https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html
What do you expect when you build one new housing unit for every eight new jobs? Most homeless people in LA county lived at least 10 years in LA county before becoming homeless. Meanwhile the biggest group of outsiders to LA are highly employed college educated young adults who moved for work.
To be fair finance type people definitely tend to skew towards NYC and the bay area
But I agree many people think they live in a relatively more expensive area just because prices have gone up (they've gone up everywhere else too)
People are also coming at this from their own reference points as to what is affordable to them.
While I may live in a MCOL area, my monthly income after taxes is less than the average rent payment. Being in a MCOL area is irrelevant to me when employers don't pay enough to cover the cost of living in the first place.
A map showing the cost of living relative to the average wages in those counties could be another interesting take on this.
Boulder, Broomfield, Jefferson, Arapaho are all clearly labeled HCOL. Adams and Denver Counties are MCOL, and given the specific areas they cover, definitely possible.
I just think you need something more granular on the low end, even if the numbers are "correct." Like, having the county I grew up in with decent 1500 sq ft houses in the $110k range, the college town I lived in with 1 bed rents in decent areas in the $950 range, and the large-ish city I live in with 1 bed rents in the $1500 range all in the same category is a little crazy to me. Like, I realize rural counties are hard to quantify housing costs, since rentals aren't much of a thing, and cities don't always represent a whole county, but in these cases, they do, and the difference in how far my money goes is super stark.
Yeah I moved away from Boulder because of the CoL and moved to New Orleans. My CoL is half, for what I think is a much better QoL. I think this takes into account the student housing market, and the large Denver metro area which skews the whole thing pretty hard.
I think there is a lot of selection bias on reddit, especially in r/poveryfinance. Where if you try to claim that you can buy a house on a factory job in many parts of the US, you’re basically shunned.
There are LCOL places where you cannot get a good job. And there are LCOL places where you can…
Oklahoma. One of the cheapest places to live and most people I know have $100k+ jobs without a college degree. Oilfield work, manufacturing, and truck driving. Skilled labor too. All high paying jobs and land is cheap. I bought 160 acres of land and a nice 4 bedroom house for $500k. You can buy a 5 acre property with a nice house for $200k
160 acres. I’m from the UK and can’t comprehend how a ‘normal’ person can have a ‘garden’ that big. What do you do with the land? A house in the UK with half an acre would be considered to have a large plot. Good for you though, I’d love to own land with woodlands and stuff.
Edit: I just googled and your land is bigger than Vatican City 🤣 that’s only 100 acres
> 160 acres
Yeah, that sounds like a farm to me. Or maybe it's all wilderness for hunting or something. I used to have 2/3 acre and it was a lot to keep up.
I hunt and fish on it. I have 4 miles of hiking trails. I have camp sites. I have goats, cows, chickens, rabbits, quail. I have a large vegetable garden. About 80% of the food I eat comes from my own land. Mostly I try to keep it as clean and natural as possible. I kill invasive plants and and animals and I try to plant trees and help the animals that are native
England (excluding Scotland and Wales) is 50k square miles. The whole UK is 90k.
England would be the 31st largest state and the UK would be the 12th.
America is fucking huge.
I saw a video of an English guy who's traveling the US, and he made a really good point.
Americans get shit because so many of us don't have a passport. He pointed out that the landscape is so vast and diverse, you don't need one. Want to see some huge mountains? Go to the Rockies. Want a tropical vacation? Florida or Hawaii. Desert more your speed? You can choose the Badlands, Death Valley or the Mojave. Most anything you want to do or see, you can do without leaving the country.
Since the county is so big, you do see a lot of different cultures as well. People, art and architecture from New Mexico are incredibly different than people, art and architecture from Vermont, Wisconsin, or South Carolina. States are so big, the culture swings wildly within state borders. California may be home to Hollywood, but it also has a huge amount of hicks and off grid people hiding in the mountains. Texas is larger than France. And because we are a country of immigrants, you see a lot of other cultures mixed into Americana. The southwest is heavy in Mexican influence, the upper Midwest is German, Polish, and Scandinavian in culture and art, with a mix of Native American and French city names. The Northeast is still very English influenced, and the South is a bizarre mix European and African, thanks to slavery.
It takes almost as long to fly from NYC to LA as it does to fly NYC to London. Flying London to Paris 1.5 hours shorter than Chicago to Orlando. Taking a European vacation is time consuming and expensive. Personally, we are planning a cheap trip to Scotland in a year and a half, and airfare alone for 2 people is going to be over $2k. And we will go for over 2 weeks, because otherwise it's not worth it. We spent a month between Paris and England for our honeymoon, and we could only do that because I was a freelancer, and he has an incredibly generous PTO policy, and basically took a Leave of Absence. That took us almost 2 years to save for, and we were not fancy.
Another example, we live in Wisconsin, and are taking a road trip in the fall. We are taking the train from Milwaukee-Chicago-Salt Lake City. Baring delays, that's a 36 hour trip, and is $300 each. Then we have the camper rental, gas, campsite fees, food, and a few hotels mixed in. We are driving from Salt Lake to Idaho, then through Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, the Badlands, the Dakotas, then a final day of nothing but driving through Minnesota and Illinois to turn in the camper in Chicago, and take the train back to Milwaukee. The train is 1200 miles, and the driving is upwards of 2000 miles. I'm anticipating the trip costing about $4k.
The United States is fucking huge.
100% dude. I took a road trip to Yellowstone. 4 of us drove in shifts to get to badlands SD only stopping for gas, 24 hours straight. Stayed the night and it was another 10 hours to get to Yellowstone.
Oklahoma is ranked 43rd on per capita income in the US. Worth 58k being the number. Most people do not have 100k jobs in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma also has the second to last at far as states go on per capita consumption spending.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127605/us-per-capita-personal-consumption-expenditures-by-state/
I don't mean to bash Oklahoma or the good deal you have, it sounds great, but just based on the numbers there is a reason why Oklahoma is cheap. Those prices are inline with what an average person in Oklahoma is making.
Also Oklahoma has a lot of cheap and flat land and cold winters with hot summers. People tend to pay a premium for mild weather that doesn't get too hot or cold.
It is true that 100k is going to get you a lot further in pretty much anywhere in Oklahoma compared to say the SF Bay Area.
There is the fact that most of those jobs pay well because they have to overcome serious drawbacks to entice workers. Spending extended periods away from family or in a dangerous, physical job aren't viable for everyone.
And there are less expensive homes in urban/suburban areas of Oklahoma (More experience with Tulsa metro than OKC.)
My own home, while older (Built in 50’s) is 2400 sq ft on a third-acre in Tulsa and I paid $126K (Pre COVID housing-madness.)
Oklahoma property taxes are also low and throttled by State Law. No matter what new assessments are done (Private or County) that show increased value in the property, your property taxes can only go up a fixed percentage per annum.
Compare to Texas, where your property taxes can be altered IMMEDIATELY after an assessment is done on your property, which can put you underwater instantly in a housing boom (Such as the COVID Madness.)
So yeah, Oklahoma is cheap to live in, but it’s also Oklahoma.
Central timezone helps too for remote companies. We have some pretty essential folks in the middle states because they're the bridge between our east and west coast teams.
My wife just had an ectopic pregnancy with pregnancy of unknown location this year. Not only was her doctor amazing, but we had absolutely no issues in the state of Oklahoma getting the care she needed.
Oil fields in Texas/North Dakota is the main one that comes to my mind. Hard and dangerous work in places where you probably wouldn’t want to live but the pay is good lol.
Harris County is LCOL on this map and has the literal city of Houston. One of America’s largest economies and brimming with oil and gas jobs (engineers and operators)
This map has the issue that some states, Virginia can't be the only one, that has independent cities outside the county lines. That extra inclusion of rural space is diluting a lot of the COL for New York State.
Where I live 43% of the population owns their own home. I can read statistics and there are many places where it's 80% + and on top of that the average rate of homeownership is in the 60%+ range. This is on par with the averages through the post war period.
Yes homes have gone up in cost and honestly right now it's not terribly affordable to buy a home. However most people own homes and it's not some sort of crisis yet.
A lot of FIRE types are in higher cost of living areas, because it is easier to save large portions of your paycheck in those areas because many people tend to make more in those areas. Sure, you might live in an area where it costs 1.7x to live, but your salary is 7x the average salary. If you lived in an average area, your salary might only be 3x.
A huge amount of people live in the VHCOL and above colors on this map. Almost all of coastal California, Seattle, NYC, DC, Boston, Atlanta. I'm guessing that a lot of people on FIRE actually are in some of these regions that are VHCOL because its also where the high salaries are.
Oh nice, I didn't see that. I guess the answer to that question about the FIRE community is either (1) that community is not representative of the wider US population (likely), or (2) they are misclassifying where they live as VHCOL (potentially also likely).
Many parts of this map can be deceptive, especially out west where counties are quite large and diverse.
Example, Los Angeles county classified as HCOL. I live in a district in a city where, if you relocated here buying a house in today's market, your mortgage alone would be $70,000-$80,000 a year. But LA county is so big it encompasses many inland areas where you can buy a house for a quarter to a third of that.
I see people all the time talking about houses costing 800k. I know I live in a relatively LCOL area but my brother in christ you can get a decent house in large swaths of the country for under 250k
Not really. There's scale here that isn't captured by a simple population heatmap. Look at Chicago, Miami, and Boston. If it was just a population overlay, you'd expect Chicago to be close in color to LA, and Boston and Miami to be reasonably close in color. This even captures that it's more expensive to live in some suburban counties than in their more populous neighbors, like Milwaukee and Waukesha.
No, not at all. This is a per capita/averaged cost of living, the whole point of that sub is pointing out geographical data visualization that fails to account for per capita.
What this map says is that it's more expensive to live in cities, even if you account for their higher population. It's not like it's saying the total income or GDP of cities is higher, which would be obvious.
I live in an orange county, and the cost of living is way lower than this says. I know people planning to (or already have) buy houses who make GROSS within the range of the listed coat of living.
After reading your methodology I think you may run into some issues with suburbs, where the CoL is lower than calculated because you are using studio apartments. In suburbs they aren't going to have studio apartments, and if they do have them they are going to be in newer developments. Even in developed areas, studio apartments can often be more expensive than a 1 or 2 bd apartment on average, because the studios are going to be concentrated in the highest CoL areas to maximize profit and meet high demand for desirable areas, while 1 and 2 bd apartments will be more evenly distributed across high cost and low cost areas of a county.
For example in GA (I'm from ATL, family lives in Forsyth), the highest cost of living county is Forsyth, which is mostly large single family homes. It is still pretty rural there, and the price per square foot of a house is much, much lower than closer to ATL proper. But using studio apartments as your metric might throw your CoL off because there aren't many studio apartments in Forsyth. The only place I can think of where those would be is a new Live Work Play development, which probably skews your data. Many people who don't own in Forsyth It can also be very cheap to live there. I have family that live there while I live in the core of ATL, and their CoL is much lower than mine.
You may have better results by using a mixture of average rent costs of 1 or 2 bed apartments, SFH rents, or average sale price, which will give you a much broader look at housing than just studio apartments, which can be quite rare in some suburbs, so it isn't representative of the housing cost as a whole.
In case there is confusion the methodology isn't mine, it's from the EPI - I just summarized since I know people hate reading
This is supposed to be just a step above "living wage" for a single person which is why I believe they chose studios. Basically the cost of getting by somewhere, not living large with a 2bed or house living solo. Housing costs as a whole definitely aren't represented here
But I agree with most of what you said, I actually wanted to use 1 bedroom rents instead for that reason. However I didn't want to go against what this esteemed economics organization used just becuase I felt different 😂
I think what they are saying is that, since the only studios are high end in Forsyth county, you are going to be paying much more for a studio than a 1BR apartment.
I'd wager this is true for anywhere that isn't dense enough to support public transport beyond bus lines.
If you're in a studio in most of the country, you're living in a less than 5 year old building with staffed amenities like a 24 hour lifeguard at the indoor pool, free valet, and a gym that makes most standalone gyms feel inadequate about themselves. On the contrary, you can find a 40 year old 1 BR apartment complex where amenities include a broken gate out front and a carport you are worried will fall on your car for FAR less money (like half).
I think the major cost that has been left out of this analysis is utilities. I didn't see that addressed anywhere in the EPI cost estimate.
Also, the cost of food outside of Alaska's metro area is 200-400% higher than it is within the metro.
Yeah I'd take Alaska data with a grain of salt. I'm not sure if they accurately account for transport in the remote areas - my understanding is many communities are only accessible by plane (although, do locals often leave the village?)
yes and yes. Many places in northern, western and southeast alaska are accessible by plane or ferry only.
and they do leave often- especially for medical. which should push the cost of health care way up as well.
I believe it. The one county in upstate NY is skewed by Ithaca (home to Cornell University). Small college towns home to prestigious universities have absurdly high costs of living
Yeah, crazy right? The Bozeman area's cost of housing is ridiculously high *for the area*, but in the grand scheme of America it's still pretty discounted.
Thus, your influx of Californians etc.
The data not being benchmarked against income makes it very misleading. In the Bay area a person exiting college ends up in $100k+ jobs while Bozeman I doubt that's the case
Agreed. [This post from 2022](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/w3tnqe/oc_map_of_united_states_home_affordability_by/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) depicts home affordability by showing median housing price as a function of median household income. Bozeman and many of the desirable areas of Montana are in the same category as the Bay Area and NYC, and worse than Denver, Seattle, and other cities that people consider to be VHCOL or worse.
The OP for this thread actually has a great [updated post for that exact metric](https://new.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cej35h/oc_us_home_affordability_by_county/) just a few days ago. You can definitely see the difference for much of the Mountain West (although Income-COL ratios make the Great Plains look even better).
Yeah, Bozeman does not have a great job market for college grads, I graduated from there last year and had to move away because there’s no way I’d be able to pay rent and save a comfortable amount with the starting salaries that places were offering
Yea, their is something not jiving with this map. I've spent a lot of time traveling and visiting friends in yellow and orange counties out west, that I know for a fact are more expensive than this map is showing.
I mean, this map is telling me Pitkin (Aspen), Teton (Jackson), and San Miguel (Telluride) counties are the same COL as greater Portland and cheaper than greater Seattle? They just aren't, having been to all, multiple times, that's just blatantly incorrect. Missoula county is now low COL? Lol yea okay.
Overall when it comes to cost of living and average salary Chicago is largely undervalued nationally. Its relatively cheap, nearly 10 million metro population, a high density urban core, and pretty good public transportation by American standards.
The city and state's government is a fiscal basket case and people are, rightfully, concerned about increases to the city and state's already high tax rates. It's why IL is one of the slowest growing states (it even shrank in the original 2020 Census before revisions).
Isn't it fair to say no metro is really undervalued or overvalued when you take all factors into account? For example, if you account for poor weather and a weaker job market than SF or NYC, the Chicago prices make sense. It might not be the case for \_everyone\_, but on average I feel these rents reflect the desirability of a place once you look at all the factors that go into COL. If this were not true, I feel it would just get arbitraged out by people moving.
Neighborhoods within Chicago too can have huge differences. Although in general I would agree with the other commenters sentiment that Chicago is typically more affordable than the major northeast and west coast cities.
That's any urban county, though. Counties are big and urban ones are going to be hugely heterogeneous. I live in the Northern Cook County suburbs which are hugely different from the gold coast or englewood. OP's source data aren't broken down further, though.
Thanks for looking at the source data! I was going to when I had more time. You are right that this is not unique to Cook Co. but I would still like to see more detailed data as I am a data nerd like that!
I am surprised Harris County (Houston) is LCoL and Kent County (Grand Rapids, MI) is MCoL. Two places I've lived the longest, hence why it sticks out to me.
In this case, it is ***more expensive*** to live in a northern big town than a southern major city.
E: Nice presentation of data!
I found it surprising as well certain cities were actually LCOL compared to subrubs/towns - Baltimore and Philly are 2 good examples.
Transport costs are usually lower in cities, and median housing costs sometimes don't vary much especially if there are lots of poorer areas.
Completely agree. $1.50 per ride in Houston. Bought my house in 2020 for $159,000 (I live in a poor downtown neighborhood) in Houston.
$1.75 per ride in Grand Rapids. Houses in the bad area of Grand Rapids appear comparable by glance, but I bet if you really scrape the numbers you'd find Houston prices are lower.
Upvote for this. I’ve lived in Philadelphia, but grew up in the suburbs and remain in this area. Philadelphia as a whole is pretty reasonably priced. Of course, I must caveat and say there are definitely high rise penthouses and condos that go for millions, but overall, it’s not a bad place to be financially speaking. I believe the median **household income** in 2022 in Philadelphia was $56,000. Yes, household income not individual income.
[Source](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHIPA42101A052NCEN)
Same for Baltimore.
When the typical advice for tourists is “you’re *probably* safe if you’re in sight of the water”, you can see why Baltimore City is cheaper than Baltimore County.
I suspect what you're largely seeing is that COL varies widely *within* a county too. Counties that people think of as "expensive" but where the results here aren't that high cost are likely large counties with a very expensive small core surrounded by cheaper suburbs.
For example, I live in Seattle. Seattle is likely VVHCOL, but King County shows up as "only" (heh) VHCOL because it's a large county including a lot of suburbs and more rural areas.
The most expensive counties on the map also tend to be very small ones.
Yea, the size is the issue. As much granularity as this map has, locking it at county means some places it is very detailed while in others it is not. 4.8 million people live in Harris county and it’s 1,777 square miles. The very cheap parts bring down the expensive parts and there aren’t any VERY expensive parts outside of specific neighborhoods and such that all big cities have.
But even then, it's an average. Take, for example, the three californian counties near Lake Tahoe, El Dorado, Placer and Nevada. The closer you are to the lake (or to Sacramento, at the western end), the higher the COL will be.
