It's like Chicago doesn't exist in the collective conscientious of the east and west coast white collar class. ILL is a dumpster fire of a state, but the COL to quality of life ratio is pretty excellent as far I'm concerned.

Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit are all fun cities too. I say this as someone who went to college in Boston/NYC and lived all over the Acela corridor and London.

> ILL is a dumpster fire of a state

True, but New York City has a per-capita municipal debt load double Chicago's, Connecticut and New Jersey are really the only two states in more dire financial straits than Illinois and for the pleasure of living back east I get to pay what seems like an order of magnitude more in taxes and housing costs.

And obviously California is California. Loved, loved, loved it when I went to college in Los Angeles but have no real desire to ever work there. Maybe once I make my 50th million I'll be on the next flight out.

Once climate change starts destroying the coasts and warming the interior, we'll see how bad the hick midwest really is :)

> New York City has a per-capita municipal debt load double Chicago's

But also a higher per capita GDP and faster economic growth.

Everyone’s calculation of utility is different, but Chicago/IL land also has a non explicit cost of land prices being held down by expected increases in taxes disproportionate to increases in other parts of the country, due to disproportionate levels of debt per taxpayer.

Instead of your land appreciating by a few hundred thousand, it might only appreciate by a hundred thousand, which is a decent difference in return for many people.

Obviously, that is offset by needing less cash upfront, but it does make the CoL calculations less obvious in favor of Chicago.

Well, I live here because I need a house, not as an investment property. That might be why the housing situation in California is a superfund site and in Chicago I live in an expensive house because I want to.

I do not think it matters if a house is an investment property (i.e. not the house you are living in) versus a house you need (i.e. to live in). My point is the cost of living calculation also involves the opportunity cost of the difference in land price appreciation.

Of course, this opportunity cost only exists if you have the opportunity to choose between two or more locations.

My ROI on the extra million I'd spend has far better returns in the equity markets than even the most broken California real estate markets.

ROI would have to be calculated using the levered amount. Even paying $2.7M cash for this house, you can refinance and take out 80%, and have the $2.7M asset for $540k in a non recourse state with a non callable margin loan. And with capped 2% property tax increases.

Plus you get to live in it. Plus you get CA amenities (value dependent upon individual preferences, but obviously valued very highly amongst people with money). One of those CA amenities is very worker friendly non compete laws and strict limitations on what employers can claim is theirs, a not insignificant benefit for knowledge workers in my opinion.

Ah, but $1 million allows me to borrow upwards of $6.5 million at 0.75 percent from my broker. Real estate allows significant margin for the lower and middle class, but there's literally zero overlap between those people and people buying $2.75 million homes in Sunnyvale. Way better off leveraging your SPX shares than a house.

> Real estate allows significant margin for the lower and middle class, but there's literally zero overlap between those people and people buying $2.75 million homes in Sunnyvale.

People buying $2.75 million homes in Sunnyvale are largely either working (knowledge workers dependent primarily on wage labor) or middle (petit bourgeois; independent business owners and workers with mixed dependency on wage labor and capital investments) class.

I suspected this would be brought up, which is why I tried to pre-empt it by specifying that a home mortgage has special conditions that make it not 1 to 1 comparable to other leveraged investments, such as non callability, non recourse (in California), you get to live in it, and you get to live in that specific location (assuming you value it).

I recognized that, which is why I tried to stick to a high-net worth situation like this particular one.

I'm far better off buying a $300k house than having $60k in investments but those comparisons become a bit more fuzzy at these 7-figure numbers.

I am not so sure. Another benefit of CA real estate is that you can gift it to your kids and not be subject to state estate taxes, and the capped property tax carries forward to your kids.

Popular California land is a very unique asset.

The best benefit to one of these houses in this area is that you have one of these houses in this area. My house isnt an investment but a roof over my head and a good sized yard not far from a very beautiful bay and lots of mountain trails. Its worth more to me than what zillow says.

It exists. But it's viewed as houses in the middle of a cornfield or a decaying steel town, no decent jobs, no culture, lousy weather, etc.

To the last point, there are a lot of people, especially on the West coast who really can't imagine living anywhere with real winters. To be honest, you don't hear much about Boston either although I think it's something like #3 in VC funding and has a lot of tech of various kinds.

>It exists. But it's viewed as houses in the middle of a cornfield or a decaying steel town, no decent jobs, no culture, lousy weather, etc.

Who views it that way? People who have never been there and also know nothing about it? People who have never left California?

I don't actually think anyone -- statistically speaking -- from California views Chicago that way. There is a stereotype of Californians which feels unusually pernicious which I see a lot on HN, generally either from people who have never been to the Bay Area or feel they "escaped" the Bay Area and take every opportunity to tell people that they bought an 8000 square foot mansion for $100K, pay $7.99 a month for 100Gbps internet service, and so on.

I kid, but seriously, many of us have actually been to other cities across the United States and the world and have appreciation for them. There are many places I would be happy in besides the SF Bay Area. I would be able to find friends and good microbreweries and good craft coffee, cocktail bars, interesting cheap restaurants, interesting expensive restaurants, museums, nature hikes, the whole shebang. Some of my absolute favorite examples of each of those are outside the SF Bay Area! It's simply that so far, I haven't found a metro area (at least in the US) that can combine a similar concentration of such places with a comparable climate, tech job market, and markedly cheaper cost of living.

Boston has the combination of yankee hospitality and New Jersey charm, just substitute rotaries for “no left turns”.

It’s also an old place with weird enclaves unknown to outsiders. You may find your lovely townhome is adjacent to a superfund site.

Tech scene in Boston is really huge. It’s a bit less “Facebook for cats” than Silicon Valley and tends to be more stuff that needs the big brains from MIT and the like. Moderna is a great example.

Pharma/biotech is particularly big but look at a magazine like Tech Review and there's a lot of diversity.

In addition to the weather (which really isn't that bad), part of it is I think that a lot of people with SV companies tend to think of tech as "what SV companies do" which naturally leads to them seeing less "tech" in other places. (Though there are sizable outposts of quite a few West coast employers at this point in addition to the home-grown ones.

Tech actually in the city was almost non-existent for a long time. Hence the Route 128 computer companies. But that's shifted a fair bit again over the past 20 years.

> Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit are all fun cities too

Different ideas of fun abound, but I doubt the people getting nervous at the uptick of crime in California cities are much interested in Detroit and it's second-highest-in-the-nation rate of violent crime.

Fair enough. There are many urban centers in the midwest that are very expensive. But im pretty sure we were not talking about those places. Edit: Also rural centers that are very exclusive (Jackson Hole etc).

Jackson Hole is certainly not in the Midwest. I'm not especially familiar with exclusive rural areas in the Midwest but they may well exist.

Yeah, I couldnt think of any either.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin?