Here’s something I bet you’ve heard before: Columbus is an affordable place to live.
Joel Kotkin at New Geography reasserted this mantra once again with a new listing of cities where “paychecks stretch the furthest”. Their research takes a look at average annual wages of major US cities, and then adjusts for cost of living. Columbus placed well at #10 on the list, with an average wage of $48k that scales up to nearly $54k after adjustment.
Kotkin identifies some of the trends to be found in the top cities on the list. From the article:
“Most of the top 10 are relatively buoyant economies with relatively low costs of living. These include Dallas-Fort Worth (fifth), Charlotte, N.C. (sixth), Cincinnati (seventh), Austin, Texas (eighth), and Columbus, Ohio (10th). These areas all also have housing affordability rates below 3.0 except for Austin, which clocks in at 3.5. Similar situations down the list include such mid-sized cities as Nashville, (11th), St.Louis (12th), Pittsburgh, (13th), Denver (15th) and New Orleans (16th).”
The cost of living concept isn’t anything new, but analysis like this article presents is always good food for thought when considering making a move to somewhere like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Miami, all of which fall toward the bottom of the list.
The full article can be read at www.newgeography.com.
Photo by Jennifer René of BeyondSnapshots.net.