I'm a lifetime Seattle resident, and so I never seriously considered moving out to the suburbs to get more house for my money. But alot of people have subscribed to the "drive until you qualify" method of buying a home. In other words, if you can't find the 3000 square foot house you want in Seattle, drive out farther until you find a 3000 sf house that you can afford. I always thought this was a little weird, since this inevitably means that people spend alot more time in their cars commuting to work, which means they a) spend more on gas, b) spend more on car maintenance, c) lose more of their day to sitting in traffic, and d) have to deal with *alot* more stress that comes from unpredictable commutes and traffic jams. My 3 years of crossing Lake Washington to work pretty much cemented my thinking about this - living close to where you work is a good thing, as each of the items I noted above has a cost (the worst one for me was the stress of the commute - need to be somewhere by a certain time? Throw it all out the window if you have to sit in traffic...).

Anyways, I always thought it would be cool if someone smarter than me put together the *real* cost of living farther out from where you work. Certainly you pay more money for your house if you live nearer to the city, where most jobs tend to be. But at what point does paying high prices for in-city homes outweigh the benefits of being close to work? And at what point does all the driving and commuting outweigh the savings one might get from buying a less expensive home farther out?

Well, the folks at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have finally put something out that lets people measure some of the costs of high priced homes versus a high priced commute.
The site is pretty cool, as it lets you view things like the average cost of housing + transportation for neighborhoods in some of the country's more populous regions. For example, I can see that living in Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle) has a similar cost of housing + transportation to living in my neighborhood in Seattle. And costs being equal, that tells me that I could make my decision on where to live based on the nearness of my place of employment, since that will cause me less commuting stress.

Now, the information is based on 2000 census data, and as a result it's not very current. I also don't think it takes into account the current cost of gas, which could make some locations far from centers of employment much more expensive than what the map shows. But it's a useful tool for comparing one area to another.

Here's the link: http://htaindex.cnt.org