I live in one (Shelburne Falls, Mass - https://shelburnefalls.com/).

Everything is in walking distance and most of the houses and buildings are 100+ years old (the town is on a river in a bowl of a valley so most of the buildable land ran out 100 years ago). We have a drug store with a soda fountain counter, a nice grocery store and a few nice restaurants and bookstores.

I moved here around 20 years ago after stints of living in Boston and Chicago after college. It has been a great place to raise kids but now that they are in their teens the main downside I'm seeing is the public high school options are sub-par compared to "magnet" schools available in cities. I don't think my kids are as ready for college as they would have been if we would have stayed in Boston. However, if we did want to drop the money there are a lot of world class private schools in the area.

We have been lucky enough to make sure to travel as the kids have grown so they don't become "townies". They have been on trips to England, Spain, France and Italy and many places in the US. We have also hosted two year-long exchange students so they realize there is a wider world out there. In my mind the biggest risk of raising kids in a small town is that they become provincial.

If anyone knows of places like this - I would love to know of them!

I've been spending embarrassing amounts of my time looking for a place to live that's like this, and I haven't found many that aren't just as expensive as the city for something that's comparably walkable / livable.

The only promising affordable towns with lots to do & decent weather that I've found are Silver City, Los Alamos, & Taos NM. And San Marcos TX looks promising, too.

Honestly, it seems like there's way more affordable houses in nice parts of big cities like Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc.

And it seems like even hip medium sized cities like Bend Oregon and Boise Idaho are cheaper than the really cool small towns.

Totally agreed. I live in a fairly rural town with forested backyards, trees, canyons and creeks and it is only 7 miles from Oakland and 15 miles from SF. Even within Oakland and Berkeley you will find enclaves which feel very rural and quiet

What are some examples of Bay Area towns? It seems like everyone in my friend circle in tech lives in San Francisco and puts up (or used to) with the long commute.

Quite a few of the towns in the South Bay have walkable cores: Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo...

You also have smaller cities all over the country.

Now, you get into truly small towns in places like New England and there really isn't a lot in the town center and it's unlikely you'll be living walking distance from it.

No way, man. You have to pay like $1.5 mil for a home in Palo Alto and Mountain View. You do all that and you get a glorified suburb. No way. The city is like 400x as city life for like 1.1x the price.

I would be shocked if one could find a liveable single family home in Palo Alto or Mountain View for $1.5M.

Last I looked empty lots went for that much.

By home, do you mean house? Sub-million dollar homes show up all the time in Mountain View, even before Covid. Thinking anything less than a house is unlivable for a family is not the norm in most other parts of the world.

I assumed you meant "single family home", but yes, you can find sub-$1M apartments.

By home-not-a-house, do you mean an apartment? Duplex? Tent?

Lol love how we're talking about the core cities of silicon valley as towns... have you guys even been there?

They have a town vibe only because they have essentially made development outside of office buildings impossible for decades. There is a ton of pent up demand to live there (meaning it's super, super expensive) and there is a lot of traffic and a surprising population density given the development pattern (because there are a LOT of people working there relative to living there). They're really all a contiguous metropolitan region of the Bay Area from SF-SJ-Oakland, the fact that they're separate political entities is at this point a historical relic

Come on, Mountain View’s downtown degrades into there-is-not-even-trees-to-shade-you after like two blocks sideways, and no grocery store. Palo Alto is better, but unless you live in downtown south you won’t be walking distance from a grocery store, and you can basically not walk for more than 20 minutes without being in boring ass McMansion suburbia.

> no grocery store

I can't tell if you forgot about Ava's, or if you've never actually _been_ to downtown Mountain View, or if you only consider chain supermarkets to count.

Suburbs, particularly old growth / inner ring suburbs, often have walkable cores and even rail connections to the city. They are not all the postwar Levittown kind.

“Town” as distinct from “suburb” usually implies standing alone, being surrounded by farmland and not particularly connected to the nearest metro area.

The towns in the peninsula are nice, even the smaller ones like Burlingame or even San Carlos. But apartment rents are barely cheaper there in SF for comparable nice units, and you’ll almost certainly need a car, and you of course lose many of the benefits of a big city like SF if you value those things.

I responded above, but look into Orinda, Lafayette, Moraga, Kensington, Albany. You can also north to Novato, San Rafael, Petaluma. Also, along the coast Pacifica, Moss Bay, Montarra, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero. I would also explore Oakland and Berkeley hills

Alameda comes to mind. Completely walkable, charming, great community feel. It's an island, so going over bridges or through the tube to go anywhere can be a bit of a hassle, but it's well worth it.

The pinball museum in Alameda is one of my favorite spots! I hope it survives the shutdown, they always seem to be operating on a shoestring budget. Super cool place if anyone hasn't checked it out before, highly recommend!

I second this, spent my birthday there last year and it was a blast!

Half Moon Bay for example looks like a nice little place? I had dinner there once passing through. Wasn't an Applebees.

https://www.visithalfmoonbay.org/

Go much further north of the Bay and you can live in Yountville and I think you'll have a 3-star restaurant in your town, which is a level of culture you can't even get in most US megacities. Again not Applebees.

https://yountville.com/

I doubt you want to live in Half Moon Bay unless your schedule allows you to get outside during the week and hunker down to avoid the weekend traffic when the weather is decent.

