I don’t really dislike where I live, it has its good points and its bad points. I do, however, dislike having to admit to others that I live here. Telling people in the Houston area that you live in Baytown always gets the same reaction: “Ohhhh…sorry!”
Move to Kansas. 
I only dislike where I live during the winter. It’s only four or five months a year, so it’s not too bad…
I live in Southern California’s beautiful San Fernando Valley, which, on maps at least, is part of the city of Los Angeles. It’s not a bad place, but I want to go over the hill to LA proper. It’s tooooo damn hot here. It’s always at least 10 degrees cooler on the other side of the city.
But LA? Hell, it’s great!!! And I’ve lived in other cities. We got babes and celebs and beaches and mountains and cutting edge music and all kinds of stuff!
I moved to the to-be-unnamed-Midwestern-city from L.A. a few years ago.
Sure, LA has problems. But it was home, and at least it was close to the beaches and mountains.
But this to-be-unnamed-Midwestern-city is too far from the beautiful places I love. It’s flat, flat, flat. And there are some really xenophobic people here! Not everyone, of course. Some are really cool, but some are ignorant. “I’ve never been anywhere else, but all I know is that California is shitty, NY is shitty, but why don’t they acknowledge us? We are IMPORTANT too.”
Give me a frickin’ break.
Every place has its importance, and its charms, but the world does not revolve around any one place. I just want to tell these people to get over themselves. Most people outside of LA haven’t heard of my hometown of Glendale, California (it’s a suburb in the LA area) but I don’t get all bent out of shape about that.
Also, (and I have started a thread about this) where is it written that I MUST love everything here, and prefer this to-be-unnamed-Midwestern-city to LA? I don’t. But I will try to keep my mouth shut about it, so what more do they want from me? They have no right to dictate how I feel in my heart. I don’t have to “accept” anything about here if I don’t want to. As long as I try to keep my damned mouth shut about it.
Also - who SAYS that every local attraction, museum, or what have you is “just as good” as what’s in LA or NY? Sometimes it’s not. I actually have some basis of comparison, unlike some of the people here. Many of these people who are claiming that their town’s attraction is “just as good” have NO idea what they are talking about.
Of course, once again, I will make the disclaimer that (thank God) not everyone is like this in this to-be-unnamed-Midwestern-city. Many of the people here are really cool.
But still. It’s so flat here. And it gets cold in the Winter. Yech.
Wouldn’t help. Whether I’m North or South I always wish I were in Texas.
I have the exact opposite problem. I’ve been trying to get back to Louisville for about 5 years now. I was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia. I lived in Louisville for a few years after I graduated highschool. I loved everything about your city. It has a small town comfort yet most of the big-city attractions. And if Louisville doesn’t have it, you can hop up to Cincinnati for a weekend. I’ve since moved back to my hometown, but my heart will always be in Louisville. Hey, if you ever have a Louisville Dopefest I would have a good excuse to visit again.
I live in Pratts Community, just north of Tupelo, MS. I have a nice house sitting amount oak trees. There is a big cotton field across the road and another back of my house.
Almost everyone around has lived here all their lives. I’ve lived here 15 years and have loved it. But its time to move on, if for no other reason than I’ve lived here longer than anywhere. I’ve lived outside of Dayton, Ohio; Atlanta, GA; Sewanee, TN; Pensacola, FL; Quantico, Va; Santa Ana, CA; Cincinnati, Ohio; Tupelo, MS and here. They were all good places to live, but I want to go somewhere new and eventually maybe move to another country for a bit.
I moved to GA as a kid and have been called a Yankee since 1948. The weather is bad some time in any location. I’m not far from Florence, AL so I’m on the other side of the buckle on the Bible Belt. At least you know where they are coming from and don’t tell me there aren’t religious nuts in the other places I’ve lived. Some people are friendly and some are not everywhere, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to find good friends because that just doesn’t happen all the time. I really believe there are two kinds of people in this regard, those that are meant to keep moving and those that are meant to stay. The worst thing is if they marry each other, because they really don’t understand each other. It is worse than morning people and night people.
Good luck to all of you, whether you are staying or leaving.
I’m a born and bred Bostonian, and frankly, I can’t imagine ever leaving here. Sure, the traffic sucks, we’ve got the Big Dig screwing up the entire topography, the weather is extreme (it’s either horribly humid or damn freakin’ COLD), we’ve got one of the highest tax rates in the nation…but heck, it’s MY home!
