[chrisco255]

What goods and services, exactly? Other than a vast array of restaurants and night life to choose from, struggling to see what you mean here. It doesn't have to be a "rural" city in the traditional sense. Plenty of 100-250K population cities out there.

[jandrewrogers]

Access to diverse groceries for eating and cooking. Availability of many types of high-quality clothing. Availability of many types of high-end durable goods. Proximity to an airport. Adequate Internet connectivity, though a handful of semi-rural regions have competing residential fiber options as an accident of history (wish I could get that in downtown Seattle). Availability of social activities outside of a very narrow range that reflect the one-dimensional background of the population. Now, there are also some goods and services available in these towns that you would be hard-pressed to find in an urban city but these are usually on the margin of lifestyle and not a reason to move to these places.

I lived a significant percentage of my life in rural towns across the US. While I really enjoy spending time in rural American towns because it is very comfortable and familiar for me, I am under no delusions about what actually living there entails. The lack of access to goods and services even for those that fit within the economic class of the town (which I did last time I lived in one) is inadequate enough that it is considered normal to drive 50-100 miles each way once or twice per week to get to a "real" city for various errands. You spend a lot of time in vehicles; instead of spending hours each day stuck in traffic, you spend hours covering distance at speed.

By the way, a 250k population city (i.e. larger than e.g. Geneva, Switzerland) is a very different animal than your average rural town, which is more commonly thousands to tens of thousands of population. I find cities in this range (also lived in these) to be the worst of both worlds, being neither as rural or intimate as a small town while also having few of the benefits of a real urban city. Of course, this is a personal preference.

[AnimalMuppet]

To me, the ideal is something like Fort Collins, Colorado. It's maybe 120,000 people. It's an hour north of Denver, so when you need an international airport, or a big city children's hospital, or a professional opera company, or whatever, they're available - at the cost of some time. But when you don't want them, all that big city isn't in your face.

Fort Collins is also a college town, and has a fairly educated population.

And if Fort Collins is too big for your taste, there are a ring of smaller towns (Loveland, Ault, Windsor or Westminster or something to the north) maybe 10 miles away.

Note well: It is my impression that this is my ideal. I've never lived there.

[ghaff]

What you describe is the case to greater or lesser degrees with a lot of large cities. Head an hour out of the city and you have the option of various flavors of semi-rural/suburbs/smaller cities with varying degrees of affordability depending upon the town. The geographical constraints of the Bay Area (together with the magnet of tech) means that you really can't commute out of high housing prices in an hour. That's not the case with most other cities.

I live about an hour west of Boston which is certainly close enough to go in for a tech event or theatre/dinner for the evening. But my house is a lot cheaper than it would be in the city or a more expensive near-in suburb and you simply wouldn't be able to get the land I have near-in.

I get a lot of the advantages of a semi-rural lifestyle while still living close to decent supermarkets and having access to pretty much anything I would want within an hour.

[munificent]

> What goods and services, exactly?

Good schools.

Many HN readers don't have kids so they don't realize what a profoundly important factor this is when choosing where to live for many people. Once you have kids, their well-being and opportunity in life typically becomes the dominant attribute you're trying to maximize.

Parents would live in an active lava field where it rained urine every afternoon if the schools in the area were top notch.

Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers. In the US, a lot of school funding comes from local taxes, which means the amount of money schools have varies widely [0].

You could argue that this shouldn't be the case and that schools should be funded more equally out of larger pools. But if you are a parent with some money, it is your logical incentive to want to use that to improve your own child's schooling, so money naturally tends to flow towards schools that have more wealth children.

Many of those local taxes are local property taxes, so often the places that are affordable to live are by the very same process places that don't have great schools.

There's a nasty feedback loop here. You want your kids to go to good schools. The best schools have lots of rich parents. Those parents can afford expensive housing. Thus, most of the places with good schools have expensive housing.

Good government can and does push against this instinct, but it is a difficult, uphill battle.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

[lotsofpulp]

>Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers.

