Where’s home?

<Post written by Bryan & Joanna>

As 2020 begins, we’re looking ahead to the next chapter, after our wandering sabbatical year in Berlin. One of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves is where to call home. We acknowledge how incredibly lucky and privileged we are to have the opportunity to consider & choose where to live. Many people do not have this freedom. This year we lived for a bit in Berlin, stayed for a while in New York and London, and visited many other cities in the US and around Europe.

As we’ve traveled, we have felt how life is similar and different in each city. It’s helped us hone our senses and discuss what we each like and what matters to us, even as we remember that most of what makes life happy and fulfilling is not where we live, but rather how and with whom. Here are some of the main things we’ve been thinking about as we contemplate where to live starting in 2020. Wherever we land, we hope to stay there at least 3-4 years, and then reconsider whether we want to stay or move on.

Diversity & Integration

For us, places where people with diverse backgrounds & interests can live together are better places to live. They’re more equitable and offer more enriching life experiences to all residents.

Diversity is just one piece of the puzzle — we also want a place that’s well-integrated, where people of all kinds share common space, whether at markets, schools, restaurants, playing fields, or community groups. For instance, while San Francisco is relatively diverse as a whole, its neighbourhoods and schools are less well integrated.

During our travels this year, we’ve walked through many urban boundaries. We’ve crossed a street and gone from a restaurant with all White customers to a church with all Black attendees, or from age-diverse non-hipster stores to young hipster-central, or from fancy terraced houses to world-class tourist trap. While we were in the US, we enjoyed comparing our experiences on the ground with maps of diversity data. The University of Virginia Dot Map is especially readable (runner up: National Geographic’s Diversity Map).

Easy Access to Nature & Cuteness

We care a lot about the urban environment we participate in and how it feels.

For both of us, having nature nearby nourishes life — from the trees that we see out the window, to parks and waterways nearby for walks, to wilderness we can easily reach. We want to be in a vibrant, dense city environment, yet a quick hop from an ocean, forest, lake, or mountain. While here in Berlin, the city parks and country lakes have been wonderful, especially in summer, but we’ve missed dipping our toes in the Pacific Ocean and hiking in the Sierras. It’s flat here for a hundred miles in every direction, and the tallest thing nearby is a World War II rubble heap.

For Joanna, beautiful buildings (as opposed to ugly flat boxes) are also important. The more crown moulding there is, the better. Though a natural wood look is nice, too. Bryan’s a little more lax on this criterion — he appreciates homes that blur inside and outside, but he’s okay with anything that is not a brutalist chunk of concrete. Too many years spent in the depths of the MC in Waterloo.

Great Urban Mobility

Moving from one place to another fills a good chunk of our daily lives. This is why we prefer to live in mixed-use areas where we can move quickly, delightfully, and safely through a typical day.

Ideally we also want to be able to commute to work and meet up with friends in under 30 minutes by bike or transit. Also we’d like everything we need day-to-day within a nice 5 minute walk or bike ride. This means we should be able to get to the grocery, doctor, gym, yoga, haircut, bakery, drug store, tasty restaurants, Döner kebab, and nifty cultural things. Our neighborhood in Berlin, Kreuzberg, fits the bill:

A few factors that contribute to great mobility in Kreuzberg are good bike infrastructure, high density buildings that are all 6-7 stories, mixed-use zoning, and walkable street blocks. In his post about life in Berlin, Bryan wrote a lot more about why mobility is so delightful. Even on our quiet side street, there are a couple dozen businesses on the block – everything from a daycare to an orthopedic center. You can see what this feels like in a bike tour near our house:

New York and Berlin definitely come out ahead in mobility (though getting from Brooklyn to Harlem is not exactly fast). London was also very dense, but tended to have less mixed-use zoning. It felt like everyone takes the tube to different areas for sleep, work, and entertainment. Parts of the city felt like ghost towns in the morning, mid-day, or evening. The San Francisco Bay Area is okay by American standards, but has pretty awful urban mobility in comparison.

Delightful Culture

Joanna likes having access to great museums, performing arts, talks, and other fun activities. It’s the best when there are a million things going on at once, and nearby. She also values being in a place with a sense of history, where people feel a connection to their heritage and like to explore how their history can inform today’s culture. She appreciates the sense of purpose and energy that comes from common acknowledgment there is much to be done to make our community (neighborhood, city, region, world…) a better place. Joanna also likes living somewhere relatively non-materialistic (except for beautiful buildings & public space), where there is less focus on buying nifty objects and waiting in lines, and more on picnicking in the park, visiting a museum, or going on a bike ride.

While there are many smaller places with great culture, Joanna really does like having many many things going on. For example, Santa Fe was great culture-wise, but at the same time rather sleepy. Joanna liked living in Bonn for a summer back in 2011, too – but it’s also quiet for our current life stage. For now, Joanna thinks a metropolitan area of around 6 million or (preferably) more people is nice. For Bryan, how vibrant a city is also matters, but there are smaller cities that he thinks are nice too. Like Denver, at just under 3 million.

We’ll reconsider in 3-4 years. There aren’t too many cities that are that big, so it’s a little limiting.

