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There is a lot of paper wealth in the US but if you want to buy back a comparable quality of life to a middle class European (i.e., live in a safe, walkable, clean city with good public transit and little crime or disorderly behavior) a lot of it evaporates pretty fast, so the differential ends up being less than it looks on paper. I could be wrong but my sense is that there's just about one city in the US that meets those specifications and it's Boston (very expensive).
If you can compromise on one or more of those factors (safe, walkable, clean), then yeah you can make and save some money here at the cost of potentially living the "American lifestyle" (commuting and driving everywhere with all the cost, time-sinks, and social alienation that entails), which may or may not be a problem for you. NYC is I guess decently safe in a statistical sense and walkable, but not clean. A lot of others are safe and clean but not walkable, and there are cities that are walkable but not particularly safe.
I'm seriously considering leaving the US for London for this reason.
I'm largely indifferent to the walkability of a city. While all cities in India are nominally walkable, I'd much rather not. I certainly didn't enjoy trekking all over London all that much!
Nor is public transit a concern because I value the freedom that a car provides. They're pretty much a must even in the UK except for those crazy ER docs who bike everywhere.
With those constraints relaxed, most US cities seem fine to me as long as I stay away from the inner city ghettos.
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If you define quality of life as dense walkable urban living then I live a wretched life indeed. If you define quality of life similarly, but also forgive a 20 minute commute to work and 3 to 5ish minute drive to shops, then I live a great life. My American suburbanite cup overflows.
I went kayaking last weekend. I put my kayak on the roof rack of my big SUV. I built a new AR recently and I'll go shooting when I get some time. The guns and stuff will go in the back of my big SUV. I built a long set of retaining walls on big side yard. I made a stepped double retaining wall with a waist high middle section that is a very long garden. Too many strawberries are coming in recently. I'm a few minutes walk from a very large and clean park. I walk there or somewhere else in my neighborhood every day with my kid. Good thing I don't live in a dense urban core and instead can have high quality of life in so many ways in my big suburban house, really nice clean neighborhood and car.
Just for fun: let's define high "quality of life" for men as including satisfying sex with women. Then point out that gay guys lack high "quality of life". No matter how good their sex lives are they don't include women in this arbitrary and narrow definition.
Why wouldn't you be able to walk to a park in a dense urban area? Or go kayaking or shooting (presumably at a range, not in your backyard)? Gardening is a bit more difficult, depending on how dense the city is exactly. On the other hand, in an urban area, you could be 3 minutes away from shops without even needing to drive.
I have driven into the local major urban center and walked around. It's okay. There are crazy drug addicted homeless people, shit on the ground, rents are ruinously high for tiny apartments that don't include storage space for kayaks or workbenches, half the schools are crap, etc. But some of the parks are not open drug markets and I indeed could walk around them with a little kid. But the parks near my suburban home have 0.0% homeless person poop on the ground and are also nice, so instead I'll walk to them. If you and I walked through one park then the other the differences would be clear.
I've been to state parks and BLM land countless times across decades. 0% of the people using them got there by bus or light rail. It is a very anti-walkable-city sort of activity. You need significant personal storage space such as a garage and you need a personal vehicle to access these spaces. There's no rental shops for kayaks or bikes and no bus stops on the mountain side or BLM desert land or lake, etc.
Indeed I don't shoot in my suburban backyard. I'm imagining a "walkable urban space" shooter trying to bring a couple rifle cases and a range bag on a bus out to an outdoor shooting range. I don't suppose that is realistically possible. To within round off error that's not viable. Load it in your personal car and drive to the range or you can't do it.
My very suburban dad activities are not expensive. I'm dishing out single digit thousand dollars for these things. But it absolutely requires a moderate amount of storage space and a personal vehicle. Given that I might as well live on the moon from the point of view of a walkable city advocate.
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On good days, it'll be packed with other people using the park.
Unfortunately many cities tend to be bad about even letting residents have guns, let along shoot them anywhere. And where are you going to kayak in the concrete jungle?
Sure, 3 minutes away from 3 shops; all the rest are just as far as in the suburbs except it's a public transit journey instead of driving.