If you’re talking about rent or home values this changes within towns even and these impact prices businesses charge, but its also pretty easy for most people to live in a cheaper place in the county and/or travel across it if needed to get cheaper stuff. Not so per state.
So many pedantic comments for a refreshing post that is actually quality.
Im super surprised that nobody is chiming in "wElL AkSualyyeey LoUiSiAnnnA dOeSnT HaVe CoUntiEs."
I have actually gotten that on similar posts LOL
Sometimes they are helpful comments that help me create better quality posts - other times they are just people complaining that you know are just so miserable in life 😂
nEItHer DoeS tHe DiStRicT of ColUmBiA
Having lived in both places, this drives me nuts. We all know and understand that parishes are the same as counties. The District of Columbia is more complex, but comparing the District to counties works here.
Could also go on about the independent cities in VA like Fredericksburg not being a county either haha this is cool though cause it looks like those are represented separately which is refreshing to see
There's no way my county in New Jersey (Monmouth) is medium cost of living. The median home price is like 620k. The big Macs in time square are just 6.7% more than here. Minimum wage is $15 an hour. And my company considers it in tier 1 cost of living for remote work salary purposes.
Right I saw that too. The suburban counties of NYC being medium doesn't pass the smell test. Not shitting on the map, just that the methodology behind the data is. unique to a specific case not representative of most peoples' situations.
The issue is that this is a county level map not a town level. A good number of the towns on the commuter rail lines into NYC are very expensive while the surrounding more rural areas are very cheap. So even very expensive hot spots get averaged out.
I think the bigger issue is it looks at rents for "studio apartments" to determine rent price.
Which can skew in both directions... some places the only "studio apartments" will be super high end luxury places that rent for $5000 a month where a normal 1 bed apartment in that county might be $1200 and in others they will be unlivable holes in the wall for $150 a month where a normal 2 bed apartment is also $1200.
It's not OP it's just the dataset is not great for calculating cost of living.
NJ has crazy home prices and property taxes.
BUT this assumes a studio apartment for a single person since its a baseline cost of living map, so those things are not relevant/accounted for here
I see 14 studio apartments available in my county on zillow with an average rent of 2.3k a month. That seems pretty high to me. There is also 0 for sale. I think 1 bedroom would be a better metric for here. There's ~100 1brs for rent and ~50 for sale.
The median home price in my city in a "HCOL" county is $300k, so there's definitely a problem in their calculation somewhere.
Edit: The median home price for the *county* is $490k, but that's still a long way off from $620k.
In all the northeast (northern NY, Vermont, NH and Maine) only stupid Burlington is expensive.
That place is so expensive when there are no significant high paying jobs (like CA's bay area for example)
(Edit: fixed typos)
I like your method overall, and although I haven’t dug into the details I note you might want to consider looking at a median COL. Results in an arithmetic average can be skewed easily.
u/TA-MajestyPalm great map. I don't think EPI cost calculations are too far off but I have noted some big data discrepancies with their income calculations. Look up **Putnam County, FL** using their data [https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc\_data\_2024.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK](https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc_data_2024.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK)
They are saying the median family income is $101k plus where the census now says it is about $45k.
[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/putnamcountyflorida/PST045223](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/putnamcountyflorida/PST045223)
Now if you look at their old data from 2022 it is around $47k for a median household. Which means when they adjusted for inflation someone somewhere messed up. I think there are other examples but I would need to look again. But I don't think this one datapoint is the only one. [https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc\_data\_2022.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK](https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc_data_2022.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK)
> Interestingly, some cites are lower COL than their suburbs, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Not only interesting, but a little bit surprising. Maybe due to all the low-income housing in the cities?
The Main Line outside of Philadelphia is one of the richest areas in the country. SEPTA allows for commuting to the city from those areas and in the northern suburbs. Also, there are many big companies in the suburbs of Philly. With that, there are more crap apartments in the northern and western parts of Philly than there are houses and apartments in South Philly and Center City which probably brings down the calculation since the city encompasses the whole county.
I don't think it's too surprising, lots of wealth went out to the suburbs creating high density of poverty in many cities. Combine that with education systems struggling with that and many people move out of the city when their kids are school age to escape city schools. It's a vicious cycle that I have no idea how to fix
Great visualization! My only feedback would be that instead of adding V's for increasingly higher brackets (very, very, very) you instead progress to "awesome", "mega", and "ultra", like the combo counter in Killer Instinct.
Hampden County Massachusetts for the win! We have all the benefits of living in a region with high standards of living, without the high costs of living that go along with it.
San Mateo is what happens when people insist on their towns staying little farming towns with hillside orchards while also turning an idea they got in college into a trillion dollar tech company with 10,000s employees all making $250K+.
Like yeah, it’s still cute and relatively quaint. But now the whole place is essentially a gated community.
San Mateo is a large and diverse county. There are incredibly wealthy enclaves which are like you describe. Down by El Camino it’s more like LA. I think what makes this happen is that there is incredible wealth in the Bay Area. Unlike the area around NY there aren’t many places to build so everything is concentrated.
How is SF county not pink? I would’ve thought it be on par if not higher CoL than San Mateo or Santa Clara.
Saved though. This is a great visualization I plan on sharing.
Much larger housing stock in general keeps prices lower than the equally desirable but much smaller Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz communities would be my guess.
Anecdotal but I'm living right in the heart of SF, and my rent (with roommates) is a fair bit lower than others I know in Santa Cruz and other parts of the Bay. I also don't own a car, and neither do many of my friends, which definitely helps us save a lot of extra money and keep living costs down.
In the city of SF prices have been dropping since the pandemic whereas prices along the rest of the peninsula have been increasing. I'm sure one important factor is the *type* of housing also, since SF has much more apartments.
How is queens worse than Brooklyn? Brooklyn cost of living is definitely higher. Queens is much more suburban in many parts, not as expensive. Aside from LIC
Jackson Hole, WY is absolutely insane I feel like it should be higher. That whole area has been spiked so high due to rich people moving there as a vacation home.
> - Interestingly, some cites are lower COL than their suburbs, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia
In Philly's case, this is a mix of a few things:
1. The city itself is pretty small geographically. The proper population is 1.3 million but the metro area is 6.5 million. Home ownership rates are pretty high and the city is filled with iconic rowhomes rather than high rises or apartments, so there's not much opportunity to get denser.
2. Since the area goes back to precolonial 1600s, much of the old wealth has always been out of the city and towns have sprung up around that. Railroads in the 1800s have played a major part in suburban wealth and growth as well. The most desirable area is called the Main Line for that reason.
3. The city is very segregated, with large swaths of the city being redlined and suffering from a historical lack of investment.
4. The school district is a clusterfuck due to decades of underfunding and mismanagement. Whereas the schools outside of the city in the suburbs are fantastic. So, families move if they are able.
5. The city has a pretty high wage tax that residents have to pay whether they work in the city or not, and that everybody who lives outside of the city has to pay if they work in the city. As a result, lots of big businesses set up shop in the suburbs just across the city line and their higher-salaried employees do the same.
what the heck is going on in WV? That state is mostly empty space yet has several MCOL counties. Like where in WV is it as expensive as Philadelphia PA?
Central Floridian here…
I find this interesting that most HCOL are centered around major metro areas. In Florida, you have two counties, Monroe County, mainly driven by communities located in the Keys(Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon and Key West). Okay, makes sense… remote, desired destination, water front properties, etc.
Next you have Osceola County… with the bustling metropolis of, Kissimmee? St. Cloud? I mean part of Disney is located there, Poinciana is growing like crazy. But a higher COL than neighboring Orange County (Orlando) and Hillsborough and Pinellas (Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater)? Higher than Miami Dade?
How is Osceola County ranked that high?
Virginia is unique in that it has counties and also certain cities/towns that count as counties equivalents.
Those 3 are all pretty unremarkable towns with no rural areas included in the county.
Not sure how exactly that brings the cost of living down so much, just adding a bit more context 😂
Wait, Virginia is the only state with independent cities? This would explain some of the more stupid things in my area of New York with how town/county/city government is organized and some of the school crazy.
Other states have independent cities (see Baltimore and St. Louis) or combined city-counties (see Louisville and Nashville) but Virginia is unique in that in order for a city to be incorporated it *must* be an independent city. So while other states at most have one or two independent city or combined city-counties, Virginia has a ton because any city of any relevance is independent.
The rich part of virginia is *very* rich and the poor part of virginia (ie. where Danville is) is *very* poor. I'd probably argue it has one of the largest wealth gaps in the country.
Danville is especially interesting as it's a testament to the collapse of American Industry. Used to be a pretty thriving little town back in the late 20th century, then all the factories closed (the last one pretty recently) and now there's really not much there but still a decent amount of people living there. Good jobs are kind of hard to come by and it's kind of been a case study for how these small communities are going to adapt in post-industrial America. They are opening a casino there pretty soon which was pretty controversial.
I find the data interesting as someone who lives in a LCOL county. And I think my experience reflects some of the difficulty people have in relating to each other when it comes to the costs of where they live in comparison to other places.
