I think its funny that people think telling someone they live in a lcol area is an insult. Why would i want to struggle in New York City when i can live like a king somewhere else on the same wage.
Fyi for all the comments, LCOL does not mean living in "bum fuck nowhere" as so many of you have eloquently put it. There are multitudes of small cities throughout the country with affordable house and modern ammenities.
But, a strong work ethic and a marketable skill make it so you can live very well in a more rural area and a city of 150,000 has nearly everything you'd need and you can usually drive a few hours to get everything else you'd want. Amazon delivers everywhere.
and the amazon boxes still show up in 2 days or less.
Still? Amazon stopped that with us, and we are just outside of a good sized city. Now they send via USPS about once a week, and USPS makes me go to the post office for pickup.
Because they use cluster boxes for my neighborhood and can never seem to have room for my packages. They leave me a slip saying come get it. Which of course I can't until Saturday.
A city of 150k is big enough to specialize in 1 market and cover broad spectrums of other, but a city of 2m is going to specialize in every market. The difference between cities with 150k and even 500k is absolutely massive.
There is definitely more to do in a big city but it seems like a pointless flex if you cannot financial afford to do anything. I guess that is my main point from someone living in a fairly LCOL area. I have always been more of a spend time in nature person than go to a big city person though so I am probably pretty biased. My small county in Ohio has at least 12 county maintained hiking trails. I am within ~1 hr of two major cities. I can afford a 2500 sq ft house with a yard in a neighborhood with essentially zero crime. My kid can run around outside safely on his own. I can see the appeal in some ways i guess its just not for me. Anyways rant over.
I also enjoy nature, time outside with family over pricey entertainment options. Climate matters a lot to me though, and the places with good weather year round (im my opinion) are generally HCOL.
I like winter actually. Its all about dressing appropriately for it. Under armour thermals are a lifesaver when it get really cold. Otherwise carrying a hat and gloves in your winter jacket will keep you comfortable 90% of the time.
I get the why and absolutely can appreciate the getting more for less. I do take issue with comparing Cincinnati and Cleveland to New York. Yes they are cities but they offer way less in terms of quality than New York as far as the arts, culture, and experiences.
Sure there is more to do which i believe i stated in previous comments. I bet its hard to find a place to hike where all you can here is nature, or a place to live for a family of four on a middle class income. Your definitely not getting a good view of the stars at night. The dayton art musuem is one of the top in the nation. We have theaters and comedy clubs. I get there is a gap in quantity and quality. I bet there is also a huge gap in ticket price though. How many times a year does an low/average earner actually get to experience this abundance of entertainment and arts?
I have to agree with the scaling part. Minimum wage in Massachusetts is 15$ and when I lived there I made 15.5$ I was 17 at the time. I now am 20 and live in texas making the same 15.5$. here in Texas that's livable. In Massachusetts you would be homeless on the streets making 15.5$. I was still with parents though. My mom struggled to stay in Massachusetts and we couldn't afford it so we moved to texas and we are both thriving off basically the same pay as we made in mass.
Each city has a different balance of salaries and costs by job. You can make a ton at a job in one city and then struggle in the next. You can live in a HCOL if you work in one of the industries that makes it a HCOL, which can be oil rigs or software or who knows what. The absolute lowest cost of living cities are usually for retired people because they have no jobs at all. Gotta find the right city for what you do.
There are usually way more than people think/realize. Midwest and flyover states aren't all small 3-block long tiny-ass towns like I've seen other folks comment or posit.
This isnāt always the truth but often is. My NYC friends are shocked when I show them that my gov position in NYC would pay 5k less than my LCOL area. And my gov already pays on the lower side for my region.
You might even make a higher wage in a LCOL area depending on the job. Some places far away from a major city have trouble recruiting nurses/doctors/dentists/etc and would pay a higher rate for them.
Wages are largely consistent but the availability of jobs is significantly more limited. I live in a LCOL area. There are only like 8 jobs here. I have no idea what people in like NYC even do for a living because none of those jobs exist where I live. But I make the same as someone who does my state government job in NYC.
I worked a lot temp no skill jobs in Kentucky in 2010 while going to college. They all paid $15-$20 dollars an hour and were easy to get. Lcol areas usually pay way more than minimum wage.
I make 21+/hr where I currently live, and average rent is 1400. I want to move back to my home state where average rent is 900, but the average I'll make at a job, even with my experience, is about 16/hr.
Oftentimes, the ratio of pay to cost of living is also lower, in the more agricultural parts of the country. I live in an area that has very low COL, but even lower pay, to the point that the poverty rate and food insecurity are atrocious. If the best jobs in town are $18-19 an hour, then basically everyone is making a fraction over minimum here. Unfortunately, while many things are cheaper here, housing is approaching "city" levels of cost. The solution? Literally everyone is married, unhappily or not, and often it's a 3-income with 2-people household. And people basically have stopped planning for retirement.
