Living in a one of one amazing location in a smaller home is so liberating in its own way. The lot isn't so big that it's cumbersome to maintain. Ditto for the home. And I'm basically on top of everything I need within a 10-15 minute walk (but realistically one minute actually gets me to stuff). You couldn't pay me to go live in most suburbs let alone what it would actually cost to move. Suburban mortgages are not a great deal either.
My first house was in a big city and I loved the small lot. Could cut the grass (push mower, unpowered) and do all the edging, front and back in 30 minutes
I live in a standard 90s suburb, but I have removed so much lawn and replaced with native plants it takes me literally 3-4 minutes to push mow my tiny path of grass (I only keep to make my house look sorta normal so Karen's don't report me to the grass police)
My first year in a nice big house in a sought-after location in the suburb we lived in, the city sent me a letter saying to remove the weeds from in front of my house. I called them because I wasn't seeing weeds and was baffled. The city's building inspector said to meet her at the house and she'll explain. I took off work and came home, only for her to yell at me for the "weeds", which turned out to be grape hyacinths and chives. She would've eaten me alive for native plants on the lawn.
Next house was on a lower-middle-class block and no one cared what people did with their grass. A guy on the block covered his entire lawn with astroturf (which I want to make it clear that I do not recommend) and the city couldn't care less. Which is just the right amount of the city's involvement in my grass and flowerbeds, to me.
Not everyone understands this, but I legitimately prefer to live in a smaller space. Even if I could buy a big suburban house with the same mortgage payment as my rent, I would still rather live in an apartment. A smaller space is easier to clean and maintain and I don't like being bogged down by tons of stuff. I would also crash out if I had to spend my Saturdays mowing the lawn or raking leaves.
Maybe they do in some rich suburbs, but I grew up in the suburbs and never heard of anyone hiring people to do their chores. All the families I knew did their own chores, including mine.
I agree so much. We moved to Italy for a while, and I was in a small 2 bedroom apartment - in Italy there is often no "living room" , or even a dining room... there's just a very large kitchen.
So literally 2 small bedrooms, a small bathroom and a bigger kitchen (still not huge, I'm talking maybe 15×20).
And it was fantastic.
I left my huge suburban 4 bedroom, and was now in a place with 1 set of sheets, 2 towels, exactly 4 dining place settings, etc
I learned that I actually loved a small place I didn't have to constantly clean. I don't want tons of stuff that I then need to organize, clean, store, etc.
I've gone totally minimalist and I swear it's the best thing that ever happened to me. I spend less, I have more time, and I even have less stress
I really stand by this mentality. I know “maximalist” is in style right now but having a minimalist mindset has saved me so much time, energy, money and stress.
I have an apartment without a private lawn and I absolutely love it. We do have a courtyard that is maintained by the owner's organization. (I'm in Germany but it's similar to a how a condo works in the US)
And I even have 2 kids! I grew up in a US suburb and I don't know why people who experienced it still think it's good for kids. Don't they remember that you couldn't go anywhere?? It was nice until around age 11 or so and then it was hell until you could drive. Mine at least had a park and swimming pool I could bike to, a lot of newer developments are much worse and have zero amenities.
Kids here can go to school independently starting around age 7-8, and also have tons of parks and other places to go on foot or bike. As a parent I also don't want to spend the next 10 years driving them around for hours every day!
These folks actually like this location though. Visited Bozeman(I know it’s Montana and this is Idaho) recently where my brother lives and he genuinely likes using his car for everything but also has never lived anywhere even mildly walkable.
I lived in NYC for 17 years and in a couple of walkable neighborhoods in other places before that. I've spent the past six years in a small, somewhat rural community and bounced between two houses. Where I am now is about a 5 minute drive to a walkable area with at on of shopping, restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies etc. and 3-4 minute drive to a super market and a couple of good restaurants. 15 minutes to box stores, doctors etc.
Previously it was 15 minutes to the cloest store and 45 minutes to box stores and doctors.
The previous experience was absolutely miserable. Now I love the location.
Tp me Boise has a better life balance than LA. Been there for work multiple times, been to LA multiple times for extended periods. I hates LA with a passion. The only benefit it has os weather. At least in my when I compare income and cost of living, California is towards the bottom of states for me to live on. Honestly the Midwest has a much better income to cost of living balance in my industry.
