It's a really nascent scene, and you want to avoid letting the culture get in the way of business, but it has a lot of promise.
Houston is a wonderfully large and diverse city, and there is always a lot of work to find around here while pursuing your startup. We've got top-notch engineering talent (NASA and the energy sector), and the best private research university in Texas. The food is really good, housing to match near any requirement is readily available, and the people are friendly.
Rochester, NY (roughly equal time away from Boston and NYC, legacy of engineering culture from Xerox, Kodak, ITT, etc. Low COL, high quality of life, manufacturing base for physical goods, multiple universities, data centers with good connectivity)
Perhaps of interest is this report from the Brookings Institution:
Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and its Metropolitan Areas
* Austin, TX (seems to be the obvious pull-ahead winner in 2013)
* Portland, OR (great weather, beautiful, lots of potential)
* Madison, WI (near Chicago, great college town, not as cold as people think)
* Minneapolis, MN (underrated gem, beautiful, just very cold; I'm told they haven't had a 60+ yet in 2013)
* Pittsburgh, PA (CMU is right there; how is it not kicking ass?)
* Ann Arbor, MI (another Midwestern gem)
* Chicago, IL (if you consider that low-COL)
* Toronto, Ontario (ok, not a US city, but I spent a summer there and loved it)
Almost none of these would be considered low-COL (they're above 100) and relative to their regions they're quite high, but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than New York or Palo Alto.
Oh, one ass-kicking advantage of the low-COL places: people actually want to be lifelong software engineers. In New York, you can't raise a family on a (non-WS quant) engineer's salary.
Of course, most of young idiots have this insane dream of having a manager's title and pay (plus real stock options!) which you can get by 27 if you play the politics, but being full-time programmers and just using their magic manager powers to assign themselves the best work. It turns out not to work that way. Poor them...
I really think the fact that one can't raise a family out here on an engineer's salary is toxic to the culture. It creates the wrong kind of ambition.
Not being able to raise a family on less than 200k in NYC basically screams unrealistic expectations. There are plenty of software engineers with families in the city and suburbs. They are probably doing something wrong. Especially if both husband and wife are good software engineers (say Google), there is no problem at all.
And most quant salaries are not that high, I guess less than 50% of them make >200k. Again, you are probably cherry-picking successful quants working for big banks and funds and that gives you very high expectations.
I lived in Portland before coming down to startup-land, and yeah - Portland has a huge number of underemployed, talented programmers. They're a little more risk-averse than their San Francisco counterparts, but they've got stronger social fabric - so if you manage to convince one that you've got a good thing going, you can pull in ten or fifteen of their friends without much trouble.
Not that this refutes any of what you're saying, all of which I believe, but... aren't all talented programmers a bit underemployed? I don't think anyone in the mainstream has figured out how to unlock even 10% of the value that a talented programmer can bring to the table.
Perhaps I am jaded, but I look at what most people do at their day jobs and it makes me sick to see trillions of dollars of unrealized economic value being spilled on the floor because the wrong people are calling the shots.
Sure, but there's a difference between the Bay Area underutilized programmer making 100k+ and jumping from job to job, and the underemployed Portland programmer who's out of work half the time and the other half takes jobs that pay 40k out of desperation.
I hope you're right about the future trend; the cost of raising a family in NYC / SF is a big roadblock for moving out there even considering the opportunities available. Or the alternative solution is the promotion of telecommuting.
I was in Minneapolis in the spring a few years ago and it was a very attractive city. The winters are harsh and long, though. I actually mind it most in the fall, because I'm used to November still being somewhat warm (northeast's "Indian summer").
Portland, according to Wikipedia, has an average January high of 47, an average July high of 81-- some seasonality but not too much-- and with 40+ percent sunshine in most of the year, doesn't seem to have the overbearing cloudiness of Seattle's winters.
Let me tell you, I absolutely love the total shit of PDX -- it's amazing, walkable, great bike culture, great food/beer/coffee culture, good public transit, beautiful environment, an amazing DIY culture that permeates everything...
But the weather? Oh my god, the weather. The weather is horrible a good 6-9 months of the year. It's amazing for 3, but oh my god does it have a cloudy, wet, no-sun-ever feel for a good chunk of the year. Wikipedia might say one thing, but really, the weather... oh man the weather.
I lived in Minnesota for 20 years and just got back from Portland. I'd say Minneapolis is average-nice but not "beautiful." The Grand Rounds and city lakes are great. The actual city parts, however, are nothing special and I would argue are actually kind of ugly, especially in late winter and early spring when there's a layer of dirty ice crust covering everything.
Portland's weather is truly miserable during the winter and is rated #1 in the country for seasonal affective disorder. The summers, however are beautiful.
As somebody who currently lives in the Twin Cities I can vouch for both the upside and downside. So far this year the weather has been awful (we're about to get hit by a wintery mix for the next two days) but I think that's true for many places this year. The summers are shorter but beautiful. Spring and Autumn seem to be the shortest seasons. I personally love the Fall up here. Out-state weekends trips to the lakes are awesome as well.
When it comes to the cities themselves, just like anywhere else there are some spots that are better or more trendy than others. St. Paul is an older city but in a well maintained, charactery sort of way. Minneapolis is a small city, newer feeling, much cleaner than some of the bigger cities. Their are lots of small areas within each of the cities that are pretty popular. The suburbs are constantly being built out and are very convenient to the downtown areas.
There's a number of other great things about the area to help counterbalance the weather as well. The one thing that really gets me though is that NOBODY knows how to zipper-merge.