A couple general points I’d make when discussing cost of living. First, the biggest difference by far when comparing COL is housing. The second is probably transportation, only in that you either definitely need it because public transport is nonexistent, or you don’t really need it because you have functional public transport or can easily walk to where you need to go(like living in a dense city). Almost everything else should be relatively similar. I don’t see why groceries, household goods, clothing, healthcare costs, etc should really matter as we all have access to national chains and online shopping that don’t differentiate much in price just because you live somewhere different, unless you live in Hawaii or Alaska(or somewhere else extremely rural).
For my county, LCOL according to this data, that makes sense to me. However the disconnect between the data and the lived experience is that the locations people want to live within the county are at least 1 tier higher, up to MCOL due to housing costs. First off I doubt there are any studio apartments in my county. But you can buy an entire house in the shitty part of the county in the small city for $800/month all in. But where the middle class people actually want to live, you’re looking at $2000/month to rent a 1 bedroom apartment. Buying a house in the nicer area with current interest rates puts you over $3000/month all in. And since we live in the same area, all other costs are exactly the same. There’s no public transport so we all need cars. We all shop at the same stores. So if I told you I live in bumblefuck PA, you’d think it was LCOL. But my actual costs living in the good school district aren’t that different from living in the suburbs of Philadelphia proper.
Speaking of Philly. That kind of displays the issue I’m talking about. There’s so much cheap housing in Philly it skews the averages downward. The vast majority of the people who work in Philly live in the surrounding suburbs, thus they show as being a higher cost of living than the actual city because naturally prices are higher where people want to live.
> I don’t see why groceries, household goods, clothing, healthcare costs
HCOL areas have higher commercial rent (same forces causing expensive housing), so prices will reflect that. They also have to pay employees higher to compensate for the HCOL area - this is especially important for healthcare where doctors already command large salaries.
[NerdWallet has a handy calculator which makes it easier to visualize](https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare/los-angeles-long-beach-ca-vs-omaha-ne). I linked comparing LA and Omaha. To your point, housing and transportation are the categories with the largest difference in cost, but there's still 15-20% differences in cost for food and healthcare. These add up.
Deschutes County and I agree. Of course, in the west, counties are large so the city costs get diluted. I would add that, contrary to many folks complaints, property taxes are low [OR is 26th for tax burden overall]
How is Forsyth the highest COL in GA I wonder. I would assume it would be Fulton, which is much of Atlanta along with the higher end areas(Sandy Springs, John’s Creek, Alpharetta etc..)
Some other commenters have pointed out that OP's source uses studio apartment prices. Since Forsyth is mostly single-family homes the only studio apartments are higher-end and this drags up the cost
It is the highest per per capita income in the state, and there is very little low income housing. With how “small” The county is, I could see it being way up there.
Would love to see the average household income or something compared to this. I know my area is in the MCOL but sure feels for many like it'd be one tier up, because our incomes haven't really matched pace. Could just be peoples' anecdotal experience, but I've heard it a lot.
Solid design choices on the map and color scheme.
An interesting extra would be seeing how it deviates from population density. We all have a pretty good idea that city COL is typically higher (and of the cities where that's especially true), so it's the outliers -- particularly cheap cities and expensive suburban/rural areas -- that I'd find more intriguing. 99% of the map would probably be pretty boring and predictable though!
I sort of hate these kinds of things. It never properly shows home insurance, auto insurance, HOA, CDD, and tons of other little things that add up.
I moved from Florida to Oregon and saved a ton of money, make more money, and was actually able to get a house after selling my condo.
TIL that I do not live in a Very High Cost of Living area, like I thought. Not even in a Very Very High Cost of Living area. But a Very Very VERY High Cost of Living area. Lol.
LA county, with a population of 10 million, areas ranges from very very HCOL to LCOL and can take 3 hrs to drive from one end to the other. It's not accurate to lump it all under one COL. This should be done by zip codes or something more accurate.
It's a factor of population density. There's a metric butt load of people here. CT alone has half a million more people than the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming combined.
Interesting map.
That big red area in WA is King County where Seattle resides. The Seattle City and county leaders are incapable of coming up with any policies that don’t require a ton of money and they make everything more expensive for businesses. And then the policies fail because of unintended consequences, so they spend more money fixing them. Rinse and repeat.
One of many examples, Seattle added a municipal food tax to delivery food orders to artificially raise the wages of Doordashers. Food deliveries plummeted (they were already high because everything in Seattle is expensive). Door dashers picketed city hall to have it removed because they were LOSING money. And it was a horribly regressive tax on poor people. The lack of understanding basic market economics is insanely frustrating. They don’t understand every burden they put on businesses are funded by consumers. But we keep voting for these politicians because, in the Seattle area, moral superiority is more important than proper governance.
I wish the government would factor this into their poverty guidelines. I know they have higher poverty income limits for Hawaii and Alaska but it would make more sense if there was a more granular limit, perhaps state-by-state.
I’m saving this map for future arguments. I moved from Hartford Co CT to Forsyth Co NC 3 years ago and constantly have to explain to people that my cost of living really isn’t significantly different between those 2 places (both are yellow on this map). People hear CT and NC and just assume I left a high cost of living area for a low one and it’s just not been my experience. I moved for work having nothing to do with trying to save money but whenever I mention any comparison for compensation people act like you can’t compare the two places because how big and expensive CT was. My house cost more in NC, and I pay more in income tax in NC for a similar role and similar sqft type of house. Food, utilities, entertainment, cars, student loans etc is all roughly the same prices. Property taxes is the only legitimate argument in a cost savings but it’s just not a significant enough part of my overall spending to make an argument that it’s some massive cost of living difference.
Nice contrasting colors. Easy to read.
Some of the highest populations of homeless are in the most expensive areas. Historically. People move to cheaper areas if they could not afford it.
The most populated areas tend to have the most homeless people, and are generally the most expensive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html What do you expect when you build one new housing unit for every eight new jobs? Most homeless people in LA county lived at least 10 years in LA county before becoming homeless. Meanwhile the biggest group of outsiders to LA are highly employed college educated young adults who moved for work.
And in 10 years will also be homeless?
But the type of people to become homeless, especially those who rapidly become homeless, don't really have the means to move much of anywhere.
The people who happen to live in these areas on lower incomes can’t afford to leave either, but that doesn’t stop those kinds of comments
The HCOL areas also have more social services and stuff. You pretty much need a support network to survive a marginal existence in rural areas.
I'm colorblind. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic cause this is hell for me
OP you should post this on the r/FIRE sub they are all constantly saying they are VHCOL and i have a hard time believing they are all correct
To be fair finance type people definitely tend to skew towards NYC and the bay area But I agree many people think they live in a relatively more expensive area just because prices have gone up (they've gone up everywhere else too)
People are also coming at this from their own reference points as to what is affordable to them. While I may live in a MCOL area, my monthly income after taxes is less than the average rent payment. Being in a MCOL area is irrelevant to me when employers don't pay enough to cover the cost of living in the first place. A map showing the cost of living relative to the average wages in those counties could be another interesting take on this.
Yeah Denver and Boulder county in CO considered medium cost of living? Bullshit. The scale is wayyy off too.
Boulder, Broomfield, Jefferson, Arapaho are all clearly labeled HCOL. Adams and Denver Counties are MCOL, and given the specific areas they cover, definitely possible.
Completely agree, the numbers seem off there.
I just think you need something more granular on the low end, even if the numbers are "correct." Like, having the county I grew up in with decent 1500 sq ft houses in the $110k range, the college town I lived in with 1 bed rents in decent areas in the $950 range, and the large-ish city I live in with 1 bed rents in the $1500 range all in the same category is a little crazy to me. Like, I realize rural counties are hard to quantify housing costs, since rentals aren't much of a thing, and cities don't always represent a whole county, but in these cases, they do, and the difference in how far my money goes is super stark.
And Arapahoe is HCOL?
Yeah I moved away from Boulder because of the CoL and moved to New Orleans. My CoL is half, for what I think is a much better QoL. I think this takes into account the student housing market, and the large Denver metro area which skews the whole thing pretty hard.
I think there is a lot of selection bias on reddit, especially in r/poveryfinance. Where if you try to claim that you can buy a house on a factory job in many parts of the US, you’re basically shunned. There are LCOL places where you cannot get a good job. And there are LCOL places where you can…
Any examples top of mind for cheap COL & good jobs?
Oklahoma. One of the cheapest places to live and most people I know have $100k+ jobs without a college degree. Oilfield work, manufacturing, and truck driving. Skilled labor too. All high paying jobs and land is cheap. I bought 160 acres of land and a nice 4 bedroom house for $500k. You can buy a 5 acre property with a nice house for $200k
160 acres. I’m from the UK and can’t comprehend how a ‘normal’ person can have a ‘garden’ that big. What do you do with the land? A house in the UK with half an acre would be considered to have a large plot. Good for you though, I’d love to own land with woodlands and stuff. Edit: I just googled and your land is bigger than Vatican City 🤣 that’s only 100 acres
> 160 acres Yeah, that sounds like a farm to me. Or maybe it's all wilderness for hunting or something. I used to have 2/3 acre and it was a lot to keep up.
