John Malone was in his mid-20s living the dream of being a software engineer in San Francisco. Except his home was a three-bedroom house shared with six other guys. He returned to his hometown and now in his 40s, married with a daughter, Malone lives in Minneapolis duplex with a yard.
"Starting again in the Twin Cities made sense," says Malone. "As you get older and have a family, you can't have roommates. It's about quality of life."
Techies are leaving Silicon Valley for more affordable places to live compared with San Francisco where the median home listed price is $1.4 million and San Jose at $994,000. Realtor.com set out to find new Silicon Valleys by looking at 500 cities and ranking criteria such as number of people employed in the tech sector, average tech job salaries, and media home list price. The data team tossed out places where the media home price exceeded $400,000 and came up with a ranking of the top 10 affordable cities for techies.
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