patrick.net

wave9x says

I moved to Seattle from SF. After 2 years I moved back. Don't underestimate how depressing the cloudy weather gets.

I didn't last that long. I would have left sooner but needed my signing bonus in Seattle to vest to cover relocation expenses incurred moving for another company on the East Side. Big companies spare _no_ expense when moving employees.

Taxes are low (0% income tax being the most obvious; although my property taxes were about 0.7%), prices for similar size + location properties are lower (which doesn't mean a lower cost of living - my housing expenses have been pretty much identical in Sunnyvale, Seattle, and Boulder CO), and the live music scene is better although otherwise Seattle and the East Side are devoid of redeeming qualities.

While I picked up a few friends in the area that I rather like, overall the weather makes people depressed and mean.

Traffic can be horrible (low taxes don't buy big roads) - I spent 3.5 hours once driving 90 miles from Shelton back to Seattle because everyone takes advantage of the sun when they can. During one storm my wife spent 3-4 hours making the 10 mile trip from the East Side to Seattle. When we were there the government was figuring out how to accommodate baby deliveries on the highways because mothers couldn't make it to a hospital in time.

The startup scene and technical job opportunities aren't in the same league as the SF Bay Area, and worse for non-big company, non-webby people than other tech hubs like Boulder.

This be the boat?

Atlanta chiming in here...

I visited Dallas-Ft. Worth (I've never lived there) and it looks less dense and cleaner than Atlanta. It almost feels like Northern Virginia. So between Dallas and Atlanta it is my opinion that Dallas is nicer. People who move to Atlanta do so because that's where their job hunt took them but nobody thinks "I'd like to live in Atlanta, let me find a job there." I hope that makes sense. Atlanta does have a lot of large companies for its size (CocaCola, AT&T, HomeDepot, Delta, etc) and a moderate cost of living so it tends to be easy for educated people to "make it" here. On the other hand, it also has its fair share of pan handlers and hustlers. Traffic is also horrendous and is the biggest hindrance to growth that the city faces. The city's transportation infrastructure is appropriate for a smaller city like Cleveland (2 million metro area), not Atlanta (5.5 million metro area). City officials realize this and are trying to fix the problem but they are 20 years behind.

Back to real estate - Atlanta, like Phoenix and various cities in CA, has been the target of large institutional investors. Flippers are definitely back in force. I've seen multiple in my own neighborhood. New grass, new paint, and three months is all it takes to justify a $100,000 price increase. It's ridiculous.

However, given Dallas' relative location to the stratospherically-high-prices-of-CA and the resulting flow of population from CA to TX, it is my hypothesis that Dallas real estate (which has been largely insulated from past bubbles) is also ripe for significant price increases. Dallas has even more employment opportunities than Atlanta and it's moderate cost of living makes it a target for Californians willing to trade in their hipster culture for more money in their wallets.

Atlanta, on the other hand, tends to see people coming from New York and Washington D.C. Those are "our" Californians and Atlanta looks like a bargain to them.

I had a friend who stated that Atlanta was like LA with none of the parts that makes LA cool. I'd agree with that assessment. I grew up 3 hours from Atlanta and to me there was not really any redeeming qualities. Its one gigantic suburb with a small city center.

robertoaribas says

California had high car insurance and registration, florida car registration
was effictively zero and my car insurance fell by 50%

So what pays for the golf cart and hoveround lanes then?

I grew up in a small town of around 20,000. There were good and bad aspects to that. The good was that yes, traffic was non-existent, the cost of living was less, and people were seemingly less rude.

The bad was that people were nosy, knew everything about our family and who we were, and as far as things like decent restaurants, microbreweries, a music scene, arts, and so on were non-existent.

Also- job opportunities were limited to mostly retail and lower end type jobs, which was why housing was so cheap. I would caution those who can work online to consider what might happen if they lose that job and how easy it would be to find another considering opportunities in your field would probably be very limited in whatever area you settled and if the home you bought or rented depended on the income you were getting, that luxury house might very well turn out to be extremely expensive if you can't find a new job and have to suck it up and work at a fast food joint.