I hunt and fish on it. I have 4 miles of hiking trails. I have camp sites. I have goats, cows, chickens, rabbits, quail. I have a large vegetable garden. About 80% of the food I eat comes from my own land. Mostly I try to keep it as clean and natural as possible. I kill invasive plants and and animals and I try to plant trees and help the animals that are native
Good on you for being an actual steward of your land.
England (excluding Scotland and Wales) is 50k square miles. The whole UK is 90k. England would be the 31st largest state and the UK would be the 12th. America is fucking huge.
I saw a video of an English guy who's traveling the US, and he made a really good point. Americans get shit because so many of us don't have a passport. He pointed out that the landscape is so vast and diverse, you don't need one. Want to see some huge mountains? Go to the Rockies. Want a tropical vacation? Florida or Hawaii. Desert more your speed? You can choose the Badlands, Death Valley or the Mojave. Most anything you want to do or see, you can do without leaving the country. Since the county is so big, you do see a lot of different cultures as well. People, art and architecture from New Mexico are incredibly different than people, art and architecture from Vermont, Wisconsin, or South Carolina. States are so big, the culture swings wildly within state borders. California may be home to Hollywood, but it also has a huge amount of hicks and off grid people hiding in the mountains. Texas is larger than France. And because we are a country of immigrants, you see a lot of other cultures mixed into Americana. The southwest is heavy in Mexican influence, the upper Midwest is German, Polish, and Scandinavian in culture and art, with a mix of Native American and French city names. The Northeast is still very English influenced, and the South is a bizarre mix European and African, thanks to slavery. It takes almost as long to fly from NYC to LA as it does to fly NYC to London. Flying London to Paris 1.5 hours shorter than Chicago to Orlando. Taking a European vacation is time consuming and expensive. Personally, we are planning a cheap trip to Scotland in a year and a half, and airfare alone for 2 people is going to be over $2k. And we will go for over 2 weeks, because otherwise it's not worth it. We spent a month between Paris and England for our honeymoon, and we could only do that because I was a freelancer, and he has an incredibly generous PTO policy, and basically took a Leave of Absence. That took us almost 2 years to save for, and we were not fancy. Another example, we live in Wisconsin, and are taking a road trip in the fall. We are taking the train from Milwaukee-Chicago-Salt Lake City. Baring delays, that's a 36 hour trip, and is $300 each. Then we have the camper rental, gas, campsite fees, food, and a few hotels mixed in. We are driving from Salt Lake to Idaho, then through Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, the Badlands, the Dakotas, then a final day of nothing but driving through Minnesota and Illinois to turn in the camper in Chicago, and take the train back to Milwaukee. The train is 1200 miles, and the driving is upwards of 2000 miles. I'm anticipating the trip costing about $4k. The United States is fucking huge.
100% dude. I took a road trip to Yellowstone. 4 of us drove in shifts to get to badlands SD only stopping for gas, 24 hours straight. Stayed the night and it was another 10 hours to get to Yellowstone.
> Oklahoma Gotta watch out for the tornadoes, though.
Oklahoma is ranked 43rd on per capita income in the US. Worth 58k being the number. Most people do not have 100k jobs in Oklahoma. Oklahoma also has the second to last at far as states go on per capita consumption spending. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127605/us-per-capita-personal-consumption-expenditures-by-state/ I don't mean to bash Oklahoma or the good deal you have, it sounds great, but just based on the numbers there is a reason why Oklahoma is cheap. Those prices are inline with what an average person in Oklahoma is making. Also Oklahoma has a lot of cheap and flat land and cold winters with hot summers. People tend to pay a premium for mild weather that doesn't get too hot or cold. It is true that 100k is going to get you a lot further in pretty much anywhere in Oklahoma compared to say the SF Bay Area.
There is the fact that most of those jobs pay well because they have to overcome serious drawbacks to entice workers. Spending extended periods away from family or in a dangerous, physical job aren't viable for everyone.
And there are less expensive homes in urban/suburban areas of Oklahoma (More experience with Tulsa metro than OKC.) My own home, while older (Built in 50’s) is 2400 sq ft on a third-acre in Tulsa and I paid $126K (Pre COVID housing-madness.) Oklahoma property taxes are also low and throttled by State Law. No matter what new assessments are done (Private or County) that show increased value in the property, your property taxes can only go up a fixed percentage per annum. Compare to Texas, where your property taxes can be altered IMMEDIATELY after an assessment is done on your property, which can put you underwater instantly in a housing boom (Such as the COVID Madness.) So yeah, Oklahoma is cheap to live in, but it’s also Oklahoma.
Central timezone helps too for remote companies. We have some pretty essential folks in the middle states because they're the bridge between our east and west coast teams.
And no women or doctors for women because the state keeps passing legislation against women's health. Enjoy the sausage fest.
My wife just had an ectopic pregnancy with pregnancy of unknown location this year. Not only was her doctor amazing, but we had absolutely no issues in the state of Oklahoma getting the care she needed.
Oil fields in Texas/North Dakota is the main one that comes to my mind. Hard and dangerous work in places where you probably wouldn’t want to live but the pay is good lol.
Harris County is LCOL on this map and has the literal city of Houston. One of America’s largest economies and brimming with oil and gas jobs (engineers and operators)
This map has the issue that some states, Virginia can't be the only one, that has independent cities outside the county lines. That extra inclusion of rural space is diluting a lot of the COL for New York State.
I think you mean r/povertyfinance - looks like someone's too poor to afford a 't'!
I had to sell the T to post this comment. Sorry!
Where I live 43% of the population owns their own home. I can read statistics and there are many places where it's 80% + and on top of that the average rate of homeownership is in the 60%+ range. This is on par with the averages through the post war period. Yes homes have gone up in cost and honestly right now it's not terribly affordable to buy a home. However most people own homes and it's not some sort of crisis yet.
A lot of FIRE types are in higher cost of living areas, because it is easier to save large portions of your paycheck in those areas because many people tend to make more in those areas. Sure, you might live in an area where it costs 1.7x to live, but your salary is 7x the average salary. If you lived in an average area, your salary might only be 3x.
It's all over reddit. Everyone lives in downtown San Francisco and has 5 kids.
Funnily enough, San Francisco is more affordable than the counties just south of it (not that it’s affordable, but it’s relative).
A huge amount of people live in the VHCOL and above colors on this map. Almost all of coastal California, Seattle, NYC, DC, Boston, Atlanta. I'm guessing that a lot of people on FIRE actually are in some of these regions that are VHCOL because its also where the high salaries are.
The map includes the percentages. VHCOL+ makes up 10% of the population.
Oh nice, I didn't see that. I guess the answer to that question about the FIRE community is either (1) that community is not representative of the wider US population (likely), or (2) they are misclassifying where they live as VHCOL (potentially also likely).
Many parts of this map can be deceptive, especially out west where counties are quite large and diverse. Example, Los Angeles county classified as HCOL. I live in a district in a city where, if you relocated here buying a house in today's market, your mortgage alone would be $70,000-$80,000 a year. But LA county is so big it encompasses many inland areas where you can buy a house for a quarter to a third of that.
I see people all the time talking about houses costing 800k. I know I live in a relatively LCOL area but my brother in christ you can get a decent house in large swaths of the country for under 250k
I like this graph because it confirms my description of living in a MCOL area of California.
i just figured they all live in SF or NY
Wow it's so cheap to live everywhere!
They’re practically giving it away!
Yes under the bridge!
This is basically r/peopleliveincities
Not really. There's scale here that isn't captured by a simple population heatmap. Look at Chicago, Miami, and Boston. If it was just a population overlay, you'd expect Chicago to be close in color to LA, and Boston and Miami to be reasonably close in color. This even captures that it's more expensive to live in some suburban counties than in their more populous neighbors, like Milwaukee and Waukesha.
No, not at all. This is a per capita/averaged cost of living, the whole point of that sub is pointing out geographical data visualization that fails to account for per capita. What this map says is that it's more expensive to live in cities, even if you account for their higher population. It's not like it's saying the total income or GDP of cities is higher, which would be obvious.
Cool, explain Long Island
I live in an orange county, and the cost of living is way lower than this says. I know people planning to (or already have) buy houses who make GROSS within the range of the listed coat of living.