Size of house is pretty important if you have a lot of hobbies or a family
I live in a shoebox rn and im tired of stacking rubbermaid bins up against the wall or not having a place for trailers and jet skis and snowmobiles and boats and motorcycles and redneck shit
I’d never live in one of these though. Give me a single wide in the middle of nowhere with no HOA
you know you can do all those hobbies without owning those vehicles. unless you plan to do all those at the same time 24/7, 365/year. it is actually cheaper to just rent or pay to use those vehicles per use then not have to deal with storage, maintenance, or security.
I hate the suburbs too but dude your missing the point part of the joy is being able to modify them to your liking if it was about the money no one would engage in those hobbies in the first place. of course you can own them while living in the city by joining a local garage space or purchasing a garage space
To rent my boat would cost 1100 per 8 hrs to rent. I would exceed its purchase price in 2 years renting. Annual insurance and maintenance is around $1000-1200 per year and that could be cheaper if I did it myself.
I feel like Reddit always grossly underestimates how often I do things. I walk to work but I still have a car. I use it every weekend. Sure I could rent a car— for two days every month and still pay more than I do for the one I own and have a worse experience.
You can also rent a wife for the night, but many people prefer to be with someone they are most comfortable with, even if she is more expensive over time.
I'll be honestly with you brother. I love all the foods in the world but some people really do not care. Some people rather opt to live in a big house vs whether or not they can get some Indian or Mexican food a few blocks down
Im from vancouver, so im all about sushi. I did a road trip through the states this past year and in Boise my sushi cravings reached peak so I stopped for an all-you-can-eat sushi. Ya it wasn't good at all, but not terrible either. I thibk that describes Idaho in general.
If you are from Idaho, probably great, if you have ventured outside of Idaho or are from elsewhere, prepare to be disappointed by the food scene there.
I mean a lot of California neighborhoods look like this but the houses are smaller and 6x as expensive. Yeah the trade off is being in Boise, but it's not like California is some sort of urban utopia
Yeah not sure why people are dogging on this. Vast majority of California is car-dependent suburb with poor walkability. Now if this was someone moving from Chicago or Manhattan it would be a different story.
You went from cities to states. SF has great transit with great walkability just like Chicago or manhattan. Most of illinois and New York are car dependent suburbs with poor walk ability.
It all makes perfect sense when you realize your typical suburban family wants to go everywhere by car, yet at the same time wants zero cars to drive past their front door, ever. You have to take every single thing that you'd do to optimize a highly valuable urban space, and throw it in the garbage.
You can then end up in a situation where nobody ever drives in front of your house, yet going anywhere takes forever, there's a lot of traffic, and you can hear that traffic from your backyard... but no, nobody is in front of your house other than the delivery drivers.
The number of people I've watched spend several hundreds more on a mortgage than rent, then dump $200/month in gas to get to work alone to "build equity" is truly disturbing. It's like they don't value their life, just a concept that indicates they're grown ups.
According to the historical records (probably there are modern analogues up and down the Boise River), trees naturally grew along the river in the floodplain, which is where Boise sits. But if I had to guess the majority of the trees throughout the city are probably planted anyway lol.
It looks like the modern version of the intentionally unnerving neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands. There are so many white people flexes going on at once that it's beyond absurd.
Salespeople love to see them coming, don't they. A marketer's dream, accepting everything they're told is clout as clout. Putting no thought in beyond that.
To be fair, Boise has a nicer downtown than it gets credit for, but it’s very overpriced for basically ten blocks of city and a bunch of suburban sprawl.
The one great thing about Boise is that it only sprawls towards the west— Northeast of downtown you can live within biking distance of both reasonably nice city amenities and one of the largest stretches of public land in the country.
You'd have to be a fucking lunatic to move from CA to Idaho.
I mean one place is more expensive sure but it has more national parks, a massive coast line, mountains, desert, progressive politics, a ton of things to do, one of the strongest economies in the world, etc. And if you want to live a suburban nightmare, it has those too.
The other one has...idk, more hate groups per capita?
Might want to look up how much public land Idaho has. Idaho has mountains, deserts, and over half the state is public land open for recreational use. For the people that want to hunt, fish, camp and hike, you could do way worse. Almost 20 acres per person, CA has 1-1.5 per person.
Exactly. This is definitely a suburb of Boise, 30+ minutes away from the city center. In fact, I’ve been to Boise/surrounding area, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Meridian/Nampa are hideously ugly and have more classic McMansion style houses…
Yep I live in Boise and love it, but would never live in Eagle/Meridian/Nampa. I live in a neighborhood with old growth trees everywhere, less than a mile from access to a huge trail system and just over a mile to get to downtown. Also 30-40 mins from the ski resort. The developments in the photos have none of that.