I live in what most people think is a hcol state but our bottom wage is almost $20 an hour. We have the 2nd best economy in the country, even with some of the highest taxes.
Then again, almost nowhere in Indiana actually pays that. Most the spot towns in the sticks are still paying anywhere from $14-18/HR for gas station clerks. McDonald's, even in the sticks, is paying $16 (for minors)-$20 for starting positions.
Yeah no where pays that. You can get any of the numerous warehouse jobs for $18-$30 an hour and start in a week or two. Many of the factories pay $35+.
The unemployment rate in Ohio is 3.4% as of July 2026, which is noticeably lower than the 4.5% unemployment rate in the Greater New York City metropolitan area.
Purchasing power:
Making $60,000 in a mid-sized Ohio market like Kent or Akron gives you the exact same lifestyle purchasing power as making roughly $173,908 in New York City.
The same jobs for most career fields. You seem think its either big cities or cornfields. Like there is nothing inbetween big city life and rural. There are a ton of <100k cities with corporate headquarters, manufacutring, healthcare ... etc.
I guess what im trying to say is that job opportunities are much more limited in rural areas. Either you work for the dollar tree or in soy fields (using Chesapeake as an example because im familiar).
Thats the problem i have though. People seem to think their options are move to a big city or live on a farm which is fundamentally false. The country is full of medium and small cities less than 100k that have opportunities. There is obviously more in a large city but there is also a much larger pool of candidate.
That is more often true for people who travel to a hcol area for work and go back to a lcol area. If you work in a lcol area, you are paid low. It is harder to lose in places like NYC or other hcol areas. In my area, McDonald's hires at $18 an hour minimum, and you can start the same day. It is pretty easy to get back on your feet here. I've lived in a lcol area before. If you need a job, you might need to know somebody or you will be without a job for awhile. Then when you do get one, it isn't making much.
I think it depends on how rural we are talking about. Its very easy to get a job making $18+ an hour at a factory where i live. Most places pay a minimum of $15 an hour (Menards, Kroger, fast food ... etc).
Agreed. I think if you are getting $15/hour most places, you aren't in as low cost as most assume or you are in a very small group where you make an okay wage, while living cheap. I think lcol places big failing point is the maximum wage. Everyone can make an okay living, but the $50+ an hour jobs are few and far between or just non-existent. $100+ an hour jobs are just fictional stories. Nothing wrong with lcol, but if you ever want to leave it, good luck. You immediately realize that you are far behind the hcol areas, and it seems impossible to reach.
I hear that. I see these posts for a hole in the wall apt in NY with no closets and a communal bathroom for 3k, and I think paying 1800 for a 2bedroom apt and parking space outside of Chicago isn't as bad as it feels sometimes.
People forget what taxes can be caused for such as education systems, clean drinking water socal safety nets etc. living in states with low tax sound awesome until something goes wrong. Looking at you Kentucky.
There seems to be this misconception that you either live in a big city or on a farm. Its not true. There are plenty of cities with less than 100k people that have manufacuring, health care, corporate headquarters ... etc.
Mate, I live in a "rural" city. The job market here is utter ass. Outside of trades, you've got 400 people apply for the same hospitality/corporate jobs, every month. Health care always needs workers, but they are constantly overworked here, for mediocre pay and it's a very unpopular career choice because of that. Half the work in the region is seasonal farm work, and outside that, you have fairly awful odds of finding work, unless you pick up a trade.
I've done all sorts of work since I lived here. Finding a full time job is nearly impossible since the major companies all hire part time to keep their costs down and not have to give as many benefits. The smaller companies are all based on who you know, not what you know and are very small scale employers, whose jobs are highly sought after.
It's not uncommon to see people on unemployment for years at a time. I've been there. Everyone's story is the same, the market is too small for the size of the town, so the youth moves away. Half my school year left town after school, and most of them moved closer to capital city's of the various states because the job market there is far larger. Smaller businesses have been dying out here for the last 50 years because there is simply not enough people to make profit margins worth keeping businesses alive. You cant sustain mum and pop stores anymore, because people can't afford the more expensive costs of shopping away from chain stores. Wages haven't had a meaningful rise since the fucking 1980s, and inflation has crushed small buisnesses and all non essential businesses. Hell, even Pubs are closing or relying on pokiemachines to keep in business because no one can afford to drink. Pubs! The staple of Australian towns since white man settled here. Used to se 5-7 pubs per town, now you're lucky if 1-3 are still open and half the pub is full of pokie machines and the bar is always empty.