Teaching is important, but I would argue that even more important are the goals and resources of the other students, which correlate nicely with wealth/income of their parents, and hence the neighborhood, and hence the school they all attend.

This is all barely noticeable when everyone is not so far apart on the wealth/income ladder, but over the past few decades, as that gets wider and wider, the data gets clearer and clearer about the consequences.

[chrisco255]

There's diminishing returns on quality of K-12 education. There are A school districts everywhere. Between parenting your child right and giving them an above average education, combined with natural talent, they would have no trouble getting into state university (assuming they don't want to do perfectly acceptable blue collar work like plumbing, carpentry, firefighting, etc) I never took AP classes, for example, but make much more than many of my HS peers that did.

[CM30]

Are most good schools in large cities in the US? Because I definitely heard about how different neighbourhoods have different quality schools there based on the income of the people in the area, but I haven't heard anything about whether that correlates to the area's overall population.

It certainly doesn't seem to here in the UK, where quite a few of the top schools are old fashioned 'public schools' located in rural/semi rural areas.

[paganel]

I’m not American and don’t live in the States but as a guy who works remotely I can say that I highly value the coffee shops from the city I live in (an Eastern European capital) so much so that whenever I visit other European cities I always compare them to my city in this respect: I was happily surprised to find out that Madrid has coffee houses almost as good as ours, I was unpleasantly surprised when a friend of mine told me that Milano doesn’t have the same quality of coffee houses.

I also highly value being able to watch non-mainstream movies in a real cinema and I also very much like being able to physically touch and purchase books from a real bookstore. All of these things are impossible for me to do were I to move to a small town.

[mperham]

90% of high earners will have kids. A great school district becomes a top 3 criteria, typically this is only found in affluent clusters in each state.

[lotsofpulp]

This is the big one, in my opinion. "It's not what you know, who you know" makes it very consequential to choose your kids' school district properly.

https://www.opportunityatlas.org

[chrisco255]

You're going to be much bigger influence on your kids than their school ever will be, besides the fact that A level school districts are scattered all over the country. It's also not going to matter that much until college, to the extent that such networking matters, as there are plenty of successful life paths to take without being in the upper echelon of the socially connected.

[lotsofpulp]

It’s all about playing the odds, and statistically, there’s not many better bets than picking a high achieving school district (for achieving economic security).

[nightski]

Personally I feel that "great schools" are not nearly as important as people think they are (many bright individuals I have worked with came from smaller cities/towns). I also think that you find a lot of great teachers in smaller communities. Lastly, I find the "great schools" thing to be a cop out for piss poor parenting because the parents are too busy with big city jobs with crazy commute times. In reality great parenting and time with kids will get them very far in life vs. the perfect school district.

[derekp7]

I can second this. But it also fits in real good with households that can't afford a lot too, as that creates more educational / bonding opportunities. For example, my dad always worked on the family vehicles, where I learned a lot about basic auto mechanics (even just handing a wrench when needed, taught me about fractions (what's the next size up from a 5/8th?). When the parents have to do many domestic chores themselves because they can't hire it out, it is natural for the kids to be involved (anything from car mechanics, to cooking, deck building, renovating the bathroom, etc).

When both parents work a high end job, chances are the car gets dropped off at a mechanic to change the oil or for a tuneup. And many meals are carry out or in restaurants.

[gizmo686]

Schools are a central part of a childs life; far moreso then a workplace plays in an adults life.

[dillonmckay]

You named 2, also a selection of retail stores, besides Walmart, is also nice.

[AnimalMuppet]

There are a lot of things that you get anywhere that FedEx delivers. Of course, the delivery charges may eat into the rural cost-of-living advantage...

[dillonmckay]

Sometimes it is nice to try on clothing or shoes before you buy them, or not have to wait at least 2 days to receive something you may wind up returning.

[chrisco255]

How often does one purchase clothing that necessitates living within 10 minutes of a major shopping district? As others have said, it's perfectly reasonable to find satellite cities within an hour's commute of a major city that you can have your cake and eat it too.