Heh, I live in Arkansas and have a comfortable house with a nice sized yard in a reasonably nice, young professional/older blue collar neighborhood.
From what I can tell, to move to somewhere like Massachusetts or New York, I might could double my salary, but it would cost 3 or 4 times as much to live there in a tiny apartment. I'd love to have that access to Broadway shows or the Boston Symphony, but at that rate, I can wait for the traveling Broadway productions or take a vacation up there every couple of years.
That is probably a lot of it. You can live pretty well down here for MUCH less money. It's not as sexy, but are the headaches that go with the sexy locations worth it?
I'm getting lonely -- WAAAAHHHHHH!
I grew up in Arkansas and that's part of the reason I'm moving out of Mass. Not only is it cheaper pretty much anywhere else, but the closer you get to the city (Boston) the ruder people are. I'm on the New Hampshire border, in a small town, and it's not too different in attitude than where I grew up. The small towns outside of Boston (and Cambridge and Brookline etc) try to vote some sense into the rest of the state, but the liberal population centers out vote us. In the town I live in, there were way more Bush/Cheney signs than Kerry/Edwards in the last election. However, there are some folks in this thread who feel we don't have to right to move outside of the state ...
You can rent in the Boston area for very reasonable prices relative to salaries, but yeah, the costs of owning a home are in the stratosphere. Those amenities (and they are wonderful) are enough to keep 20-somethings and empty nesters in the state, but people without a lot of money who are concerned about having a home for their kids are trading in the big city glamor for a place they can afford to settle down. Boston isn't so exciting if you have to settle 40 miles away to buy a home.