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Notes -
I'm curious what the preference here is specifically. Suburbs of large cities function quite a bit like their own small city but with lots of benefits from being attached to a major hub like access to well connected airports and niche but useful amenities. It's a very popular choice for a reason.
I'm wary of suburbs for a few reasons, not all of which I'm super confident about.
I'm concerned that most of the jobs are in the large city itself, which would be unacceptable to me. Like, let's say the suburbs have 50,000 people. I'm concerned that the number of jobs in those suburbs are vastly fewer than the jobs that would be available in another city of 50,000 that's far away from a large city and thus whose jobs can only be in the 50,000 city itself. I hope that makes sense.
I'm concerned that the large city's growth will, in years or decades, envelop the suburbs in ways I don't want (zoning, culture, traffic, demographics).
I'm concerned that the suburbs of a large city attract highly educated blue tribe people, many of whom probably commute to the large city and were priced out of it or wanted to raise a family.
Precisely because suburbs are popular, I'm concerned about the price of homes. Me and my significant other may very well end up with a household income of like mid-five-figures or something.
This may practically be the opposite for the point you followed it up with, the people commuting to the city still do much of their consumption in the suburbs. It'll depend on what kind of work you ultimately do but they're going to need all the well paid blue collar labor like plumbers and electricians as well as all the service industry jobs. White collar offices also end up in the suburbs sometimes.
Suburbs tend to be somewhat static, unless you're right on the border of the urban parts of a city you really probably don't need to worry about this. They're places built by people who don't want to live in the urban core run by people who don't want to live in the urban core. Many of the suburbs have tens of miles of not much between them and the urban core.
This seems like the kind of thing you're going to be ruling out on anyways, no need to toss suburbs out of the heap for this reason when it'll already be filtered by your price constraint. If you take a upper mid tier city like Columbus Ohio or Dallas Fort Worth you'll easily be able to find suburbs that don't trigger most of these concerns.
Uh, DFW growth rates are so high that suburbs do get enveloped into the urban core quickly and regularly, and this is true in every direction except south-southeast(which is caused by very high crime rates).
If @helmedhorror can deal with climate and a bit of culture shock, then there's three smaller, economically prosperous red tribe cities in Texas to consider- Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Tyler. All of these are cheap places to live with a generally good labour market and are deep, deep red politically- they get used by the state government to make controversial proclamations specifically because they're much farther to the right than Austin. If a hot climate, southerners, or Hispanics are an issue, I'd recommend looking in Michigan's upper peninsula- the state might be blue, but the local area is not, and the state government is shier than average about imposing progressive policies on deep red towns geographically separated from the core population.
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