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Ask HN: What are the best US cities for for working remotely?

32 points by hueving ↗ HN
What are the best cities with affordable housing that are big enough to have a good variety of food and no (or a very mild) winter that have enough of a tech community for some meetups, etc?

I'm looking for places cheaper than Austin when it comes to cost of living.

16 comments

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jamesmp98
Atlanta?
gargarplex
Atlanta has a good food, a tech community, affordable housing and office space
tedmiston
I don't usually like posts that just link to an external resource, but Nomad List is a (free) search engine built for this exact use case. They have both domestic and international cities.

https://nomadlist.com/

The same guy that created that also recently made a second project of crowdsourced neighborhood characteristics within each city. For example, if you want to find where the tech or hipster neighborhood in a given city is.

https://hoodmaps.com/

For example, SF:

https://hoodmaps.com/san-francisco

hueving
Do they have a way of ranking by places to live permanently?

This site doesn't seem to take into account things like buying a house and property taxes.

tedmiston
I think it's mostly focused on short-term living (digital nomads). It may be worth contacting the creator on Twitter. I'm sure it's not the first time he's had that type of request.
pieterhg
Yes. I'm the maker of Nomad List.

You can rank/sort by more long-term attributes like quality of life, rent price etc. Property taxes are too granular data to collect for me and impossible to keep up-to-date for 1,000+ cities though.

See https://nomadlist.com/#sort=life_score for a more long-term quality of life ranking of cities.

pieterhg
"What are the best cities with affordable housing that are big enough to have a good variety of food and no (or a very mild) winter that have enough of a tech community for some meetups, etc?"

https://nomadlist.com/cheap-mild-cities-to-visit-in-january-...

The answer would be Tucson, AZ and San Antonio, TX.

If budget isn't important you have more options:

https://nomadlist.com/mild-cities-to-visit-in-january-and-de...

- Gainesville, FL

- Tampa, FL

- Los Angeles, CA

- San Diego, CA

- Jacksonville, FL

- Austin, TX

- Santa Monica, CA

- Phoenix, AZ

- Houston, TX

- Orlando, FL

If you're okay with outside United States, you have countless more options:

https://nomadlist.com/mild-cities-to-visit-in-january-and-de...

From Portugal to Taiwan, Israel to Ecuador, Colombia to Thailand.

P.S. this is based on "mild" temperatures as you said. If you're fine with warm/hot climates, there's even more options.

P.S.2. the cost of living data on Nomad List is now 90%+ accurate.

bradknowles
Is San Antonio really that much cheaper than Austin? I'd be really surprised if that were true, but I'd love to see the evidence.
pieterhg
Yep, Austin has become a lot more expensive with the influx of people from the rest of America.

Data is crowdsourced but cross checked with public cost of living data for accuracy.

cylinder
Somewhere beautiful an hour or so outside of LA or north of SF. Drive into town when there's meetups. Don't waste this opportunity to live in a really nice place that most people cannot viably live in due to lack of employment opportunities.
hueving
Good point, the only thing I'm concerned about is not having a good variety of restaurants if I'm that far out.
zerr
A question for those who live in a year-around summer/spring - isn't it too monotonous? I mean when you don't have a "real" four seasons...
FlopV
I live in the USVI, and we don't have any seasons other than hurricane season...

The reason I live here is because it has my favorite season year round, allowing me to do the hobbies I love year round. spearfishing, hiking, boating, etc. We get a lot of sun, which makes my mood much better than a dark or rainy place.

Having lived in New England, the winter was always kind of something you had to get through that I didn't enjoy.