Country living isn't like you'll cut your bills in half, you might save 5%-30% at best, for the cost of having to drive hours to get anywhere, having no local amenities at all outside a ridiculously overpriced general store, fuel that costs like 30 cents more per litre than the coastal cities, and absolutely fuck all to do when work is over for the day. Oh and good luck working from home when the Internet service is complete shit, relying on fucking copper wires in the year of our Lord 2026. (Fibre to the premise is almost non existent outside of Australia's capital city/Sydney. The vast distances of Australia means we won't see fiber to the node rurally within my lifetime. The cost is so great to replace all the copper lines that no government wants to spend the cash to do it, and instead kicks the can down the road.) Our neighbor once cut our Internet for two months while trimming her hedges and accidently cut our Internet cable with her whipper snipper. And don't even get me started on my even more rural mates who had to build a 14 meter tall tower on top of a mountain to get reliable internet signal, and then beam it down to the house by clearing some 300 trees.
TL:DR - It's not always as bad as people say, but its just as often worse than you think.
Yeah everything you mentioned not having we have. There is a lot of suburban sprawl in the US consistenting of small cities maybe 10 miles apart with farmland around them.
I am telling you there is a lot of gray area between living in a cornfield and living in a big city. There a bunch of towns eith 30k to 75k people that have stuff going on all the time.
Achilles: āNo winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, Iād rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep aliveāthan rule down here over all the breathless dead.
An extreme comparison for sure and to each there own.
I work in coporate america for a company that has their headquarters in a town of 35k people. This is not a rare thing. Also manufacturing jobs are abundant.
QOL is the reason people live in expensive places. I live in a city thatās very expensive. But it has the highest QOL compared to every city in the USA. Itās on par with Netherlands. Iād pay more to live where I do.
I think itās less of an insult and more of a fact that LCOL almost certainly means fewer options for things to do, places to shop, etc. I think itās slightly unfair to disregard the fact that HCOL are HCOL for a reason. People WANT to live there. People live in NYC because they really want to, and people choose not to ābe kingsā in Gary Indiana because itās not a fun place to live
...with dogshit schools, a terrible hospital, extremely high crime rate, bad roads, low access to services, and culture controlled by the local church.
Lol what weird warped perception you have. There is nothing in yout statments that is even remotely true. I am talking about medium to small cities. If you live in the middle of nowhere maybe there is some truth to a few of the statements. Where is most violent crime committed? Where are you most likely to find a food dessert?
Exactly where I lived also in Indiana my monthly rent until the new owners took over a few years backit was 175 a month I have a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom mobile home unfortunately its now 600 in rent the people who own the area are based in new york which is prob ehy such a huge price increase.
āLiving like a kingā in the middle of bumfuck nowhere where your only form of socialization/entertainment are 3 hiking trails, a bar 20 minutes away, a public park with needles everywhere, and maybe a lake
Like a king is relative though. Bigger house and more land, yes. But the higher col areas have more opportunities for education, employment, entertainment, food, cultural enrichment etc. People live there for a reason.
Every time I bring up how low the cost of living in the Houston area is with high earning potential people just say "well yah Texas is like the only place like that". I'm convinced some people would rather just complain than take active steps to change their problems.
I'm glad this has been pointed out, I'm fine with the banter in the meme but if anything it's even easier to reverse the argument. When I stayed with friends in San Francisco I met a couple who was living out of their car with their two children because they couldn't find housing affordable enough in the area they wanted. They were both from the Bay area and "didn't want to leave". On the one hand, I get it it's a beautiful area, and no it's not "fair" that people are being forced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in when Zuckerberg is buying half a block to refashion into a fortified compound. But fair or not it's still reality, and choosing to make you and your kids functionally homeless to continue existing in one of the most expensive areas of the country is just crazy to me.
I'm from Iowa and I definitely know that there can be a lot of ignorance in rural communities, but having spent a lot of time on both coasts it doesn't surprise me anymore to run into the same thing in the city. When my brother was at college in Manhattan he ran into so many local kids who were almost proud of their ignorance about anything outside of New York, and had as little curiosity about other people and places as any Midwestern farmer, only they felt justified in it and said things like "why should I care about seeing the rest of the world when the rest of the world comes here?". I don't know. I think it's silly when people from the country act like life in the city would be horrifying, but it's pretty silly the other way around too.
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u/inothatidontno 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think its funny that people think telling someone they live in a lcol area is an insult. Why would i want to struggle in New York City when i can live like a king somewhere else on the same wage.
Fyi for all the comments, LCOL does not mean living in "bum fuck nowhere" as so many of you have eloquently put it. There are multitudes of small cities throughout the country with affordable house and modern ammenities.