1-2 hours away from a major city is actually kind of a sweet spot, IMO.
Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50.
Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or beaches that are either far away from or too crowded near big cities. However, rural areas generally have poor infrastructure that big cities have, and often have extremely bad schools.
Being 1-2 hours away from a big city? That's kind of a sweet spot. You're still close enough to the city for culture and hospitals and the airport. But you're on a big plot of land, and since you're still in a metro, you've probably got reasonably good infrastructure and schools.
The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.
> The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.
That certainly is a trade off some people have to make.
We're finalizing a move to a new home that fits that description. 20k pop, basically on the beach, backed by mountains and trails, 4 hour drive to anything with greater than 200k population, small hospital that is not well equipped, local schools are pretty meh to terrible.
Here is the thing though, I'm the sole breadwinner. That opens up tons of options and flexibility.
My wife and I are deeply involved in our son's education, in which we substantially add on to his online classes. We have gigabit fiber internet, I can drive to an international airport in under 15 minutes(granted, only 3-4 days a week for flights), and our son is now getting a chance to make friends again, outside of school.
My wife wanted to move to the area, my sole objection was having fast and reliable internet to do my job. I grew up on a farm, so getting out of dense metro areas suits me just fine.
Now that we have secured internet, and my starlink reservation should be delivered in a few months as a backup, there is nothing stopping us.
Remote work has allowed me to get away from California and their income taxes, raise my pay in the process by finding a new and fully remote job, and live in a much cheaper COL area.
Renting for now, but we build our house in 2022/2023. My pay versus the cost of the area means that we will pay cash for everything, no mortgage needed.
You’re right that being close to amenities is good, but you’re building up a false dichotomy between 1-2 hours from the office[0] and “move to the mountains”. You’re ignoring option C “move close to a smaller city”. Often 1-2 hours from the kinds of cities where major offices are located provide an inferior quality of life compared to a smaller city.
1-2 hours away from my old office is basically Burbank, which is still quite expensive and crowded. There are tons of small cities that provide better quality of life than Burbank for cheaper, including the small one I picked (Boise). Also, I can get to nature much easier from where I live.
0 - I’m assuming from context that the “major city” you reference is the one where the office is located.
I think a problem with the Boise-sized metro is that it's super hit-or-miss. Places like Boise or Salt Lake City are awesome, but I think those are kind of the outliers. Many smaller, isolated cities struggle with being desirable places to live. Small cities in places like upstate New York, the Deep South, far Northern California, or Eastern Washington are tough to get young people to move to so they often have problems of urban decay.
Yeah I agree it is helpful to be close to a large city, but unfortunately for me it isn't the right city for most tech companies! I am also closer to the east coast, so less convenient for Seattle or SF.
Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50.
Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or beaches that are either far away from or too crowded near big cities. However, rural areas generally have poor infrastructure that big cities have, and often have extremely bad schools.
Being 1-2 hours away from a big city? That's kind of a sweet spot. You're still close enough to the city for culture and hospitals and the airport. But you're on a big plot of land, and since you're still in a metro, you've probably got reasonably good infrastructure and schools.
The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.