I moved from Los Angeles to Brazil. I pay $1,600 a month to live in a complex with a supermarket, day care, and restaurants.

• Luca Martins is a 28-year-old content creator who moved from LA to Brazil in 2023.
• His apartment complex in Rio has everything he could ever need and costs half as much as his rent in LA.
• Because his rent is much lower, Luca's quality of life is better.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luca Martins. It has been edited for length and clarity.

After having moved to the United States from Brazil when I was 13, I started feeling homesick while living in Los Angeles in 2023.

I packed my bags and decided to visit my family in Rio, but very quickly realized I didn't want to leave. In Brazil, I felt I was home. My wife, also originally from Brazil, and I decided we'd stay.

We moved into a gated community

For the first six months in Rio, we stayed with family while deciding where we would live. They lived in a gated complex on the west side of the city.

It's not just a gated neighborhood as you might see in the US — it's more like a gated city within a city. There are about 25,000 people who live in the complex.

We loved the area and the complex, and that my family was all close by, and decided we would rent an apartment in the same complex but in a different building.

This gated community has everything. If you didn't want to go outside the gates, you would hardly need to. We have a large supermarket, day care, a retirement home, a shopping mall, sports facilities, places to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a pharmacy, medical services, and parks — which you can access, some for free and some not.

I pay $1,600 a month

My apartment is 800 square feet, and has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Inside my building, there is a spa, spin and yoga rooms, an outdoor pool, a gym with lots of equipment, a restaurant, and a convenience store. There is a salon and laundry room (although we never use the laundry room because we have a washer and dryer in our apartment).

For all of this, I pay about $1,600 a month. This is half of what I was paying for a townhouse in the suburbs of LA. My place in LA was in a gated community, but it didn't have the amenities I have in this complex in Rio.

My routine these days consists of working through the morning, and then heading to the gym, pool, and spa (which has a steam and sauna room and jacuzzi) in the afternoon or evening. All of these spaces are included in my rent.

Friends gather around these places too, so although I work alone, I never feel alone. I connect with people more here than I ever did in LA, where you had to drive an hour to see anyone.

I feel safe

If I want more than my building offers, I can venture into the rest of the complex, and I feel safe at all times. Rio does have safety issues in different parts of the city, but here I can walk around in the middle of the night without fear, knowing there are gates and security guards on the premises.

Although gated communities exist all around the world, I've never seen one quite like this.

With my lower monthly rent, I've been able to save and travel more, two things I couldn't do nearly as much while living in LA. My quality of life is generally much better here because I don't have to squeeze in work all the time to make ends meet.

I can't see any reason my wife and I would move from here anytime soon. We're surrounded by family, and live in what is effectively a giant neighborhood that we love.

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