You can be as quantitative as you like, but you still have to define your preferences (aka fitness function, aka loss function).
There is really no generic advice -- some people hate winter and move to Florida or the Southwest, some people really like the change of seasons and move to the Northeast. Some people need to live near the ocean, some like mountains. Some need the high voltage of large cities, some feel better in a lower-stress pastoral setting. Etc. etc.
In practice most people are driven by job and family constraints. If you have none, well, figure out which climate zone you like, figure out whether you like large cities, figure out what do you want to do and where it's best to do it...
Thanks. So there are no common bad or commonly regretted decisions, ways people commonly get exploited, factors people commonly neglect or anything of that sort? (Also, do I really have that many degrees of freedom at ~$1000 a month?)
If so, that's good to know, but I'm still not sure how to actually do it. Is there a centralized list of housing providers, possibly one that can be automatically ranked by relevant criteria? Amazon pretends to do that with computers, but (last I checked) many if not most models don't have the relevant fields entered and so don't show up.
This is a thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. The previous "stupid" questions thread is at almost 500 questions in about a month, so I think it's time for a new one.
Also, I have a new "stupid" question.