Where’s a good place to live? *Poll added *

Quoted from CLEllison:

Great subject and very hard to answer honestly due to some rules of this site. Before I get rolling let it be made clear I am a tolerant person. I believe in respecting someone's beliefs even though I may not agree. I simply ask for tolerance be reciprocated. I saw one person mention where I currently live. Oregon. I dont care where you live the #1 thing that can make or break a place is politics.
The bad: (as a whole this part matters)
This state as a whole is mind numbingly out of control. (Blanket statement alert) People are vicious and down right rude. The city of Portland is a straight up shitfest. Homeless issue out of control, needles laying all over the place, after dark the real "prize winners" come out. Should your political beliefs differ you WILL be attacked "at a minimum verbally". It's completely intolerant. Traffic is beyond ridiculous. Rent/home prices are ridiculous.
Run by a mayor that encourages violent protests and restrains the police from doing their jobs. Judges that slap wrists... repeat offenders get back on the street in a matter of hours.
The good:
Pinball scene is really big here. About an hour from the beach. About an hour to the mountains. Hiking and general outdoor activities. Hunting big game. Dunes for avid ATV enthusiasts.
The neutral:
Weather depends on where you physically live.
You can drive 15 minutes and be arsehole deep in snow or simply get a dusting of snow. Drive an hour or so East and be in desert and a COMPLETELY different political ideology.
In closing, if you enjoy large crowds with crap attitudes, barely being able to afford to live then you will adore Portland Oregon. If you don't then look at Eastern Oregon. Less snow, more tolerance
For me, Idaho is on my radar as I enjoy freedom, heat and blue skies. I've also looked at New Zealand however super expensive to live, dual citizenship allowed, must possess a skill they find worthy to gain citizenship.

Quoted from cjchand:

In short: There's pockets of places to settle regardless of where you live on the blue/red spectrum.

Quoted from JodyG:

My part of Central PA is really starting to grate at me. The cost of living is rising, but wages are not. Real estate taxes keep going up. Affordable housing is non-existent, so most people are increasingly becoming more house poor. The amish are buying all the cheap housing up and becoming slum lords. We are becoming a suburb of philly, where people are openly proud to be an asshole...while many natives are proud and open about being racist assholes. Neighbors are not friendly any more due to the small town lifestyle being killed off by sprawl. The state and local government (commonwealth) is bloated, corrupt and impotent. Unemployment is low, which means that good service and good employees are very hard to find at the wages most companies are wanting to pay. Pennsylvania has shitty workers rights laws, which put us well behind some other states like Maryland. We have become one of those places that is nice to visit, but crappy to live in.
That being said, I haven't figured out where I would want to go yet if I do. But this thread is helpful!

Quoted from jgentry:

All data like this is skewed toward the purpose of the people that make it. The real question is what is the murder rate per 1 mil people in those countries.

Quoted from NorCalRealtor:

Gotta agree with Jeffro here. You're basically telling everyone here in the Bay Area who lives in a <$1.5M property that their home & neighborhood are sub-par, which is false and a little offensive. Even for "your area", where my offices are located, I don't concur.
Here's an example of a property I sold in your area for around $1M (see photo). Good condition. 4-bedrooms. 1/4 acre. Wasn't Brand New, hence the nice-sized lot. Most of the new home developments have postage stamp lots where you can pass the Gray Poupon to your neighbor through the window and smell each others' farts. And they cost at least 30% more than the resale homes. I generally don't recommend those.
New custom home on large lot? Sure. Big bucks. $1.5M-$2M+.
I just don't like this false narrative that you've got to be loaded to own a decent property here. Way too many people hear that and believe that and never even try to become homeowners, which is sad because they're getting bent over on rent and missing the boat.
[quoted image]

Quoted from jeffro01:

You do realize the East Bay expands far beyond those boundaries? Speaking of things that are ridiculous, I think it's ridiculous for you to make such a statement about how knowledgeable you are about this, that, and the other, and then say something like you've never been to Martinez... There's this fallacy that's been put out there, NorCalRealtor talks about it, that everything in the Bay Area is unaffordable when that's simply not true.
Yes, your area is expensive, no doubt. But to make such a blanket statement based on one generalized area doesn't make much sense.
For the rest of the country commenting on our real-estate values here, no one is disputing you can buy more (usually far more) somewhere else outside of LA/SF Bay Area. As such, you can think our property values here are as ridiculous as you want but our weather here is as close to perfect as it gets, really can say the same thing for the entire CA coast, and our proximity to high-paying jobs is unlike anywhere else in the US. Things are so expensive here because the market dictates they be, that's how it works. If no one wanted to live here and there weren't a gluttonous amount of high-paying jobs, then no doubt the real-estate prices wouldn't be so high comparatively speaking.
Jeff

Quoted from jeffro01:

But then I'd have to live in NC where I personally don't want to live. The weather there doesn't remotely match up to the weather here on the CA coast for starters. Furthermore, there aren't plenty of tech jobs in NC paying 150K+ per year, I know, I've looked... I've been recruited several times by companies in NC, and TX, and neither can hold a candle to the salaries paid for equivalent work in CA...
Jeff