| Not OP; but as someone who recently bought a house near seattle and has started feeling the pain: I couldn't afford to compete in redmond proper/seattle proper (low end ~500k+, regularly escalated with 20+ bidders 100k+ in cash over listing) so I got a house out in the suburbs (duvall, off in the northeast about ~20-30 miles) for ~430k. Grew up/worked on the east coast for many years, and regularly lived 60-80 miles outside of cities but could rely on light rail to get in to center <40 minutes of very regular, very easy travel. Here, a fraction of that distance regularly takes me 60-70 minutes to drive. I'm VERY LUCKY that I have a bus route, so that I can at least work, but as others have said, if any of the 1 lane roads have an accident, my drive rapidly becomes 2 hours+. I have to wake up before 6 to avoid rush hour, and even then it's a coin flip. I would frankly never make this tradeoff again. I now burn 2-3 hours every day (assuming I get home at 5-6 and sleep at 10-11) this just ate ~50% of my leisure time for a given day. I fucking love nature, having a yard, having autonomy to run my house how I want, but this is slowly destroying my sanity as I go to sleep each night with an even more pressing feeling of "not enough time in the day" than I ever had in an apartment near work. I'm... not too happy with the job/home life tradeoffs that I've seen available thus far. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but in most cities with high tech job concentration and reasonable stability I don't see a way around having to live like this unless you happened into money. (I was priced out of Seattle even with over a decade of life savings) |