askchapo

i liked it a lot more 10 years ago, but it's alright compared to a lot of places. it's about 1,000 km from where i grew up, which is a chud occupied shithole undergoing climate apocalypse. i like the climate here much better. a medium-small city with a large state university, so the infrastructure for walking and biking actually exists in some places and is only sort of terrible. right at the tail end of this being a LCOL area i lucked into a deal and bought the dumpiest little baby house in a nice, quiet neighborhood with like trees and parks and streams and shit.

people from the region think this city has major traffic and crime problems, but where i am from had real crime problems and deadly shootings in traffic so this place feels like a hallmark movie. the housing market has been tight for decades but since AirBNB and other STRs came to town, it's become a recognizable crisis. prices for houses and rents are going up like crazy (2 years after i bought my place, it was appraised at a level i could not afford and interest rates were twice as high... i make the median income for my postal administrative unit) so i expect desperation to climb as well and maybe have some parts of get a little bit weirder. there has been and continues to be a lot of internal displacement in this region, so people coming from some dead town to find work here and make a go of it. the labor market is also relatively tight here, with very low unemployment.

there's a lot to like about it, but i want to move even further away from the equator. not just for climate stuff, but the institutions here have been heading in the wrong direction for a while and it seems like some capital formation(s) finally noticed there's a lot of assets to strip here, so they're working hand in hand to convert everything i like about this place into a pile of cash and put it in an overseas account.