I have my own consulting business out in the midwest. All my clients are remote, and in January I paid around 33% (utilities included) of that rent figure for my housing, for approx. 4x's the sq ft, and made almost 15x's the above figure last month.
You can live in a shack in the woods for next to nothing, but do your peers live there? Are you comfortable remoting in? Can you meet with investors who work in or near Boston on a moment's notice?
The solution here is not to push people out of the cities but to make the cities more livable for those that want to live there.
You have a great consulting business, but living way outside of an urban area is a lifestyle is not for everyone.
Busses and trains are invariably packed beyond capacity, no one can afford their own place, and landlords aren't held accountable for property quality. Blame decades of zoning laws and historical fetishism that prevented high rises from being built and kept us all in buildings with single pane windows and only three bedrooms. At least they have pretty old bricks outside....
But then, each unit has its own clothes washer/dryer. That seems really inefficient in terms of unused space and appliances (not to mention added water and drain infrastructure throughout the building). Putting a laundry room in the basement, or mabye one on every floor, with coin-op machines seems like a much better idea all around. Most older apartment buildings have this arrangement, so it's not something unusual.
