I’ve lived in Fort Collins, CO (~1 hour north of Denver) for 4 years now and its nice, but I’m ready to leave. So fair warning, the weather is nice (most of the time) but it’s a double-edged sword. Every year I’ve been out here its gotten hotter (I think total we had close to 3 weeks of temps over 95F this summer) and drier (0.27" of rain in August). My hops were going gang busters in May, but then summer hit and they nearly died even watering twice a week. So basically there are two seasons, winter and summer. Winter when its cold and snows, then it moves right into summer where it temps hit the mid-80s early and stay there, with no rain, then fall lasts about 2-3 weeks before getting cold again.
+1 to Burlington VT. It’s not a major city but the art scene is great and it’s only ~2 hours from montreal and ~3 from boston. No train service and real estate IN burlington is pretty dear but in surrounding towns it’s pretty good.
My wife is from Southington as well as my college roommate and other friends. Great area, really close to NYC (drove back and forth planning the wedding years ago). We almost move down there when we had to get-the-hell-out-of-massachusetts, but decided on NH instead.
I graduated from UVM and Burlington is definately one of my favorite places I’ve lived. Although that hill can get %$%^ cold in the winter with the wind blowing up from Lake Champlain. Worked for parks and rec one summer and spent every sunset at the boathouse that year!!
My wedding was at the Rock Point outdoor chappel and the reception was at the boathouse. god that’s beautiful. Apparently Hemmingway once said that the most beautiful sunsets he had ever seen were on the burlington waterfront.
Oak Park is really nice. Close to the L lines and Metra. Lots of really nice older homes. Used to be pricey, not so sure anymore. I’d say we’re at the bottom of the home price curve right now, so worth exploring. You might have a tough time finding bigger lots, but there’s some out there.
If you’re looking at suburbs, pull up a map of the Metra lines and explore those with stops that are just outside the city. That’s probably your best bet. I have friends who left the city for Des Plaines, River Grove, etc. that are very happy.
Ok, gotta put my plug in for the PNW. On the tech thing, we win hands down. Nowhere else in the country has the tech scene we have (not even silicon valley). I think we match up pretty well on beer as well, but I am biased. We have to have the most homebrew clubs per capita though… I have 4 homebrew clubs within 30mins of my house that all poured at NHC this year.
The one major issue the Seattle area has is the lack of commuter train coverage. We have one light rail that goes from downtown to the airport, and they are supposedly working on a train to downtown Bellevue, but that is in like 2017. For as progressive as we think we are, we are way behind on public transportation. If you are looking at decent housing prices and space (for chickens and bees), I would recommend somewhere up further north, in south Snohomish county. They have better prices and lower taxes, but are a bit further out of the way.
also, our housing prices are rather high here as well.
I think the PNW misses on a few of your criteria, but it’s where I’m staying for now and the future.
Redmond is nice, I highly recommend it. We have chickens (2 are laying, the other two are getting close), and both Seattle and Portland allow chickens in the city. It’s not cheapest place to live, but on the other hand people in your industry are well compensated. The main thing you would want to do is to get a house on the bus lines - the buses on the east side are very good, clean, and on time. There is plenty of diversity, the kind of diversity depends on where you live. Redmond is very Microsoft heavy as you can imagine, so the diversity runs towards highly educated foreigners. Good education for the kids in the Lake Washington School District, plus UW is great and there are several other schools your wife could check out.
We meet your temperature desires, but fail on the sun and thunderstorms. We have a lot of cloudy days (something like 300 cloudy/partly cloudy days per year) and thunderstorms are rare (I only hear thunder a couple of times per year).
Great beer scene, and it’s not too hard to start a brewery considering Mic Sager just did it and I know a few other people who have or are in the process of doing so. Whatever hurdles there are, there are plenty of people around to help you navigate them, including the Washington Brewers Guild.
Let me know if you decide to head this way. I have a bunch of Microsoft neighbors who are happy to turn in resumes, and my wife does IT PM consulting and has contacts at a lot of the consulting companies in the area.
Tom, my background is in the LAMP stack, so mostly web stuff. I believe MSFT is still C/C#/Visual C etc, so I’m not sure if they’d be able to accept my resume (stellar though as it is : )
Kyle, thanks for the super description of Indy. My wife really liked what you had to say.
I personally am a fan of mountains and outdoors-y things, so Ft Collins sounds fun. Plus NORAD! However… Those fires looked pretty scary this year.
Also Asheville sounds nice… We have a coffee table book of American landmarks, and the Blue Ridge Mountains are in there, really breathtaking stuff. Plus I’d have an “easy” time of doing the Appalachian trail later when the boys are bigger.
Hi Phil,
I live in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina. We used to live in Durham (which we loved) but recently moved to Cary (sorta between Raleigh and Durham). Durham is a great town, but does have some bad parts to it (you will read about those if you do much searching). But we never had any issue and really loved it there - great baseball, great restaurants, great breweries.
In general, we’re about 3.5 hours from Asheville, but we’re also only 2 hours from the beach! Raleigh is a fairly good sized city but we’re also only 4.5 hrs from Washington DC and about the same to Atlanta.
I also do web-based software engineering. Because of the Research Triangle Park here, we have a TON of tech companies. IBM, Cisco to name a couple big ones, but there are so many smaller-ish web companies here. Dice.com currently shows 1061 job listings for the Raleigh area. RTP companies step up to support Durham Public Schools | Research Triangle Park
The housing market here is strong and has been pretty strong throughout the slump the rest of the nation has felt.
For outdoorsy stuff, I traded rock-climbing for kayaking when we moved here from Tennessee. Lots of rivers and lakes for kayaking. Also a good bit of hiking - though mostly flat terrain. If you want mountains and a more “outdoorsy” vibe from the town/city in general, Asheville is the way to go. I just don’t know what you would find in terms of a job there.
For Craft Beer, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 production breweries within 25 miles and many many more that are just in NC (70 I think now!).
Let me know if I can help you with any specific info about the area.
Raleigh/Durham (Cary, Wake Forest and Garner are in surrounding area)
I agree with everybody posting about the Denver/front range area. There are many great breweries/pubs/cultural places within walking distance or short trip on the public transport. In the greater metro area there many up in coming “hip” neighborhoods. The weather is overall pretty nice, in the winter most of the metro area does not get that “much” snow, the summers can be hot but that is what the mountains are for. as for flying to Europe- from DIA to the east coast it’s 3-4hrs (depending on the city) and then about 6-8 hrs to Europe.
Good point :) Then again, Microsoft isn’t the only game in town, my wife knows gainfully employed people in the area with your skills. And of course, we have plenty of hiking, mountains, and other outdoorsy stuff, plus the lakes and Puget sound, plus rainforests and high desert. And volcanoes.
There are so many gret places in the US I think you have a lot of options - good luck narrowing them down.
OK, so I don’t speak y’all’s language, but I did say we have tech all over the place. MSFT, Google, Facebook, Zynga, and thats just the big players. There are a LOT of smaller players and start ups that could use the web type thing. I was looking at recruiting in this area, so I have done a bit of looking at the IT field.
)