Yountville is nice and it's also dripping in wealth - if you aren't driving a Porsche and carrying a black AmEx you'll feel out of place.

They almost never have decent internet if you're someone trying to wfh. Most of them are POTS lines only. The ones that have muni fiber would be a possible option but you're making definite trade offs elsewhere. Pubtrans, bike lanes, food options, travel optins, etc.

Rural broadband is certainly an issue generally. But a lot of people seem to be under the impression that as soon as you leave the city limits of a major city, you're in the wilds of Wyoming. Somewhere like Massachusetts, there are a ton of towns and smaller cities not called Boston that have broadband.

We have about 98% coverage from Comcast here in Shelburne, MA (about 2 hours west of Boston). It kid of sucks because the towns with less coverage surrounding us got more MBI (https://broadband.masstech.org/) money and are building out fiber networks. MBI doesn't handle the last mile which means I can look out my office window at a town building that has a (dark) fiber line terminated inside it that MBI installed which may never be lit up.

I didn't know it was a big thing in MA. But thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. I hope to go back to the NE/E in the next few years (Maine/VT/MA).

I tried to move to a small town this year, one that was woodsy and if possible in the mountains, AK, CO, WA, OR. My requirement was 100mb+ internet that didn't require me paying Spectrum $25k to cable another road. Honestly I would've been fine with DSL at a bunch of these places but they were almost all satellite only. I looked for about 3 months before I eventually just went to the city. But the market is insane right now, I did find some that were gone quickly.

There are 3 "towns" in CO that you can possibly get fiber at but without MLS/Trulia having that as a filter I spent a bunch of time checking zip codes for service and being let down.

Might I ask what line of work you're in that 100mb+ would be a limiting factor?

I ask because I've been doing remote work web development for 9 years now on a 10mb DSL line, and honestly haven't really seen much any need to go faster. Not at least work-related requirements.

I’m doing this exact search! What’s been your best resource for finding fiber? Are you plugging in addresses to the providers webpage?

Yeah I just type the zip in to each ISP I find in that area (another fun search).. it sucks. You eventually get rate limited and it will make you constantly change addresses, so just incognito mode it. Some of the ISPs will have the distribution maps but when you're looking at something not in a suburb you're kind of at the behest of the city or a recent neighbor having built out the infra in my experience (which is mostly south/texas/pnw). SOMETIMES theres a local WIFI provider.. I haven't gone that route I'm not sure the investment or quality there. I have done a lot of satellite, BGAN internet etc. I think now everybody is just giving up and waiting on 5G.

This is the muni fiber map https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

I really wish Trulia or one of them had some way to tie into ISPs and tell us whats there.

This improved my house search a LOT; Get the Clickup (no relation) extension and create a space to send your zillow/trulia/mls links to directly, there is a template for apartment searches [1] you can edit it and put in your own fields - it basically grabs a snapshot of different keys and you can add columns and rows and start to quickly grab house listings then filter with your own database. It's stupid simple, like airtable, you can probably use that too. I added ISP sections, stars, comments.. All the real estate apps are terrible for critiquing en masse.

I never got around to checking if the ISPs have apis you can interface with..

I'm going to NEXT year try the mountain thing again.

[1]: https://clickup.com/teams/personal

edit: Wow this link is looking positive, I didnt realize there were so many 500Mbps+ connections https://broadbandnow.com/fastest-cities

edit2: Oh, another stupid ISP tip, the business ends will usually be WAY more lenient if you open your wallet. If you cant get X cable, try to get X cable biz they'll happily run a line down a pole for a new $200/mo customer, I've done it in desperation. You don't need to be an actual biz, just tell them youre hackernewsman LLC and they'll sign you up if they can.

thank you for such a detailed reply!

Tons of towns in the Puget Sound region have gigabit. For example, Wave services Union, Shelton, and Belfair.

That's not true. Except for rural areas, most of the US has broadband internet, typically from their cable company.

I don't consider internet via coaxial cable with 300mbps download and 5mbps upload to be broadband. It's probably split between too many houses, and they boost your bandwidth to 300mbps for a minute or two to make it seem like it's fast, but they won't sustain it.

I also don't trust the economic incentives of a company that makes more money selling media than it does proper broadband service.

Dealing with fiber to the home providers is much nicer, with symmetric 1Gbps down and up connections. You can feel the connection is much snappier, have multiple FacetimeHD and HD video streams going, and you don't even notice. And I can stream from my devices at home when I'm away because there is actually available upload bandwidth.

You're not wrong, I forget the Gov calls 100Mbps broadband (thankfully up from 10Mbps). I wasn't specific enough. I personally, and I do move every few years to new States/Cities (and recently trying to move to smaller mountain/woodsy towns) and wfh and have to actually have 100Mbps+ internet or I think I'll melt. Most of the towns I looked were vdsl/DSL only except for a few who had gone the muni route or had an executive from Xfinity living there.

300mb+ is still pretty hard to get outside of cities.

I've actually spent ~$20k before to get Spectrum to cable an old house in the middle of a huge city.

If only. Despite having a franchise agreement to make service available at every residence in town, it's impossible to actually get broadband at many homes here.

I just cut a large check and signed some papers to be the first community fiber island here, with a microwave link to get us service.

Los Altos Hills, CA