Considering relocating from Montana, advice...tips?

Anyway, I was looking into the Phoenix area, specifically Chandler.

Ahh... generic cul-de-sac suburb nightmare town that hasn't yet settled into its own real culture. Snoreriffic!

Is the cost of housing/living there pretty fair compared to wages?

http://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator

Does anyone have specific information about the tech industry there? Healthy, open, or overcrowded with too much talent?

Land is abundant, electricity is cheap, there's lots of tech opportunity here. Pay isn't great but low(ish) housing costs help soften that.

Is it true basically everything is air conditioned?

My little tin lawn mower shed thing is not air conditioned. Everything else is.

I love heat, the snow up here drives me insane but I'm worried I might melt.

Five million people live here... some how. The city heat bubble is shitty, I did the math once and it's the equivalent of a hair dryer blowing every 100 feet for 16,000 square miles (in addition to the heat soak of asphalt and the direct contributions of the sun) - ironically if everyone turned off their A/C the whole city would cool off a bit. Ha!

How about the people, are strangers usually friendly, or do most folks keep their heads down and have a leave me alone attitude?

This isn't Compton, don't expect strangers to start conversations with you but nobody will mind if you start one. Houses here don't have stoops and we historically haven't had a ton of multi-family housing (compared to other cities this size) so people don't seem generally to know their neighbors very well or care about each others' business.

Also as far as Phoenix goes, what parts of the city are more liberal and which are more conservative?

It's a patchwork. As expected, a lot of old people from northern climates come here to die and a lot of old people and boomers tend to address today's challenges with yesterday's answers. Same goes for the more religious parts of town. This leads to a lot of embarrassment for the state, but what are you gonna do? I'll put it this way, if you're the sort of person who looks forward you'll want to be downtown Phoenix or Tempe or generally situated around those things. If you're more tied to yesterday, hit the retirement areas like Sun Lakes, Sun City, etc. Most of the other suburbs are much too mixed up to declare anything useful about their political or ideological leanings.

/r/phoenix Thread