CityNerd: Which Affordable, Walkable City Should You Move To?
For those with itchy feet looking for a new place to live, this week’s CityNerd takes you on a tour of 10 cities you might not expect to be the most affordable, livable, walkable, and transit-friendly places in America.
As you might imagine, walk scores, cost of living, housing prices, and transit reach are all part of CityNerd producer Ray Delahanty’s calculus. But what moves this video into the nerd stratosphere are some special custom metrics, such as bonus points for “Lowest Freeway Lane Miles Per Capita for its Metropolitan Region.”
There are many practical considerations at play in these rankings. Delahanty says good weather is important and if you like sports, particularly college basketball or Major League Baseball, this is an underrated cities rundown for you.
“There's a staggering difference in cost of living between the sought-after cities of California (and even skyrocketing cities like Austin and Nashville), and established, legacy cities in other parts of the U.S.,” according to Delahanty’s intro for this week’s episode. “Finding affordable living in coastal and sun belt cities continues to spiral out of reach.”
CityNerd intersects with the Strong Towns approach to development and urbanism, particularly on the subjects of walkability, car dependence, and the Suburban Experiment. Nerd out on videos about induced demand; freeway lids, caps, and decks; and hunting for walkable neighborhoods. Video topics are usually viewer suggested and come out once a week.
Delahanty, the man behind CityNerd, is a Portland, Oregon-based, transportation/planning project manager with some video production in his background. He took a one-year sabbatical break and found himself producing the YouTube series. He intends to get back to his real job at some point, but in the meantime he’s having too much fun publishing for a fast-growing audience of 41,000-plus subscribers. We will be sharing CityNerd posts intermittently, when they most connect with Strong Towns themes.
Delahanty encourages his viewers to fight the good fight to get more housing built in the places where many people seem to want to live, but “some people…just can't wait for solutions,” he admits, and if you count yourselves among them, this video is for you.
For the first time this year, I attended the YIMBYTown conference, the annual gathering of the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement. Here were my impressions.