I&#x27;ve lived in Boston, DC, NYC and London for extended periods of time, and spent a stint in Berlin. It&#x27;s tech scene is awesome - if you find the right group of people it feels like CCC year round. It&#x27;s art, music and food scene was an amazing value for the money when I was there circa 2011.<p>I&#x27;m guessing the equivalent of their hipsters got wise to it and drove up prices a la the gentrification you saw (compare the between the dirty-grimy NYC of the &quot;Taxi Driver&quot; 1970s vs the clean power-tie NYC of the 1980s bond-trading years, or the early 2000s Williamsburg where the rent was somewhat reasonable vs 2010 where anything on the L costed literally 3 times as much because every white kid with a fixie had his parents pay his $2600 rent, etc. $800&#x2F;mo on a split isn&#x27;t too bad for Boston if you&#x27;re anywhere close to a decent spot on the T, considering the supply&#x2F;demand (it&#x27;s arguably the biggest college region in the US - between Cambridge, Boston and BC in Newton it&#x27;s probably the densest student:non-student ratio in the US). Berlin had that vibrant feeling that&#x27;s hard to explain but yeah the tech scene was (and hopefully still is) spectacular, especially re: the hardware hacking scene when I was there and it&#x27;s certainly worth a visit.<p>Edit: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccc.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccc.de&#x2F;</a> In math if you solve something major, odds are you&#x27;ll wait till that years AMS Symposium to present; if you crack the PS3, CCC is where fail0verflow went to present. (Don&#x27;t write them off because of their l33t-name, these guys aren&#x27;t script kiddies -- these hacks are worthy of PhD theses if you see the detail of reverse engineering they go into.).