Ask HN: What sucks about where you live?

My only gripe with Tampa is the length & intensity of summer.

It's incredibly humid the entire year. Close to 100% humidity and 100 degrees F quite often in the middle of the day. April through November is just hot as heck.

You are hot and sweaty...and stay hot and sweaty until you take a shower and dry off. I see people walking around in suits downtown and I can't understand how they manage it. Getting into your car is a task because you're essentially hopping in an oven.

Additionally, today is the first "nice day" in a while and its's still 90 F with 60% humidity. It's almost October. We don't really have a fall, which is what I loved about living further north in Atlanta. I'm exhausted by it by the time August ends and this will last into November.

The strangest part is that the humidity makes cold nights feel even colder than dryer places. So 45F in Tampa is crazy cold due to the moisture in the air. It doesn't help that we're not geared up for those 10 nights per year either. I noticed this when I spent time in CO. I want to go for a run at 45F in Denver!

The only other major gripes I have is that our transportation and the way our downtown has developed hasn't worked. Urban sprawl hurt us quite a bit with the former.

But(!), there are benefits. * I can easily get away with wearing shorts for nearly the entire year. I go to meetings in shorts and it's great. * Rent is _very_ reasonable. * Lots of outdoor things to do: our Riverwalk downtown is amazing to bike/walk/run on. * We have some quality food and FL loves beer, so we have some nice breweries beyond Cigar City.

Due to the heat, I want to spend some of each year up north. It's just too much for me.

Oh, and I'll reiterate the real estate tax issue - you can definitely get a bigger, more livable place here, but the taxes are sort of obscene. For example, you can get a nice, newish 2br / 2ba condo in your choice of neighborhoods, probably with parking for 450k. Your tax bill will be 8-9k.

Calgary here

Pros:

* young, positive population with drive & ambition

* outdoor & health focus

* expanding cultural diversity, western hospitality

* no sales tax

* Calgary Stampede

Cons:

* focus on Oil & Gas masks other opportunities, startups

* boring IT jobs

* rising cost of living

* the weather

* Calgary Stampede

Juneau, Alaska

- There isn't much developable land as a lot of it is locked up in national forests or government or tribal entities, so housing prices and rent are high.

- Food prices are high due to transport requirements, both for groceries and restaurants (Juneau has no roads in, so everything comes by air or by sea).

- Wages are not especially high.

- Almost every couple ends up working two incomes to deal with the prices of food and housing.

- There is a severe daycare shortage in town which leads to problems trying to manage kids and multiple incomes.

- Lots of rain in the spring and in the fall.

However, when the sun is shining, it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

If you like being outside, it's one of the best places for experiencing the outdoors that I know of. There is almost nowhere in town where you are more than about a 15 minute walk from being either beside water, or hiking a mountain.

It also has a deep sense of community and people here seem genuinely interested in helping each other.

Austin:

- Traffic (goes without saying in most booming US cities). Infrastructure is largely unchanged since the 70s. Poorly mismanaged toll roads are instead implemented. Drivers are fucking god-awful (seriously, nowhere in the Northeast was it as bad as it is in the South -- something about the heat). With no short or long term solution in sight for remedying the traffic that worsens every day, makes me worry about staying here much longer, let alone buy property.

- Homeless. Many TX (and other US cities for that matter) cities have no qualms about giving their homeless one-way bus tickets to here. They're nasty too. Even more nasty than NYC's homeless. City has no idea what to do about it.

- Despite there being plenty of new apartment complexes near downtown being erected, there's still lots of obstinacy to increasing housing density. Also some of the most bizarre zoning laws I've ever seen (don't get me started on what Austin considers "historical").

- While there are many outdoor places to hike and whatnot, many of the day hikes are largely the same scenery. Places in Austin will get packed with loud and disrespectful UT students. I miss actual mountains and dense woods.

- Each month or so, some cool and irreplaceable bar/restaurant/music venue that's been around for decades closes down (mainly due to rising property taxes with no ceiling in sight). What replaces them is often some generic crap millennial chain seen in other tech hubs.

- They say it's the Live Music Capital of the World, but they don't tell you that 95% of the music sucks (and much like the previous point, the city continues day-by-day to become more hostile to artists in general).

- Some would say the heat, but it personally doesn't bother me. It's a relatively dry heat in the summer anyway. Better than humid Northeast summers.