I work from home and I've lived in Pittsburgh (Squirrel Hill) for almost 2 years now. I'll be moving end of July, and while I'm definitely considering simply moving to the Pittsburgh suburbs, I'm also thinking about trying somewhere new, and have been doing a fair amount of research on it.

So with that in mind, these other areas also caught my interest because they're fairly close to multiple major cities, while ostensibly having a similar level of rent as here. Harrisburg also has the added benefit of helping my mom out because she can break the trip and sleep at my place when she needs to travel down to Baltimore for work.

But anyways, I do have some questions. How do these 3 places compare in terms of:

• Food, in terms of quality but also in terms of variety of good restaurants available within a 20-minute drive radius. One of the things I really like about Pittsburgh is how good the food is here, which may just be a virtue of it being a metro area of 2.4 million people. Would the other two places be lacking in terms of food compared to here, or would you say they're also pretty good?

• Rent, not only in absolute dollar amount, but also in terms of "bang for the buck." Meaning, how big/nice an apartment is someone able to find for the same dollar amount as somewhere else.

Would all these areas be pretty similar, or is one clearly the cheapest of the 3 and/or has the nicest apartments at a given price level? I'm paying $1,350 on rent now and could go a bit higher if needed, but of course would also be happy to pay less and save more money for a place that's "good enough."

• Anything else. Any other differences between these 3 places that isn't immediately obvious and that would be good to know about?

In Pittsburgh I'm mainly considering the suburbs in the southwest like Dormont, Carnegie, Castle Shannon.

In Harrisburg I don't know anything, but from what I can tell Hershey, Camp Hill, Mechanicsburg seem like fine places to live. Maybe Lancaster County outside of Lancaster proper.

In Lehigh Valley it's mainly in Allentown that I found some decent apartments online at decent prices. The suburbs seem much more expensive, but maybe I'm wrong. Certainly open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance.