but unless you work right next to Penn Station or Grand Central, it takes at least another 10-15 minutes to get to your desk.

My parents commute from NJ west of the parkway and when things aline the commute is 45 minutes (of course things often don't align). The key piece is that you need to live and work right near the various stops.

If you're within driving distance of Seattle, you're still in the catchment area for working there though. The equivalent would be living in New Jersey or Connecticut or Long Island and working in New York City - which hundreds of thousands of people do.

There's dozens of us!

I didn't mean to come off quite as harsh as that. There are plenty of goal sets that align well to being outside of the city; but I do think that y'all are the minority. When playing the numbers in trying to staff huge multi thousand head campuses catering to a specific minority doesn't add up.