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Note that the only other human you have mentioned in your description of your quality of life is your child. The rest of it is all stuff. SUVs, guns, fences. If that’s what you care about, American suburbs have a lot to offer you. For people who want to experience natural and spontaneous human connection (that you don’t have to fight against the environment of huge yards and parking lots to obtain), they don’t, and most of the cities don’t either.
This says a lot more about your social poverty than about suburbs.
I have plenty of human connection. I live with my wife and kids. My parents are an hour away, my grandparents were two hours away from new house. I spend time with my friends, and once I finish moving, I'll spend time with old friends from high school again. My kids have birthdays and play dates and lessons. My life is full of my family, my friends, and my family's friends.
Yes, we visit most of them by car, and we drive by a lot of yards and parking lots to do so.
You might be so lonely that having an addict grunt a "fuck you" at you while you step around him counts as the social highlight of your life. You might survive on the thin gruel of the incidental pleasantries and perfunctory forced interactions caused by congestion. My social calendar is full enough, thank you.
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the statement you quoted. There’s nothing spontaneous about having to drive for an hour to see people, so it sounds like you’re agreeing rather than disagreeing, you just don’t mind it. If you’re okay with that, that’s fine. I’m not. But I’m not agitating for some sort of political change that would require you to live differently. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to live the kind of life I want to live.
My parents are an hour away. My grandparents are two hours away. My sister, on the other hand, is about ten minutes by onewheel, and a high school friend of mine is even closer, depending on how the light is timed today. My kids go to a local school, so the eldest can go see some of his friends under his own steam. We attend church only for Christmas and Easter, and only sparingly in those cases, but were we to do so more often, we would known even more people in our current neighborhood of three car garages.
You're the one with crushing isolation and boredom. I'm the one in the suburbs with the rich social fabric.
Maybe the problem isn't the cars and the yards and the strip malls. Maybe it's you.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. I just don’t like driving or long travel times so I tend to choose to avoid it, and don’t have many opportunities to meet people that don’t require that.
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It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
The places that are most well designed to further spontaneous interaction with relatively normal and stable people like Boston or NYC are some of the most exorbitantly expensive places in the whole country. So clearly there is much more demand for that sort of lifestyle than there is supply of housing to accommodate it, which suggests that’s a luxury too.
Community and making new friends. Or are you supposed to just be done with that once you have a wife and kids?
In America, this is what churches are for (not so much Catholic churches, which haven't adapted as thoroughly to the situation).
It is true that as America has become less religious, the social organizations have not kept up, and so there's a void that can't quite be filled by meetups. But that's also true in dense cities.
Catholic churches have plenty of opportunities for making friends, assuming one is either an established adult or a teen(their young/emerging adult ministries/groups are near uniformly terrible, and this is probably fallout from the broken dating market because the organizers do not want to be responsible for such things). They are, however, opt-in, not parts of the default experience. Almost every parish has a knights of Columbus council and a men's group, a woman's... something(could be called a bible study, could be called a spirituality group, who knows), and multiple clubs nominally dedicated to charitable activities but realistically mostly for socializing. They simply are not default parts of the experience for a weekly attendee and must be specifically sought out.
Fair enough, I had pretty superficial interactions, and didn't try all that hard.
A family member and also a good friend went to Catholic school for years and grew up Catholic, and also reported not having anything social to do, to the point of going to Evangelic youth group/LDS family events. It's likely this varies a lot by region/predominant culture.
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That's not just stuff: they are activities we do enabled by having a garage and a yard and a car. We are biking through trails and kayaking and gardening in a huge garden bed we built ourself. The kayaking is usually with another family or two and hanging out on the beach with similarly aged kids. It is social if we choose to make it social and just me or my family if we choose not to invite other families. I'm in good company loading bikes or boats onto an SUV and driving off somewhere.
I've spent a few months total living in major urban areas. I didn't much experience natural spontaneous human interaction. Every day I was surrounded with a new group of total strangers that don't much interact with you. It was more "alone in a crowd" than meaningful or friendly human interaction. But maybe that's just my personality or attitude as a suburbanite.
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You’re completely correct. There are exactly two places in the US where as a wealthy upper-middle class person you can live in a largely safe, urban, dense, walkable neighborhood in a major city with tons of culture, great food, art and civilization around you, excellent transport and not have to drive and they are a thin band of lower Manhattan and those gorgeous big old houses in Back Bay.
