How to live on $432 a month in America

I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.

I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a rationalization for staying where everything costs so much more.

I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize all of the megacity’s amenities.

However – I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a remote job that pays decently well and doesn’t require an excessive amount of time – and live in one of these cities – you can actually manage to see and do everything.

For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket money to explore the city.

I recently visited New York City for the first time and honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the same back home.

The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably different than the hipster bagel places in my city.

Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy places in my small city.

The game stores are much bigger in my city due to lower real estate prices.

Times Square was the biggest disappointment. It's literally just standard big box store crap like GAP and M&M store and stuff like that. I guess that one's on me as it's a tourist trap.

Central Park was cool, but not as good as the multiple large parks in easy driving distance.

I could go on and on like that, but essentially I can own a home for a fraction of the cost to rent there. The only real difference is in a metropolis like NYC, you can meet up with people for any interest you want practically. You want to learn Klingon? I'm sure there's people doing that in NYC, but not like a city of 150,000.

Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.

No one that lives in New York goes to Times Square, save for the subway station.

The great thing about New York is the prevalence of basically every nationality, with its own designated neighborhood. Places like Flushing, Corona, Brighton Beach, etc. These are also the areas that inexperienced tourists don’t visit.

If you visit again, definitely try to venture out to those areas.

Sure, medium cities that aren’t shitty and still have some vibrancy are a solid middle ground. Bonus points for being somewhere close to nice natural areas or outdoor recreation.

But I grew up in a town of less than 5k in the Midwest. The nearest cities and towns were all less than 50k population. Rent is, of course, incredibly low. There are even dozens of small universities in the area. The nearest city of 100k plus is more than an hour away.

There are vanishingly few hipster spots in these places. You get chains, more chains, suburbs, and a couple of mom & pop restaurants. Some of which are decent, but most of which are disappointing. The variety of cuisines is extremely limited. To see any kind of major entertainment, like comedy or concerts, is a two hour drive. The major airports are two hours away. Your options for outdoor recreation and activity are extremely limited: not enough people for lots of recreational sports. Too much farmland for beautiful parks. Too flat for winter activities. Too few people to have a variety of cultural events or festivals.

You can, of course, be very happy living here. But what you get is extremely different from city life.

Like you say, there are small cities that can check a lot of boxes. But I’d go out on a limb and say that’s not typical for small town America, and not everyone is happy in suburbia either, even if they have their own cookie-cutter home!

i did the same but had my wife as a guide, she dated a musician who lived there before we met and so she had been a lot of times. The different neighborhoods and just the scale of it all were pretty cool but, yeah, no desire to go back or live there. Is it required by law to play that Jay-Z/Alicia Keys "New York" song at all times everywhere there?

I've had the opposite experience. Having moved from the boonies to a downtown in a Tier 2 US city has caused a lot of my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me.

Before I moved I owned a house and justified living where I did by saying stuff like

> country people can make a day trip to do that too.

...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time. Most people just end up drinking Mai Tais that a bartender pours out of a plastic jug at a riverside dock bar instead.

Different strokes for different folks, but I think everybody should give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.

I always found it kind of fun to wander through Times Square in the evening, every now and again (on the order of once every few months).

Pointing out that it's the same old big box stores doesn't really connect to the draw of it. Most people don't go to Times Square to shop, they go to _experience_ it, and its entertaining. But it's not the place you're going to on a normal Saturday night with your friends.

With the caveat that I've only really visited a dozen or so states, and only lived in 2, my experience is pretty different than yours.

NYC pizza (and even north of the city) is generally a step above most other places. You can find similar quality pizza most places if you look hard enough, but it's nice being able to stop almost anywhere in NY and get good pizza, better than the best you'll find without having to do real research in most places. The common open-front place in NY has great pizza. Where I am now (suburbs of another fairly large city), I have yet to find a good NYC-style pizza.