Strong Social Services

Social services are important to us, both for ourselves and because they allow for a more fair and equitable society. Everyone should have access to quality food, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, other parenting support (e.g., parental leave), work-life balance, and retirement. When people do hit a rough patch, they should be reasonably supported rather than unnecessarily or excessively punished/criminalized.

Germany excels on all of these fronts. We have friends here who quit work for a few years to go back to university. University tuition is nearly free. There’s no pervasive competition to move to the neighborhoods with the best schools or send kids to private school, creating more pressure to earn. Our friends here take more than a month of vacation a year, and several work four-day weeks. New parents get a year of paid leave, shared across both partners. Unemployment payments are generous, and recipients can also take a range of actually-quite-reasonable courses to improve their job prospects. There’s no stigma associated with being temporarily unemployed, and the consequences are rarely catastrophic (except in parts of the East, where there is some systemic unemployment associated with the decline of manufacturing post-socialism). The criminal justice system is also more humane, with better prison conditions, much shorter sentences, and somewhat less systemic racism. Of course, racism and white nationalism are certainly still big problems in Germany – for example, minority kids are systemically tracked into worse schools, and there was recently something in the news about an extremist state legislator in the former East shouting “Negro” repeatedly during a legislative session (and then claiming he wasn’t being racist…). But still, incarceration rates are an order of magnitude lower than in the US, and rates of homeless people on the streets are an order of magnitude lower than in SF (though overall housing insecurity rates are similar).

In the US, social supports are weaker. While we’re fortunate to have some savings, to live a German lifestyle in the US, we’d both need to maintain high-paying jobs. That’s the only reliable way to build savings and pay for services the government does not cover well. Plus we’ll both need to continue fighting at work to show that it’s what you do that matters, not how many hours you work.

And of course, no matter what we do, there will be many people around us who cannot afford that lifestyle and are suffering from lack of social services and high levels of systemic injustice. Bryan is fine with this, because inequality of opportunity is far worse globally, and in the US one can do more to improve things everywhere. Joanna agrees that the US is a great place to work on changing the world for the better – it is vibrant, ambitious, and powerful. However, it still makes her uncomfortable to be in a society that she believes accepts too much injustice, and to some degree even praises inequality.

Perhaps because of being raised on stories of the Holocaust and having lived for a couple of years in Germany, Joanna also goes through life asking herself with reasonable frequency: Are there ways in which our society is committing crimes similar to what the Nazis did? How am I personally complicit? What actions could I take to be less complicit? Acknowledging that everybody is to some degree complicit, am I okay with my degree of complicity? These are difficult questions.

Affordability

A place must also be affordable, given the salaries we might have. This is one area where relative differences are more important long term than absolute differences.

For example, even though everything costs a half or a third as much in Berlin vs. San Francisco, the salaries are also about a third. On the flip side, there are more social services offered in Germany. While our American savings go farther here in absolute terms, if we stay long term, what matters more is our relative purchasing power.

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In the end, Berlin, SF, and NYC look like roughly a wash. London stands out as comparably unaffordable, with expenses closer to NYC and SF but salaries closer to Berlin. It seemed that cost of living makes a real impact on many Londoners’ quality of life – very long commutes, being forced to live in areas with poor air quality, and less ability to take advantage of all the amazing cultural offerings of the city. However, it’s always hard to judge from the outside – it seems these concerns, along with gentrification, are present in just about every city we visit.

Family & Friends

We’re totally burying the lede. Friends and family are the most important of all. This year we’ve missed seeing all of you in Canada and the US — you’re so far away!!

Good Career Opportunities

This is the other super-important item. We want a place where we can both find impactful, rewarding work in 2020. Deciding what to do for work is a huge topic unto itself!

Joanna has previously had a hard time finding work in Germany, but this time around she felt she could find something in scooters or electric mobility. Trickier than finding work in the US, and there’s also a lot of sexism in the workplace, but doable.

Bryan spent time looking, but it was harder to find interesting work in Berlin. While the tech scene’s been growing in the last decade, it is small in comparison to the other cities, with few interesting openings for more senior engineers. Plus there’s a critical mass of talent and companies in fewer industries, like Finance, Advertising, and E-commerce, all areas Bryan’s currently less interested in working in.

What’s Next?

While there are many good places to live, no place checks every box. It’s been hard to choose. A few months ago, New York, Berlin, London, and San Francisco were still on our short list — they are all reasonable in almost every area above.

After deliberating, we’ve decided to go back to the US and move to either San Francisco or New York. Let us know if you have thoughts on where we should go!

London was wonderful in many ways, but it felt harder to afford, less mixed-use in many areas, and a bit less social-democratic than the rest of Europe. While Berlin is a wonderful city to live in, there are far fewer interesting jobs for Bryan, and likely also fewer for Joanna. Plus we’ll be closer to all of you in North America! But Joanna will still very much miss Berlin, and so we promised to reconsider living in Europe in a few years.

We’ll be arriving in San Francisco on January 27 and will see where life takes us after that. Until we find work, we’ll be staying in North Berkeley. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to see you!