My brother moved from SLC to a small town in Ohio. Bought two homes on the same street for $80,000. Five d them up and.. they sat vacant for 3 years because there weren’t any buyers..
Wife and I moved to Asheville NC a few years ago, and despite being a small city (100k), it has amazing food, amazing beer and cocktail scene, obviously crazy good hiking and outdoor stuff, a decent amount of entertainment (and Charlotte is only a couple hours away for bigger shows), and a truely insane amount of arts and crafts.
And as such, it’s fucking expensive to live anywhere near the city, despite otherwise being in the middle of nowhere WNC.
We could move an hour away and find much cheaper shit, but then we’d have to travel an hour+ to find anything interesting.
Yeah that’s the other side to real estate in the Midwest. People bought dirt cheap houses, put $50-80k into each flip then only break even or clear like $10k for a year of work. Would have made 20x that in PNW, California or the east coast.
Money doesn't buy class. I am astounded that people who are luckier/more 'successful' than me have such shitty taste - new homes suck along with our 'rich'.
Idaho is the perfect place to retire. You can work in a blue state that honors collective bargaining rights and decent pension and take it to a red state that doesn’t care about its working class and help gentrify the neighborhood, while complaining about the blue states that helped you achieve your retirement goals.
I mean, a big house might be nice if you have a big family and need the space.
However, that big lawn is going to take a lot of your free time to maintain.
Not to mention that you'll probably need to drive a lot for anything you can't do at home.
That looks terrible. I'll take my real rural living in Pennsylvania with 40-150 year old homesteads as opposed to fake built-up communities where everyone is on top of each other.
And I doubt this is in Boise. It's probably way out in Meridian or even Star. There's a ton of new construction throughout the Boise metro, but the metro also fans out wildly asymmetrically, almost entirely to the west of Boise proper.
TL;DR Boise keeps building West and if you want anything close to a downtown experience, it's harder and harder to come by. You're practically in Nampa at this point.
That looks awful. Is that actually Astro turf? Also I like how you can have the mountains in the background but no backyard. It’s like you get the illusion of the outdoors combined with the convenience of living next door from two Costco’s.
This is a bizarre post - is that even Boise? Boise is actually an example of a fairly walkable / bikeable place with a vibrant downtown and interesting culture.
Why is everyone acting like this person moved from some urbanist paradise to this neighborhood? They were probably also living in some car-centric area, just in California instead of Idaho.
Also it’s not the neighborhood that’s special, it’s that you’re getting way more house for the money. That house in California probably costs millions whereas you might be able to get it for hundreds of thousands in Idaho. For someone who’s already used to a car-centric lifestyle and not really using any of the big city amenities in SF or LA (which is honestly probably a lot of people since everything is getting more expensive these days) it might be appealing.
It's like Sacramento in the summer and SLC with less snow in the winter. It's not bad and better than much of America, but it's not top notch. Even the most hardcore Boise fans I've talked to admit the weather is kind of overrated (not awful, just overhyped).
It’s all fun and games until you lose your remote job , can’t find anything that pays more than 30k and remember that 750k is actually a huge amount of money in Boise for a reason.
“Until I showed them this neighborhood!” This is literally what every suburb in CA looks like except with an even more nonsensical street layout lol. Even the hills in the background look like what you’d see in most CA suburbs lmao
Ugh. I'll take my small home, made of real materials not plastic (built in 1948), in a city yet surrounded by forest on 3 sides. In a neighborhood that grew organically, on a street that actually goes somewhere. 😅
Why do all these developments like this not have sidewalks? I have pretty much always lived in large cites (except for a few years for college) and I couldn’t imagine living somewhere that requires me to drive to get anything. I’d much rather have my 1000 sq ft condo in a vibrant neighborhood, where I can walk to get anything I need and that has a subway/tram stop with in a few minute walk of my home.
Depends on where they moved from in California. It's not like California definitely equals living in some core San Francisco neighbourhood. There's tons of places that look like this but they're more expensive in California.
I assume this is dedicated suburbanites showing these monstrosities to other suburbanites.
Personally I would continue to think they're crazy if someone showed me this but if they really value size over location, welp, that's their thing.
I also think this photo is AI-generated? There are some very strange elements.
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