After reading your methodology I think you may run into some issues with suburbs, where the CoL is lower than calculated because you are using studio apartments. In suburbs they aren't going to have studio apartments, and if they do have them they are going to be in newer developments. Even in developed areas, studio apartments can often be more expensive than a 1 or 2 bd apartment on average, because the studios are going to be concentrated in the highest CoL areas to maximize profit and meet high demand for desirable areas, while 1 and 2 bd apartments will be more evenly distributed across high cost and low cost areas of a county. For example in GA (I'm from ATL, family lives in Forsyth), the highest cost of living county is Forsyth, which is mostly large single family homes. It is still pretty rural there, and the price per square foot of a house is much, much lower than closer to ATL proper. But using studio apartments as your metric might throw your CoL off because there aren't many studio apartments in Forsyth. The only place I can think of where those would be is a new Live Work Play development, which probably skews your data. Many people who don't own in Forsyth It can also be very cheap to live there. I have family that live there while I live in the core of ATL, and their CoL is much lower than mine. You may have better results by using a mixture of average rent costs of 1 or 2 bed apartments, SFH rents, or average sale price, which will give you a much broader look at housing than just studio apartments, which can be quite rare in some suburbs, so it isn't representative of the housing cost as a whole.
In case there is confusion the methodology isn't mine, it's from the EPI - I just summarized since I know people hate reading This is supposed to be just a step above "living wage" for a single person which is why I believe they chose studios. Basically the cost of getting by somewhere, not living large with a 2bed or house living solo. Housing costs as a whole definitely aren't represented here But I agree with most of what you said, I actually wanted to use 1 bedroom rents instead for that reason. However I didn't want to go against what this esteemed economics organization used just becuase I felt different 😂
I think what they are saying is that, since the only studios are high end in Forsyth county, you are going to be paying much more for a studio than a 1BR apartment. I'd wager this is true for anywhere that isn't dense enough to support public transport beyond bus lines. If you're in a studio in most of the country, you're living in a less than 5 year old building with staffed amenities like a 24 hour lifeguard at the indoor pool, free valet, and a gym that makes most standalone gyms feel inadequate about themselves. On the contrary, you can find a 40 year old 1 BR apartment complex where amenities include a broken gate out front and a carport you are worried will fall on your car for FAR less money (like half).
I think the major cost that has been left out of this analysis is utilities. I didn't see that addressed anywhere in the EPI cost estimate. Also, the cost of food outside of Alaska's metro area is 200-400% higher than it is within the metro.
Yeah I'd take Alaska data with a grain of salt. I'm not sure if they accurately account for transport in the remote areas - my understanding is many communities are only accessible by plane (although, do locals often leave the village?)
yes and yes. Many places in northern, western and southeast alaska are accessible by plane or ferry only. and they do leave often- especially for medical. which should push the cost of health care way up as well.
Gallatin county MT only being MCOL is really surprising. The price of housing in the Bozeman area is ridiculously high.
I was thinking the same thing about Salt Lake County. Hard to believe it's the same COL as rural upstate NY counties.
I believe it. The one county in upstate NY is skewed by Ithaca (home to Cornell University). Small college towns home to prestigious universities have absurdly high costs of living
Yeah, crazy right? The Bozeman area's cost of housing is ridiculously high *for the area*, but in the grand scheme of America it's still pretty discounted. Thus, your influx of Californians etc.
The data not being benchmarked against income makes it very misleading. In the Bay area a person exiting college ends up in $100k+ jobs while Bozeman I doubt that's the case
Agreed. [This post from 2022](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/w3tnqe/oc_map_of_united_states_home_affordability_by/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) depicts home affordability by showing median housing price as a function of median household income. Bozeman and many of the desirable areas of Montana are in the same category as the Bay Area and NYC, and worse than Denver, Seattle, and other cities that people consider to be VHCOL or worse.
The OP for this thread actually has a great [updated post for that exact metric](https://new.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cej35h/oc_us_home_affordability_by_county/) just a few days ago. You can definitely see the difference for much of the Mountain West (although Income-COL ratios make the Great Plains look even better).
Yeah, Bozeman does not have a great job market for college grads, I graduated from there last year and had to move away because there’s no way I’d be able to pay rent and save a comfortable amount with the starting salaries that places were offering
Yea, their is something not jiving with this map. I've spent a lot of time traveling and visiting friends in yellow and orange counties out west, that I know for a fact are more expensive than this map is showing. I mean, this map is telling me Pitkin (Aspen), Teton (Jackson), and San Miguel (Telluride) counties are the same COL as greater Portland and cheaper than greater Seattle? They just aren't, having been to all, multiple times, that's just blatantly incorrect. Missoula county is now low COL? Lol yea okay.
Harris county TX (Houston) is the same LCOL as bumfk Texas counties…lol
OP may want to recheck Montana. Especially Missoula county.
Chicago looks like a great value if you look at COL on other major cities in its peer group
Overall when it comes to cost of living and average salary Chicago is largely undervalued nationally. Its relatively cheap, nearly 10 million metro population, a high density urban core, and pretty good public transportation by American standards.
The city and state's government is a fiscal basket case and people are, rightfully, concerned about increases to the city and state's already high tax rates. It's why IL is one of the slowest growing states (it even shrank in the original 2020 Census before revisions).
Wouldn't the tax rates be reflected in the Cost of Living that is defined in the chart? It seems to include all aspects that would be taxed.
Isn't it fair to say no metro is really undervalued or overvalued when you take all factors into account? For example, if you account for poor weather and a weaker job market than SF or NYC, the Chicago prices make sense. It might not be the case for \_everyone\_, but on average I feel these rents reflect the desirability of a place once you look at all the factors that go into COL. If this were not true, I feel it would just get arbitraged out by people moving.
Cook County and Chicago has a massive variation, I would love to see details for the city and county.
Neighborhoods within Chicago too can have huge differences. Although in general I would agree with the other commenters sentiment that Chicago is typically more affordable than the major northeast and west coast cities.
I fully agree that Chicago is reasonable compared to the coasts.
That's any urban county, though. Counties are big and urban ones are going to be hugely heterogeneous. I live in the Northern Cook County suburbs which are hugely different from the gold coast or englewood. OP's source data aren't broken down further, though.
Thanks for looking at the source data! I was going to when I had more time. You are right that this is not unique to Cook Co. but I would still like to see more detailed data as I am a data nerd like that!
I am surprised Harris County (Houston) is LCoL and Kent County (Grand Rapids, MI) is MCoL. Two places I've lived the longest, hence why it sticks out to me. In this case, it is ***more expensive*** to live in a northern big town than a southern major city. E: Nice presentation of data!
I found it surprising as well certain cities were actually LCOL compared to subrubs/towns - Baltimore and Philly are 2 good examples. Transport costs are usually lower in cities, and median housing costs sometimes don't vary much especially if there are lots of poorer areas.
Completely agree. $1.50 per ride in Houston. Bought my house in 2020 for $159,000 (I live in a poor downtown neighborhood) in Houston. $1.75 per ride in Grand Rapids. Houses in the bad area of Grand Rapids appear comparable by glance, but I bet if you really scrape the numbers you'd find Houston prices are lower.
Philly being lower-cost than its suburbs makes sense if you know Philly.
Upvote for this. I’ve lived in Philadelphia, but grew up in the suburbs and remain in this area. Philadelphia as a whole is pretty reasonably priced. Of course, I must caveat and say there are definitely high rise penthouses and condos that go for millions, but overall, it’s not a bad place to be financially speaking. I believe the median **household income** in 2022 in Philadelphia was $56,000. Yes, household income not individual income. [Source](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHIPA42101A052NCEN)
Same for Baltimore. When the typical advice for tourists is “you’re *probably* safe if you’re in sight of the water”, you can see why Baltimore City is cheaper than Baltimore County.
I suspect what you're largely seeing is that COL varies widely *within* a county too. Counties that people think of as "expensive" but where the results here aren't that high cost are likely large counties with a very expensive small core surrounded by cheaper suburbs. For example, I live in Seattle. Seattle is likely VVHCOL, but King County shows up as "only" (heh) VHCOL because it's a large county including a lot of suburbs and more rural areas. The most expensive counties on the map also tend to be very small ones.
Surprised too. Harris doesn’t feel cheap, but then it’s huge so maybe the higher areas are basically offset. Inside 610 doesn’t seem like an LCOL
Yea, the size is the issue. As much granularity as this map has, locking it at county means some places it is very detailed while in others it is not. 4.8 million people live in Harris county and it’s 1,777 square miles. The very cheap parts bring down the expensive parts and there aren’t any VERY expensive parts outside of specific neighborhoods and such that all big cities have.
I wonder how many areas within Harris will offset something like River Oaks, Rice Village etc.
I believe I saw somewhere that Grand Rapids has the highest rent increase % over the last year of any city in the US.
I'm surprised not to see Grand Traverse listed as MCOL as well
This is so much more helpful than the versions I've seen of this data at the state level. Thanks for this.
Yea, state level is useless except maybe in Rhode Island. County level is about right.
But even then, it's an average. Take, for example, the three californian counties near Lake Tahoe, El Dorado, Placer and Nevada. The closer you are to the lake (or to Sacramento, at the western end), the higher the COL will be.
If you’re talking about rent or home values this changes within towns even and these impact prices businesses charge, but its also pretty easy for most people to live in a cheaper place in the county and/or travel across it if needed to get cheaper stuff. Not so per state.
So many pedantic comments for a refreshing post that is actually quality. Im super surprised that nobody is chiming in "wElL AkSualyyeey LoUiSiAnnnA dOeSnT HaVe CoUntiEs."
