I don't think this is generally true. You can bike right out of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge and be away from the city in minutes. You can walk or bike out of the west side of silicon valley into a huge area of contiguous parkland. If you leave San Jose in the right direction you could hike for days without seeing anyone.

Certainly if you want both a city and nature, SF can be attractive in that regard. But the comment I was responding to was specifically about nature. If I don't care about easy access to the city and SV, I'd live elsewhere.

You can bike right out of Philly and Boise and get the same things. Maybe even more beauty. Why should we pay SF prices for the privilege?

I don't live in California, though I've spent a lot of time there, and don't know much about Boise. But, having grown-up outside of Philadelphia, no there's nothing equivalent to Marin County a few miles away. Yes, there's a nice river and various parks but it's not the Bay Area.

Boise is converging with the coasts in terms of pricing and its infrastructure is depressingly inadequate.

The local paper ran a story saying that the median house price in the city proper went up $15K in one month[1] and wages are not budging. 84% of the city is zoned for single family homes. Downtown pre-lockdown had 80K cars fighting for 18K parking spots.

I live in a one bedroom penthouse Downtown for $2K a month. I don't have care. It's only the 7th floor though, and on a 5 lane highway that the city has asked the state to narrow (the state refused)[2]. It's very loud from the red state types driving through with big diesel trucks and obnoxious motorcycles.

Most of the metro treats Downtown Boise as a parking lot[3]. The largest private land owner downtown is the power company (for parking lots)[4]. And the nature outside the city requires driving hours in a place that desperately needs less traffic pollution and more transit.

I'm pretty set on decamping to Boston soon to be in real tower in a city with transit.

[1] https://boisedev.com/news/2020/08/12/boise-idaho-home-sales-...

[2] https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...

[3] https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/eagle-narrows-where-ap...

[4] https://boisedev.com/news/2020/07/28/idaho-power-plans-to-co...

I would say those two examples are incomparable to what is available in the Bay Area in terms of outdoor recreation access.

I don't know if this is true for many people who live here. There is a subgroup of my friends who live in the city and will drive almost every weekend for 30-60 minutes with their bikes and kayaks for recreation. If you avoid the popular trails and rec areas (e.g., Muir Woods), you can get somewhere very peaceful fairly quickly. I think the balance between city and access to nature works for a lot of people who live in the Bay Area.

Yes I tried to call that out in my post. Even towns like Bend, Bellingham, etc(even somewhat places in Idaho and Montana by now) are by no means cheap and on top of that they don’t have a robust job market to justify the cost.

I wonder if the pandemic is going to decimate the housing markets even more in those remote mountain towns. I have two coworkers who just moved to Bozeman, MT to be closer to skiing and fishing. I would think places like Kalispell, Coeur d'Alene, Jackson Hole, Taos and Bend are all going to see a large influx of remote workers who like outdoor lifestyles.

I would suspect yes the pressure will be greater in areas like that. It is one of the reasons I prefer bigger cities on the west coast though; more houses, more jobs, and just as much nature.

I have worked 100% remotely for almost two years now and love it but now I live somewhere with a crappy job market. Yes I save money but I live in constant fear of having to take a 50% pay cut if I can’t find more remote work.

I love working remotely and I think it’s a great idea but I don’t think people realize how much of a leash it is when you choose to work in SV but live in the middle of nowhere.

In my case, I live well outside of Boston with quite a bit of land and only a few houses around me. No, it's not a mountain town in the Rockies or Sierras but it means I can go into the city for an evening if I want to, have lots of potential employers within (somewhat) reasonable driving distance, and could even commute into Boston by train if I wanted to--though it wouldn't really be sustainable long-term on a daily basis.