Job location will be important.

and not only job location but a good fit between housing and other living costs versus pay scales. Otherwise there are horrible mis-matches where the service industry personnel can not afford to live anywhere near the job locations.

During the height of the oil boom, people were commuting from as far away as Ft Stockton, Sheffield, and even Balmorhea and Alpine to jobs in Odessa and Midland. There were others commuting from Lamesa, from O'Donnell, from Tahoka, and even Lubbock, from Brownfield, Wellman, etc. to Odessa-Midland. Some of these were more than 150 miles each way, because there was not affordable housing here.

That is already happening.  This is a British article so the numbers are in metrics and apartments are called flats.

MoverDB.com

Moving to Silicon Valley? 2020 Living Costs & Relocation Tips

Photo by Michael Silicon Valley sits in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is home to Apple, HP, Intel, Oracle, Cisco and many other technology companies. It sits in the Santa Clara Valley and includes the city of San Jose. If you are considering moving to Silicon Valley, the...

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Still waiting for the page to load - but Silicon Valley cost of living is well beyond my pay grade.

Here it is in simpler form. I hope this page loads.  Basically someone making $100,000 would pay more than their take home on rent. There are no accessible suburbs with cheaper prices because the commute is too far. 

 

Tech.co

Silicon Valley's Cost of Living Is Seriously Driving Away Tech Talent

As the Bay Area's rent goes up, its tech talent is going away. Data proves that tech workers are increasingly passing over the area for other tech hubs.

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Yep the first one finally loaded after I went and did a bunch of electrical wiring / lighting upgrades in my shop building today, and checked it 7 hours later. Essentially, yeah - the cost of living has over-shot well beyond the prevailing wages. I even said more than 30 years ago that I could live better on $20k right here than I could on $100k in Silicon Valley.

Once you factor in the higher federal income tax bracket you have to get into just to barely pay for housing, all of the onerous regulatory compliance costs baked into the costs of everything from gasoline and groceries, special models of cars that are much more expensive, plus the incredibly high state and local tax bite on top of all of the other stuff, the true base pay needs to be more like 5x what it is in semi-rural Texas.

The tax bite in a high cost of living area is exponential rather than linear until nearly half of your income is in the highest marginal tax bracket. Then with those jaw dropping costs of living, you need to be in one of the top brackets to just barely survive.

While out here, where there is no state income tax. If one does a lot of things on the cheap, it is possible to enjoy a fairly comfortable lifestyle on much lower income. This means that each dollar you earn, you keep more of it, and what fraction you get to keep, will go a lot further.

And coronavirus is probably going to turn out to be the ultimate depth charge that sinks the San Francisco area gentrification for good, as many people realize that if they have to socially isolate and work from home, they can do that just as well from Billings, Montana or North Platte, Nebraska asthey can from Silicon Valley.

ka.

Housing costs are ridiculous.  You are right about cost of living. I don’t have a way to locate it now but I remember reading an article online about three years ago that in the OC in California, middle class income is around $100,000 a year combined family income.  That would be almost wealthy in some other places.

Showtalk said:

in the OC in California, middle class income is around $100,000 a year combined family income. That would be almost wealthy in some other places.

That kind of income for most people outside of those places of very high cost of living, would be considered wealthy. I know I could do VERY well on that kind of income.

The problem is as incomes rises, costs of living do too.

That is only because most people expand their spending to match their new-found income. If more people would read "The Millionaire Next Door" they'd not gentrify places and drive out the service people and other lower paid occupations from an area.