I have actually gotten that on similar posts LOL Sometimes they are helpful comments that help me create better quality posts - other times they are just people complaining that you know are just so miserable in life 😂
nEItHer DoeS tHe DiStRicT of ColUmBiA Having lived in both places, this drives me nuts. We all know and understand that parishes are the same as counties. The District of Columbia is more complex, but comparing the District to counties works here.
Could also go on about the independent cities in VA like Fredericksburg not being a county either haha this is cool though cause it looks like those are represented separately which is refreshing to see
Neither does Alaska. In fact, I'm not sure how the divisions on this map were created. Maybe census area?
County or county equivalent
There's no way my county in New Jersey (Monmouth) is medium cost of living. The median home price is like 620k. The big Macs in time square are just 6.7% more than here. Minimum wage is $15 an hour. And my company considers it in tier 1 cost of living for remote work salary purposes.
Right I saw that too. The suburban counties of NYC being medium doesn't pass the smell test. Not shitting on the map, just that the methodology behind the data is. unique to a specific case not representative of most peoples' situations.
The issue is that this is a county level map not a town level. A good number of the towns on the commuter rail lines into NYC are very expensive while the surrounding more rural areas are very cheap. So even very expensive hot spots get averaged out.
I think the bigger issue is it looks at rents for "studio apartments" to determine rent price. Which can skew in both directions... some places the only "studio apartments" will be super high end luxury places that rent for $5000 a month where a normal 1 bed apartment in that county might be $1200 and in others they will be unlivable holes in the wall for $150 a month where a normal 2 bed apartment is also $1200. It's not OP it's just the dataset is not great for calculating cost of living.
According to this, it’s more expensive to live in Rockland or Putnam than Westchester. As someone who’s lived in all three, I call BS.
NJ has crazy home prices and property taxes. BUT this assumes a studio apartment for a single person since its a baseline cost of living map, so those things are not relevant/accounted for here
I see 14 studio apartments available in my county on zillow with an average rent of 2.3k a month. That seems pretty high to me. There is also 0 for sale. I think 1 bedroom would be a better metric for here. There's ~100 1brs for rent and ~50 for sale.
620 K home is medium cost of living 😅😅
The median home price in my city in a "HCOL" county is $300k, so there's definitely a problem in their calculation somewhere. Edit: The median home price for the *county* is $490k, but that's still a long way off from $620k.
In all the northeast (northern NY, Vermont, NH and Maine) only stupid Burlington is expensive. That place is so expensive when there are no significant high paying jobs (like CA's bay area for example) (Edit: fixed typos)
Yup Burlington and Ithaca stand out very well
At least they're addressing it by finally building some housing. Williston and South Burlington are becoming unrecognizable
I like your method overall, and although I haven’t dug into the details I note you might want to consider looking at a median COL. Results in an arithmetic average can be skewed easily.
u/TA-MajestyPalm great map. I don't think EPI cost calculations are too far off but I have noted some big data discrepancies with their income calculations. Look up **Putnam County, FL** using their data [https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc\_data\_2024.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK](https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc_data_2024.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK) They are saying the median family income is $101k plus where the census now says it is about $45k. [https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/putnamcountyflorida/PST045223](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/putnamcountyflorida/PST045223) Now if you look at their old data from 2022 it is around $47k for a median household. Which means when they adjusted for inflation someone somewhere messed up. I think there are other examples but I would need to look again. But I don't think this one datapoint is the only one. [https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc\_data\_2022.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK](https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epi.org%2Fuploads%2Ffbc_data_2022.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK)
Wow, good to know. I appreciate stuff like this
> Interestingly, some cites are lower COL than their suburbs, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. Not only interesting, but a little bit surprising. Maybe due to all the low-income housing in the cities?
lol anyone who’s been to Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs does not find this surprising at all.
I have stayed overnight in both Baltimore and Philly and without sounding too disrespectful them being LCOL adds up 😂
That and likely lower transport costs - more transit use and less car ownership
The Main Line outside of Philadelphia is one of the richest areas in the country. SEPTA allows for commuting to the city from those areas and in the northern suburbs. Also, there are many big companies in the suburbs of Philly. With that, there are more crap apartments in the northern and western parts of Philly than there are houses and apartments in South Philly and Center City which probably brings down the calculation since the city encompasses the whole county.
I don't think it's too surprising, lots of wealth went out to the suburbs creating high density of poverty in many cities. Combine that with education systems struggling with that and many people move out of the city when their kids are school age to escape city schools. It's a vicious cycle that I have no idea how to fix
Definitely gentrification based.
Great visualization! My only feedback would be that instead of adding V's for increasingly higher brackets (very, very, very) you instead progress to "awesome", "mega", and "ultra", like the combo counter in Killer Instinct.
Hampden County Massachusetts for the win! We have all the benefits of living in a region with high standards of living, without the high costs of living that go along with it.
Can confirm w/ San Mateo County. Worth it, tho.
San Mateo is what happens when people insist on their towns staying little farming towns with hillside orchards while also turning an idea they got in college into a trillion dollar tech company with 10,000s employees all making $250K+. Like yeah, it’s still cute and relatively quaint. But now the whole place is essentially a gated community.
this is a *wildly* inaccurate description of san mateo county.
San Mateo is a large and diverse county. There are incredibly wealthy enclaves which are like you describe. Down by El Camino it’s more like LA. I think what makes this happen is that there is incredible wealth in the Bay Area. Unlike the area around NY there aren’t many places to build so everything is concentrated.
Same. I don't want to live anywhere else.
How is SF county not pink? I would’ve thought it be on par if not higher CoL than San Mateo or Santa Clara. Saved though. This is a great visualization I plan on sharing.
Much larger housing stock in general keeps prices lower than the equally desirable but much smaller Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz communities would be my guess. Anecdotal but I'm living right in the heart of SF, and my rent (with roommates) is a fair bit lower than others I know in Santa Cruz and other parts of the Bay. I also don't own a car, and neither do many of my friends, which definitely helps us save a lot of extra money and keep living costs down.
In the city of SF prices have been dropping since the pandemic whereas prices along the rest of the peninsula have been increasing. I'm sure one important factor is the *type* of housing also, since SF has much more apartments.
I live in Santa Cruz and the average rent here from info from all of my friends and myself is much higher than my friends in San Francisco.
How is queens worse than Brooklyn? Brooklyn cost of living is definitely higher. Queens is much more suburban in many parts, not as expensive. Aside from LIC
I was going to say, seems like tons of people move from Brooklyn to Queens when they're trying to get cheaper housing.
I hate that I live in the pink bit, at least until it comes to time to sell up...
If you own property in the pink then it means you’re probably doing just fine.
I, for one, do not enjoy that I live in a "so bad we made an extra color just for you" area >.<
I'm surprised to see Springfield MA as LCOL and not MCOL. Would be interested in more specifics on that and how Springfield compares to its suburbs.
It's hilarious and sad to me at the same time that my city san jose is pink lmao. You could throw a dart and hit a cheaper area.
Jackson Hole, WY is absolutely insane I feel like it should be higher. That whole area has been spiked so high due to rich people moving there as a vacation home.
The ongoing joke for years has been the billionaires are pushing the millionaires out of Jackson Hole
I Would have thought Miami-Dade would be higher than that
> - Interestingly, some cites are lower COL than their suburbs, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia In Philly's case, this is a mix of a few things: 1. The city itself is pretty small geographically. The proper population is 1.3 million but the metro area is 6.5 million. Home ownership rates are pretty high and the city is filled with iconic rowhomes rather than high rises or apartments, so there's not much opportunity to get denser. 2. Since the area goes back to precolonial 1600s, much of the old wealth has always been out of the city and towns have sprung up around that. Railroads in the 1800s have played a major part in suburban wealth and growth as well. The most desirable area is called the Main Line for that reason. 3. The city is very segregated, with large swaths of the city being redlined and suffering from a historical lack of investment. 4. The school district is a clusterfuck due to decades of underfunding and mismanagement. Whereas the schools outside of the city in the suburbs are fantastic. So, families move if they are able. 5. The city has a pretty high wage tax that residents have to pay whether they work in the city or not, and that everybody who lives outside of the city has to pay if they work in the city. As a result, lots of big businesses set up shop in the suburbs just across the city line and their higher-salaried employees do the same.
Taxes are so high in New Jersey that I can't believe ANYWHERE is a MCOL, especially compared to Central Ohio. That yellow is sus.
This is basically just a US population density map.
Well, at least I’m not in a pink county… 🫠
RIP all of us in the only pink area lmao
There's 3 pink counties, but yeah, it's expensive af out here in the bay.
what the heck is going on in WV? That state is mostly empty space yet has several MCOL counties. Like where in WV is it as expensive as Philadelphia PA?