Bagels in NY fall into a similar bucket. If you search, you can find good ones elsewhere, but it's downright easy to find good ones in NYC (though that's less true outside NYC/Long Island than it is for pizza).

And man, the black-and-whites. To date, I've never found a good one outside NYC.

Times Square is an experience, not a place you go to shop. And not a place you go to wander around on an average Saturday night. Yeah, it's a tourist trap, but that's the experience it is. It's entertaining to walk around/through; on a rare basis.

I loved working in NYC (I lived about 90 minutes north of it at the time, but didn't need to go in every day, so the commute was less of an issue) and I very much miss living in NYS. Rarely, I'm there on a business trip (it's been years) and I plan my time out so I can have pizza for dinner.

> but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor in why I live here.

FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in these homes.

The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people who choose their density based on their actual preferences. One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes them preferences.

Time Square is a tourist trap, an area I always avoided at any cost.

NYC lives on the fumes of its former reputation. Corporate chains have changed the city into basically a shopping mall.

When I was a kid I was drawn to NYC by the little hole in the wall restaurants, delis, coffee shops, funky stores. All owned and frequented by colorful local people. Technically these things still exist but they're mostly corporate chain versions of what used to be there. The unique experiences that the city still has to offer are too expensive and exclusive to be accessible.

Ironically, if I want unique food or local weirdness nowadays, I can find more of it in my lame hometown than I can in most cities.

> give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.

Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.

> ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time.

1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town). Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when everything you want to do is 30 mins away.

Food is next level in the NYC area compare to most other places. It's not just pizza, it's Ethiopian, Afghani, Iranian, real Chinese food (Szechuan, Hunan, etc.). The music scene and clubs can't be beat outside of other major cities, if you're into that sort of thing. The museums and galleries too. It all exists if you want to find it.

You'll also find some of the most ambitious people in the world.

Does the cost of rent justify it? Depends on what you are looking to do.

Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in — I don't know how long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was younger....

I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area, and now back in the midwest (in Omaha).

Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian restaurants. C'mon Omaha!

Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....

You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.

Name that town!! --

There is a growing divide and there are many towns (and many parts of metropolises) where its a weird class inverted food desert. There are tons of boutiques and vintage shops, and more tatoo shops than you'd think is necessary. Maybe there's a upvamped "bodega" with fishwife tinned fish, and apples for .80 each. "Main street"s that seems pulled out of Disney's imagination and Rick Caruso's execution. Six coffee shops and a bunch of restaurants but no grocery without driving, no affordable gas without driving, no public schools without driving etc.

there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.

A big part of it is how you want to find friends.

If you have a “friend profile” and you want people to match it, a city is wonderful - more people, more matches.

Thing: all friends within 5 years of my age, similar jobs, education, etc. Go city! Or college maybe.

But if you’re old country or old rural and want to be friends with those around you a suburban or rural area can be fine. You end up making friends with the ten year old next door, and his parents, along with the retirees on the other side, etc.

>> my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me

Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.

Most of the country by land area has no zoning and people can build whatever they want. Despite that, where I live the only thing anyone does is the SFH and the occasional duplex.

> Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....

This is the move. My partner and I are Asian and we participate in Asian community things in the Bay. A lot of asians that came from less urban areas made their own food sourced from the high quality but unknown-outside-the-community Asian grocery store!

I’ve never really been super confident with remote jobs - a recession hits and you can’t find another job.

When I lived in NYC, it was a given it would take at least an hour to get to an airport, and then I’d budget an extra hour for something to go wrong.

Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes before departure.

This isn't a good take. When was the last time you lived in NYC? Surely maybe there were glory days at one point, but there used to be a LOT more crime too. NYC is still one of the all time great cities.

Cities wreck your finances and your health.

That isn't especially surprising, given that there's no point in raising (or using) the capital to build urban infrastructure where none exists. It's a flywheel-shaped problem; the fact that the average American lives in a local optima of suburban sprawl doesn't itself indicate the absence of a better optima.

actually, i'm now noticing it may be cheaper for me to buy used skis than to rent them. buying used i can get it cheaper than even renting just once or twice

> remote jobs

> a recession hits and you can’t find another job.

Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness.

I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent at every price point.

I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.

Yep. My airport has less than 20 gates and is a 30 minute drive and 10 minutes to get through security. You frequently have to fly through hubs though.

Thanks. Yeah, if I do go back it won't be in Manhattan. I was alarmed by how every place was pretty much closed by 6-8 PM near me. Again...my medium city has plenty of cool stuff open much later -especially on a Friday/Saturday night.

What did you find interesting about times square? I'm asking seriously as there isn't anything to do other than shop or ignore the annoying 50 people on every street corner asking me to get a bus tour.

This is my thesis about the size of where you live. There are three types of people:

1. People who like the mega cities/metastacities. They genuinely enjoy the idea that they could never “fit into their head” the city in which they live. It’s just too big. You can never possibly exhaust all the possibilities, much less keep up with all of the changes. They can be intensely loyal to their abstract city, abstract because they can never physically/socially experience the entire city, so it mostly exists only in their head. But the endless horizon of that abstract city is where they really live, and why they like it so much. Never boring…of course neither is a war zone.

2. Smaller right-sized cities, defined as cities/regions that you can just about fit into your head. Big enough that they are rarely boring, especially if you take advantage of the third dimension of time/local history. But small enough that you can experience the coziness and stability of fully living in that one space…in other words, a home.

3. Smaller towns of which you can exhaust the possibilities in just a few years. If you grok the place, it is supremely cozy, and you can deepen the sense of that by raising a family and becoming (an old phrase) a pillar of the community. You go deep socially instead of craning your neck across an endlessly broad horizon. You also have the third dimension of time/local history. And you have the additional option of defining your location not just as the small town, but rather a whole surrounding region as your actual home. For Americans this is easily an area of 60-100 miles/100-160 km radius, given our love affair with the automobile. That regional view then gets you into the second level of a small city, enough stimulation so it’s rarely boring.

And there’s always cyberspace. The small town life isn’t so extremely different when that part that is online is so similar for everyone, big city or small town.

For extremely different, try 19th Century Western life, or 20th Century non-Western life.

The lights in every direction, the people interacting with the performers and each other, the naked cowboy, the hustle and bustle. It's just a very unique location. It's like watching a human fish tank.

I feel like on the surface this may seem like kind of a facile comment, but this really gets at what makes NYC a special place. There’s a whole day-to-day experience that may be technically replicable in other large cities in the course of a day, but there’s like 100 things to do in New York every 200 feet. It’s just a different experience.

People raise families and live generations in cities. There's plenty of rural poverty and poor health outside of cities.

To be fair, my impression is most people have highly contradictory desires along these lines.

They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.

In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.

My understanding of the issue is that while walkable communities are in demand they are a minority and generally speaking, also a minority that is less politically active than single-family homeowners.

Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually allows it.

This is so weird to read. My cultural bias is showing: I'm from the Netherlands. As most of you know, walkability is the norm here. And while the country is flat, so is the area described in this article.

I guess my palette is just not sophisticated but I have eaten many times in NYC, in other big cities famous for food, in suburban places with one or two restaurants, and in rural places with only Applebee’s, and I honestly don’t see that much of a difference. To me, food is food. You eat it, you’re not hungry anymore. The only difference I notice is the cost. I’ve had pizza in New York, and I’ve had “New York style” pizza from a no name pizzeria in upstate California and it tastes exactly the same to me.

My wife, on the other hand goes bananas when we visit the city and just can’t get enough of the food. She’ll eat when she’s not even hungry because she just wants to experience this or that meal. I play along because I think it’s cute and we support each other’s goofiness, but I legit don’t get it.

Cities are lecking grounds. They're places for people to date. Once they get married they move to the suburbs.

I'm remote too (sort of), but I do sometimes dislike the fact that the kind of tech jobs I'm best suited for are all an hour+ away.