Indu WangZi wrote:1. San Diego, CA - the weather is perfect. Cost of living is much more reasonable than LA and SF. It still isnt cheap but it isnt exorbitant either. Lots of Asians - Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese...so good food. Checks all your boxes save good public transport
2. Columbia, SC - beautiful The entire state is beautiful. Weather is awesome...people are nice...cost of living is good value for money. Great food...easy to navigate...not far from the ocean. Public transport is ok, but not great.
3. Santa Rosa, CA - love the city. Its nothing like you want but its paradise
If you want SF living but want it a bit cheaper...think Oakland. I lived there (Berkeley actually) for a number of years. Easily accessible to the Bay...great perks...great food...cheaper cost of living (but not too much). Castro Valley could be an option too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_Valley,_California)
Christ almighty no. We were there for a year and absolutely hated it. It's hot and sunny but 100000% humidity 28 hours a day. It's called the armpit of the south for a reason. If you go 2 hours to either direction (Greeville-Spartanburg or the coast) then it's amazing. But Columbia is in the middle of a cesspool valley of awfulness.
I mean, we literally hated Columbia so much we moved to Minneapolis.
The cost of living in San Francisco and a lote of places in California is a way higher then most every where else. Why not move to a city like Memphis?
Jocephus wrote:before i left wichita, a big pickleball (and restaurant/bar) place opened. it was completely foreign to me and i was amazed it was/is as popular as it must be.
Is this like an irony fad? My memory of pickleball is that it is some kind of fake sport that they made us learn in high school in order to have something to do in PE.
Pickleball big around here. Tennis courts being converted, and they kick the basketball players off the gym for it.
I haven't gotten into it yet, but think its cool. Good to see people doing domething active and having fun. At our gym the teams are pretty random, might be a 60 year ish old woman teamed with a 35 yr old crossfit-ish dude.
Perhaps you'd consider being my neighbor and moving to beautiful Columbus in the great state of Ohio; which has just ranked fifth in the world for quality of life. That's 5th in the WORLD yo!!!
The city of Columbus has been ranked fifth in the world when it comes to the quality of life.
This comes from numbeo.com. The site ranked 227 cities and scored them based on purchasing power, safety, health care, cost of living, property prices to income ratio, traffic commute time, pollution and climate. The higher the score the better according to the site. (read the full listing here.
“I thought we might be in the top 10, but I didn’t think we’d be in the top 5,” said Rick Hahn, the owner of Nancy’s Home Cooking in Clintonville.
Here, Hahn has a pay it forward program. Customers pay five bucks to write a note to buy someone a meal who might be in need.
“Just about anything you want to do, you can do here,” said Tracey Larick from Gahanna.”I mean anything you want you can go and do without having to travel to go do it.”
Figured it was time for a bump/revisit on this thread.
So, a lot of things happened since I first posted, delaying (but not indefinitely) any hopes of moving: my wife finished nursing school; I changed school districts and got a pretty huge salary increase (if you remember a post I made a few years ago contemplating law school, this change helped me rule out that choice); we had our first baby; and then there was that whole pandemic thing. But now, in the middle of another Midwest winter, we're once again wondering how much more of it we can (or want to) take.
Looking back through the thread, unfortunately, a lot of the places we would love to live are just unaffordable. The Bay Area (or just about anywhere in CA, really), Seattle, Denver, Austin...just not doable for a teacher and a nurse. I know I originally said not to consider costs when making recommendations, but that was because I wanted to see everything people would come up with without regard to expense. But as a move becomes (hopefully) closer to reality, we need to focus on the doable.
We're still looking for basically the same things we were when I started the thread, but there's one more factor that's in play. We are in the process of bringing my wife's parents here from Vietnam. They speak literally zero words of English. So instead of just wanting a place with good Asian food etc., we want to find a place that has a significant Vietnamese population. They are going to go out of their minds being over here in the metro east with nobody to hang out with or talk to.
So going back through everything that was suggested here, and doing a lot of research over the past few weeks, there is a strong leader in the clubhouse: Atlanta. It seems to offer the best combination of most, if not all, of the things we're looking for, combined with relatively reasonably housing prices. Now it's just a matter of looking at the different areas/suburbs and figuring out what looks like the best fit. It seems there are several areas with high Vietnamese populations, which is awesome. Our tentative timeframe right now is 18 months, so we have time but want to get to it. We hope to make a trip soon to check some things out.
There's another dark horse that reared its head while I was researching. It seemed like a very strong contender at first; the housing prices can't be beat. It also has the highest Vietnamese population outside of California. But the more I look into it, the more the luster seems to fade. I'm still curious what people think, especially people that are familiar with the city (calling you, @heyzeus , I think you've lived there): Houston.
There's another dark horse that reared its head while I was researching. It seemed like a very strong contender at first; the housing prices can't be beat. It also has the highest Vietnamese population outside of California. But the more I look into it, the more the luster seems to fade. I'm still curious what people think, especially people that are familiar with the city (calling you, @heyzeus , I think you've lived there): Houston.
Bourdain gets into it a bit in this episode around the 28 min mark.
I don’t know a lot about it, but North Carolina may tick some of your boxes. Healthy VN population there and I hear good things about parts of it, at least.