By Beth McGuire
America’s premier cities seem to have it all: Instagram-able park and city views, edgy bars, oodles of culture, a vibrant and weird street life, shops that sell cookie dough by the scoop. All that awesomeness comes at a steep price. The harsh reality: Buying or renting in urban meccas like New York, San Francisco or Denver is increasingly out of reach for many folks.
That’s why so many city-centric millennials, empty nesters, and everyone in between are finding themselves in a gut-wrenching double bind: Should they continue to fork over ludicrously high portions of their paycheck for housing, or throw in the towel and decamp to the suburbs?
Why not search out affordable alternatives for urban living—far cheaper cities with many of the same features that made you fall head over heels in the first place? Enter the realtor.com® data team.
We distilled the true character of some of the nation’s most expensive metros to find budget-friendly—and unexpected—counterparts around the country. Think of them as Metro Matchups™—places that link up to the nation’s urban meccas in critical ways, but where you can buy a home for less than $350,000. Less than $350k!
If you’re leaving one of the U.S.’ biggest cities, you’re probably not going to move off the grid to somewhere without a reliable Wi-Fi signal (unless that’s your thing). So we limited our ranking to the 150 largest metros. All have median home prices below $350,000, plenty of gigs, and some ethnic diversity. We factored in housing stock, occupations, weather, nightlife, and a whole host of other criteria that help define an urban center’s unique personality:*
- Percentage of stand-alone, single-family homes, condos, townhouses, and co-ops listed on realtor.com
- Average days of sunshine per year
- Dominant employment sectors (finance, government, tourism)
- Dominant occupations
- Restaurants per capita
- Bars and nightlife venues per capita
- Art galleries per capita
- Number of pro and amateur sports teams
- Car ownership rates
Some of our Metro Matchups pair up as you might expect. Others might make your jaw drop. But hey, we’ve got the data to back it all up! So let’s get going.
San Francisco, Calif.
Median home list price: $868,000
Matchup: Raleigh, N.C.
Median home list price: $339,200
Matching metrics: Tech jobs, tech jobs, and did we mention tech jobs?
Let’s be real: There is only one City by the Bay! But if even thinking about your monthly rent or mortgage bill makes you reach for the anti-anxiety meds, you might want to consider Raleigh.
Hear us out. The metro has the fifth-highest concentration of high-tech jobs in the nation. And the cost of living is just a fraction of that in San Francisco—or any of the other elite urban tech hubs like Boston or Seattle.
Runner-up: New Orleans, La., with its food and nightlife
Los Angeles, Calif.
Median home list price: $699,600
Matchup: Savannah, Ga.
Median home list price: $249,900
Matching metrics: Movie production and beaches
Next time you’re eating butter-doused popcorn at the movies, just remember that film could very well have been made in Savannah. Yep, you heard us right: This is the Hollywood of the South. Savannah ranks No. 3 nationally …read more
From:: Finance and Economy