10 Cities Where Housing + Transportation Costs Are Crushing

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Thanks for the "Just stop it" line about folks who say you have to eat more or replace your shoes more if you live in walkable or bikeable city.

Can't wait for the 10 cities with the lowest housing and transportation costs. Also, I'd love a big spreadsheet with every city that met your criteria and how they all stack up. Analysis like this is so valuable, even beyond the top and bottom ten.

As a SoCal resident the inland empire is truly a crime against urbanism that I cannot wrap my head around. And people tell me it’s so great because you can afford a 3 car garage ?? 🤨🤨

Living in SF it’s always shocked me when coworkers transfer/move to LA because they want a “cheaper cost of living”. I hear it all the time. But even if your apartment is 30-40% less expensive, the dramatic increase in transportation costs and decrease in quality of life from having to drive everywhere, coupled with the lower salaries, make it seem like a losing deal every time I’ve ran the numbers. In SF (which is pretty compact) my transportation costs are effectively zero (except for the burning in my thighs when biking up the hills)

What hurts many of the low median-income cities on this list is that the cost of rent and median income scale appropriately, whereas the cost of ownership of a car does not.

We are a 6 figure income couple and had very little saved and not much cash lying around the preverbal". '...don't have $500 for an emergency" that was us. The big thing was debt all kinds of it, cars mortgage (although our home isn't a high price one), student loans for our kids, and of course credit cards. One day we just got sick of being broke and went total scorched earth and became frugal overnight. Paid it all off, it took almost 5 years but now we have no debt and this year our savings rate is 50% on basically the same income that had us perpetually broke. So for us it is mainly staying out of debt and watching our spending, at first it was a real effort to save in our HISA and 401Ks but now it's actually fun watching our money grow. No car or vacation or neighborhood is worth being broke or financially unstable.

I find the mix between super car dependent cities with low income and expensive rental markets to be interesting in this video, and like you said it’s fascinating to see how much “unseen” financial damage owning a car has on those who own them. I wonder why Americans constantly complain about housing costs but almost never complain about car maintenance/purchase costs…

Please please make the top 10 most affordable H+T cities!

As someone who lives in Miami, I 100% saw that coming. Traffic is awful, most of the city and county outside the rich areas are unwalkable, there's useless public transit, and in the last few years its just gotten so ruinously expensive. I love it here and it has so much potential but its just insane.

It’s so sad that as a country we do not prioritize regional connectivity and mass transit. If European cities can do it with lower gdp’s , so could we if we really wanted to. This is not sustainable on so many levels. We are on a sinking ship and most never think about the long term lack of efficacy in what we have created . Thanks for the vid!

I'm not shocked by Miami's place on the list AT ALL. I graduated from FIU in 2012, and I wanted to stay in Miami after I graduated but the available jobs were so low pay that it wasn't workable at all. From what I've heard from people I know who live there, conditions have not improved. It's ridiculous and unsustainable.

Hialeah native / refugee here... I used to have a 90 minute commute to FIU each day when I was in college. The traffic everywhere was and is a huge drag. And no one really makes good money. It's a difficult place to live.

The brutal part of many car dependent cities is that sharing a car with a spouse or roommate is prohibitively challenging. While housing benefits from economies of scale based on your household size, transportation does not. This is how you may find yourself going from needing 0 vehicles to 2, and spending an extra $2k per month on transportation and immediately losing all the housing savings.

As someone from Hialeah, I am not at all surprised by this video. Hialeah is a special case, even for a city as odd as Miami. It is the 7th largest city in Florida, with over 220,000 officially. However, this city has a HUGE population of undocumented immigrants, which has been skyrocketing especially since 2021, so I would not be surprised if this number was closer to 300,000, making it the 5th largest in Florida. There are many reasons why people from Hialeah don't pack their bags and leave. Most importantly, the city is almost entirely (95%+) Hispanic, of which 75% are immigrants. Most of these immigrants (73%) are Cuban, so the city is the Cuban mecca in the US. People from Hialeah stay there because of family, cultural ties, and a language barrier. Many people in Hialeah barely speak English, and the city's de facto official language is Spanish, which is used in stores, businesses, banks, hospitals, and even government buildings more than English. For a non-English speaker, staying in this city is just too convenient, even if economically it makes sense to move away. Another reason is that extended families live together. It is common to see 10+ people sharing a single house in Hialeah, with everybody working and contributing to the rent or mortgage payment. It is also very common for people to turn a spare room into a studio (we call those efficiency homes). The city is very car-centric, so in nearly every parking lot you see at least 3 cars, and as you may expect, the traffic is a nightmare. There has been a huge exodus of Cubans in the past 2 years, and many of them end up in Hialeah, at least temporarily. Lastly, most people (or at least a sizeable minority) understate their income to receive welfare from the government. This is, unfortunately, a cultural norm here, especially among Cubans who are used to "cheating the system" since that's really the only way to get by in Cuba. Many people who receive food stamps and/or live in low-income housing have nice cars and travel pretty often. I had friends in high school who lived in low-income housing yet they lived a pretty luxurious lifestyle and traveled pretty often (which you wouldn't expect from someone living in low-income housing). Since people understate their incomes so much, the city is poorer on paper than it actually is. Yes, there is higher-than-average poverty in this city, but many people are pretending to be poor when they actually aren't. TLDR: Hialeah is a huge ethnic enclave for Cubans, where Spanish is used more than English, even in businesses and government buildings. Immigrants who do not speak English and want to be close to their family and culture stay here, even if it comes at a premium. The median household income is probably higher than official statistics show since many people understate their incomes. It is common for many people to share a single house, so individuals don't pay as much in rent or mortgage.

I grew up in south Florida and I’m down in right now visiting family. The urban fabric, or suburban fabric, is absolutely insane here. Everything is a strip mall or gated community and you need a car just to get across the street to the grocery store. I love my family, but I’ve grown to hate living in Florida.

My monthly train pass in Japan was around $250 US. That allowed me to travel at any time between my home stop and my final destination, which was about an hour away. It covered quite a lot of area, including Shibuya, Ginza, and lots of other cool and convenient places. The best part was that my employer paid it! I still took home a decent salary too.

This is one of your best videos yet! Because it really speaks to the problems that are intentionally overlooked by the extremes of the cultural divide. Urbanists might long for a place like NYC but suburbanites will scream "who wants to live in a box for $3000 a month!". This video shows, yes that is valid! But likewise, it shows a cheap booming sunbelt city where the transportation costs are rarely considered, and the urbanists go, "see! It's not as cheap or great as you think!" So yes, this combined metric is quite a valuable indicator. I'm excited for your next video. Hope to see my hometown Baltimore on there.

mexico has just announced plans to reintroduce passenger rail connecting a majority of the biggest cities, have plans to build a new inter-oceanic rail corridor, and are completing the tren maya project in the yucatan peninsula. think this would be a great time to have another video looking at the future of mexican cities! theres also plans to build the mexico city to guanajuato high speed railway in the news following the upcoming election. so much stuff to talk about!

Not surprised by Miami, how much of the housing in those downtown high rises are part time New Yorkers/Chicagoans who only live there December - February (or for a full 6 months + 1 day if they hate taxes)? Those kinds of "vacation cities" can absolutely ruin affordability for those that actually live there full time.