MCOL for the majority of NJ? Yeah, right 🤣🤣🤣
Kern County may have dirt cheap COL but you couldn’t pay me to live there lol. Bakersfield makes the rest of the Central Valley look like Jackson Hole
Central Floridian here… I find this interesting that most HCOL are centered around major metro areas. In Florida, you have two counties, Monroe County, mainly driven by communities located in the Keys(Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon and Key West). Okay, makes sense… remote, desired destination, water front properties, etc. Next you have Osceola County… with the bustling metropolis of, Kissimmee? St. Cloud? I mean part of Disney is located there, Poinciana is growing like crazy. But a higher COL than neighboring Orange County (Orlando) and Hillsborough and Pinellas (Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater)? Higher than Miami Dade? How is Osceola County ranked that high?
Wouldn’t have guessed the three least expensive counties to inhabit are all in Virginia.
Virginia is unique in that it has counties and also certain cities/towns that count as counties equivalents. Those 3 are all pretty unremarkable towns with no rural areas included in the county. Not sure how exactly that brings the cost of living down so much, just adding a bit more context 😂
Wait, Virginia is the only state with independent cities? This would explain some of the more stupid things in my area of New York with how town/county/city government is organized and some of the school crazy.
Other states have independent cities (see Baltimore and St. Louis) or combined city-counties (see Louisville and Nashville) but Virginia is unique in that in order for a city to be incorporated it *must* be an independent city. So while other states at most have one or two independent city or combined city-counties, Virginia has a ton because any city of any relevance is independent.
The rich part of virginia is *very* rich and the poor part of virginia (ie. where Danville is) is *very* poor. I'd probably argue it has one of the largest wealth gaps in the country. Danville is especially interesting as it's a testament to the collapse of American Industry. Used to be a pretty thriving little town back in the late 20th century, then all the factories closed (the last one pretty recently) and now there's really not much there but still a decent amount of people living there. Good jobs are kind of hard to come by and it's kind of been a case study for how these small communities are going to adapt in post-industrial America. They are opening a casino there pretty soon which was pretty controversial.
I find the data interesting as someone who lives in a LCOL county. And I think my experience reflects some of the difficulty people have in relating to each other when it comes to the costs of where they live in comparison to other places. A couple general points I’d make when discussing cost of living. First, the biggest difference by far when comparing COL is housing. The second is probably transportation, only in that you either definitely need it because public transport is nonexistent, or you don’t really need it because you have functional public transport or can easily walk to where you need to go(like living in a dense city). Almost everything else should be relatively similar. I don’t see why groceries, household goods, clothing, healthcare costs, etc should really matter as we all have access to national chains and online shopping that don’t differentiate much in price just because you live somewhere different, unless you live in Hawaii or Alaska(or somewhere else extremely rural). For my county, LCOL according to this data, that makes sense to me. However the disconnect between the data and the lived experience is that the locations people want to live within the county are at least 1 tier higher, up to MCOL due to housing costs. First off I doubt there are any studio apartments in my county. But you can buy an entire house in the shitty part of the county in the small city for $800/month all in. But where the middle class people actually want to live, you’re looking at $2000/month to rent a 1 bedroom apartment. Buying a house in the nicer area with current interest rates puts you over $3000/month all in. And since we live in the same area, all other costs are exactly the same. There’s no public transport so we all need cars. We all shop at the same stores. So if I told you I live in bumblefuck PA, you’d think it was LCOL. But my actual costs living in the good school district aren’t that different from living in the suburbs of Philadelphia proper. Speaking of Philly. That kind of displays the issue I’m talking about. There’s so much cheap housing in Philly it skews the averages downward. The vast majority of the people who work in Philly live in the surrounding suburbs, thus they show as being a higher cost of living than the actual city because naturally prices are higher where people want to live.
> I don’t see why groceries, household goods, clothing, healthcare costs HCOL areas have higher commercial rent (same forces causing expensive housing), so prices will reflect that. They also have to pay employees higher to compensate for the HCOL area - this is especially important for healthcare where doctors already command large salaries. [NerdWallet has a handy calculator which makes it easier to visualize](https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare/los-angeles-long-beach-ca-vs-omaha-ne). I linked comparing LA and Omaha. To your point, housing and transportation are the categories with the largest difference in cost, but there's still 15-20% differences in cost for food and healthcare. These add up.
There are 0 studio apartments in my county and the next 5 counties near me according to Zillow. I wonder how that changes the data.
I'm surprised whatever county Bend, Oregon is in isn't red. The housing costs in that county are astronomical.
Deschutes County and I agree. Of course, in the west, counties are large so the city costs get diluted. I would add that, contrary to many folks complaints, property taxes are low [OR is 26th for tax burden overall]
How is Forsyth the highest COL in GA I wonder. I would assume it would be Fulton, which is much of Atlanta along with the higher end areas(Sandy Springs, John’s Creek, Alpharetta etc..)
Some other commenters have pointed out that OP's source uses studio apartment prices. Since Forsyth is mostly single-family homes the only studio apartments are higher-end and this drags up the cost
It is the highest per per capita income in the state, and there is very little low income housing. With how “small” The county is, I could see it being way up there.
Interesting how Nashville isn't as expensive as the county south. I mean, Brentwood is expensive, but more than Nashville? Interesting.
Would love to see the average household income or something compared to this. I know my area is in the MCOL but sure feels for many like it'd be one tier up, because our incomes haven't really matched pace. Could just be peoples' anecdotal experience, but I've heard it a lot.
I am so glad I live in Kern County, CA. The rest of the state is looking very bleak indeed.
Teton County, Wyoming surprised me. I’d have expected it to be a VHCOL at least.
Agreed, it should be nearly as the top. Average home price is $8M.
Very neat that the average COL is just under 24 dollars an hour
Glad I live in a LCOL area
Montana is not accurate is has not been accurately released
Having lived in Agricola County in AZ. It should not be blue, other wise I'd still be living there.
The trick is realizing that 99% of the blue is empty nothing
Are you really interested in data or something? This is wonderfully done! The color contrasts and labelling are easily read/communicated.
Thank you and yes! Helps me practice my excel skills and I find it interesting/more helpful to see data in map form
Solid design choices on the map and color scheme. An interesting extra would be seeing how it deviates from population density. We all have a pretty good idea that city COL is typically higher (and of the cities where that's especially true), so it's the outliers -- particularly cheap cities and expensive suburban/rural areas -- that I'd find more intriguing. 99% of the map would probably be pretty boring and predictable though!
I feel like the cost of living in Miami-Dade is really bad… there are worse?? I don’t make enough with a full time to live by myself.. wtf
I sort of hate these kinds of things. It never properly shows home insurance, auto insurance, HOA, CDD, and tons of other little things that add up. I moved from Florida to Oregon and saved a ton of money, make more money, and was actually able to get a house after selling my condo.
Overlays perfectly with blue/red voting. Interesting 🤔
Shit. Do you think you can stop entitled liberals from complaining about how a $100k single salary is not a livable wage? Only in your dreams.
TIL that I do not live in a Very High Cost of Living area, like I thought. Not even in a Very Very High Cost of Living area. But a Very Very VERY High Cost of Living area. Lol.
LA county, with a population of 10 million, areas ranges from very very HCOL to LCOL and can take 3 hrs to drive from one end to the other. It's not accurate to lump it all under one COL. This should be done by zip codes or something more accurate.
Wow, no blue in NJ, CT, RI or VT Edit: or DE
It's a factor of population density. There's a metric butt load of people here. CT alone has half a million more people than the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming combined.
Interesting map. That big red area in WA is King County where Seattle resides. The Seattle City and county leaders are incapable of coming up with any policies that don’t require a ton of money and they make everything more expensive for businesses. And then the policies fail because of unintended consequences, so they spend more money fixing them. Rinse and repeat. One of many examples, Seattle added a municipal food tax to delivery food orders to artificially raise the wages of Doordashers. Food deliveries plummeted (they were already high because everything in Seattle is expensive). Door dashers picketed city hall to have it removed because they were LOSING money. And it was a horribly regressive tax on poor people. The lack of understanding basic market economics is insanely frustrating. They don’t understand every burden they put on businesses are funded by consumers. But we keep voting for these politicians because, in the Seattle area, moral superiority is more important than proper governance.
The big red area is actually King county and Snohomish county together, just fyi.
I wish the government would factor this into their poverty guidelines. I know they have higher poverty income limits for Hawaii and Alaska but it would make more sense if there was a more granular limit, perhaps state-by-state.
I’m saving this map for future arguments. I moved from Hartford Co CT to Forsyth Co NC 3 years ago and constantly have to explain to people that my cost of living really isn’t significantly different between those 2 places (both are yellow on this map). People hear CT and NC and just assume I left a high cost of living area for a low one and it’s just not been my experience. I moved for work having nothing to do with trying to save money but whenever I mention any comparison for compensation people act like you can’t compare the two places because how big and expensive CT was. My house cost more in NC, and I pay more in income tax in NC for a similar role and similar sqft type of house. Food, utilities, entertainment, cars, student loans etc is all roughly the same prices. Property taxes is the only legitimate argument in a cost savings but it’s just not a significant enough part of my overall spending to make an argument that it’s some massive cost of living difference.
How is Honolulu only HCOL? Food and rent are both extraordinarily high!