What about the white areas of Chicago's North Side? Or downtown Philly?
There are some OK streets on the near north side, but to be truly easily walkable into the Loop you need to live in the part that's almost all big apartment buildings without much character, IMHO. It's close, I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's not amazing and it doesn't feel as dense with good stuff as the above, at least in my opinion. I have a lot of time for Chicago, but it's pretty spread out and has in many cases a certain 'worse version of midtown new york' feeling.
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Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I just can't stand the crushing boredom and isolation anymore even though my tech salary would take a big hit to emigrate. The stuff you listed is table stakes for living in any number of European capitals so it makes my current approach (tough it out in US HCOL to make more money but spend a lot of it on rent and cars and be miserable) feel like I'm getting scammed. Maybe I'll try it for a year and see how it goes.
Where in the US do you live?
Also ask yourself, how many American tech workers are scrambling to move to Europe, and how many European tech workers are scrambling to move to the US.
In all honesty youd have to be a fucking idiot to leave the US as a tech worker when all the programmers of the world froth at their mouths thinking of the salaries you can make.
My only other option right now without getting another job would be to move to New York City and that’s off the table for me because of the filth and disorder. So it’s either suburbs, London, or new job.
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Didn't Adam Mosseri and a bunch of the other very senior Meta guys all move to London because they preferred it so much to San Francisco and NYC where they have other engineering bases? Iirc quite a few senior Google people moved to London too. As long as they can keep their US salaries tech workers very much like London in my experience.
Obviously UK pay is much lower than the US. But the previous user acknowledged this in their first post.
Thats the whole point, would they move without the same pay?
And Im not talking about seniors at Google or Meta who earn like professional athlete's. Would the average mid level programmee trade off 150k for 75k? To move from San Francisco to... London?
Im telling OP whatever he thinks hes going to get in London is probably worth much less than that sweet American salary. Hes moving out of America not Argentina.
After making a certain level of income, you should be able to just buy solutions to most problems. And on the surface OP should be able to do that.
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I don't think he's a tech worker. Tech workers (well, the type who might consider moving to London) don't sweat the cost of cars; if they don't care much for cars and don't live in NYC they buy a grocery-getter or two and don't worry about cost. If they like cars they likely buy a Tesla and still don't worry about cost.
I’m a SWE making big tech rates. But I am early in my career, have a huge amount of student debt from bad decisions I made in the past, am paying a lot of rent, and kind of hate working and want to retire fast. So it’s not actually over my budget or anything but it doesn’t feel good because I’d rather invest that money to get out of the system faster than spend it on something that feels like a waste. That said the high rent is definitely more of a burden than the car expense.
Yeah, your worry about car cost is ideological, not logical. Were you to move somewhere where you could easily get by without a car, you'd find the difference in living expenses (and/or loss of salary) were greater than the cost of the car.
That seems plausible - too much demand for housing in safe, clean, walkable areas and not enough supply so the rent is through the roof.
That's a side effect of walking being slow and cramming more people in smaller areas making safety and cleanliness far more difficult.
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Not everyone wants to walk everywhere. Americans are rich and can drive, and driving is a strictly superior means of transit for distances over a mile or so. That’s a set of priorities that most Americans don’t have and it doesn’t seem like our Indian friend does either, not on the sense of ‘I prioritize other things over walkability’ but in the sense of ‘I literally don’t care about walkability at all’.
I'm lazy, and I don't like walking for one.
In the UK, I found the public transit perfectly unobjectionable, but I was walking around more than I ever needed to in my entire life. I'd rather drive.
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Strictly superior to what? Walking? Sure, but that's because long-distance walking can be tiring, not because driving itself better than other modes of non-walking transit. To safe and well-kept public transportation of the kind that exists in, say, Switzerland? If your destination is along a rail route then that seems false, because you can sit and do what you want to do instead of having to keep your attention on the road, and you don't need to find a parking space, you just get off the train. If it's not then that's an argument for better rail coverage.
If you're talking about non-urban locations where there isn't enough demand for infrastructure to build sufficient rail coverage, then sure, driving is a fine option for that.
Being driven in an uber isn’t comparable to driving. You don’t have to actually drive, or endure the stress and uncertainty of having to find parking in the middle of London.
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