Boston’s got personality – there’s none of that cookie-cutter Wal-mart type stuff going on, unless you travel to the very outer suburbs (and even then it’s not as cookie-cutter as other places I’ve visited). We have a long, rich, historical tradition to be justifiably proud of. As for academics – never mind all the universities – we’ve got bookstores galore, some even dedicated to just one subject. And then there’s the famed Boston accent – I can’t tell you what hearing it means whenever I’m visiting someplace else!
kiz, amen, brother (or sister, as the case may be). Leaving Boston is inconcievable to me. I’m from Beverly, and I NEVER intend to live farther outside 128 than I do right now (about 1000 ft outside, if you’re keeping track at home). I love everything about the city, including the traffic. I consider it a challenge. And the people of Boston just can’t be beat.
Central Florida, small town.
The rednecks here aren’t that bad of a problem, although there are more decals related to auto racing than any other region of the country. One of my neighbours has a big Rebel flag with a graphic illustration of a Confederate, capitioned by ‘the South will rise again’. It makes me barf inside, but this white Germanic-Slavic-Anglo-Saxon deist has run into relatively few problems, even this close to the ‘bad part of the county’. The good 'ole boys here are annoying, but not harmful (at least to me - I read the paper). There are enough non-backwoodsy folk here to keep me here until I graduate high school.
The weather’s just getting pleasant here. For nine months out of twelve, the weather’s a sauna laden with mosquitos and various other nasties. We’re paving over and destroying our environment (and there’s really nothing more beautiful than the woods around my house) and I’ve tuned out the political Babel that this state is.
Florida’s a fixer-upper, if it were an ice age and were run by someone non-Bush.
Boston has a lot of bookstores, it’s true, but they’re expensive chains. It only has one or two decent used bookstores - which was a real shock when I moved here.
Oh yeah, did I mention it was expensive to live here? I could buy a mansion in the South on the money I spent on a small one-bedroom apartment.
For bookstores, the answer is Harvard Square. As for cost of living, yeah, it’s true. Boston is really the only other city that can compare to NY and California when it comes to housing.
I have lived in Houston most of my life, stayed in Minneapolis about a year, and stayed quite awhile in Toronto. Toronto is about the only place I have remotely enjoyed living, and the closest thing I have been to that I could probably call home. I am still looking for a way to escape to Europe though. I hate living in the States. 
Mora, Minnesota (aka BFE)
I hate this place. I swear, it’s the Gateway to Hell. I was driving home from work one day - bright, blue sky, sunny, not a cloud to be seen anywhere… until I got to Mora. I kid you not, hail the size of ping-pong balls assaulted my car. Lightning, thunder, everything. Horrible weather. I was driving home from St. Cloud once, same situation - bright, sunny, cloudless except, off on the horizon, I saw the darkest storm cloud I’ve ever seen in my life.
But, considering I love storms, it’s not the weather that bugs me.
It’s not really a small town, but damn near the entire population has the “small town mentality” - which is to say that, unless you grew up there, went to school with everyone else, graduated on time and so on, you are an outsider to be regarded suspiciously. Everybody knows everyone else’s business, no privacy from the neighbors who constantly scope out any extra traffic, etc. And the fact that, with a population of barely 3000, we have 18 (EIGHTEEN!!) cops, but we’re just now able to afford to fix the roads that have been damaged well beyond basic repair for well over 2 years (the length of time I’ve been here) really bugs me.
There’s a doctor in town that petitioned to cut our police force down to just two or three officers (which makes sense when you consider the size of the town and the fact that we are the county seat and have deputies patrolling almost constantly). So we’ll see how that goes.
This would save $1.3 million. I think that it’d be worth it to “cut the fat”, so to speak.
TM from SE AK, no not dislike exactly, I like the people here, I have many friends,family here. The air is clean,lots of wildlife,wilderness,vistas,etc. But theres no freaking work here(I may have to go back to Vallejo CA to work**-hot-**) I do dislike the constant rain,cold rain in the winter,warm rain in the summer.Also I like being anonymous now-and-again,lemme explain. In a town of 14-15 thousand, you can’t go to the groc store(or anywhere) without seeing at least 4,5,6, people you know,maybe one of which you never liked and vice/versa(sounds contrary to what I said about liking the people here,but keep in mind I said “now-and-again”).thats what I like about CA,being just another face in the crowd…
I forgot some things about Kansas City…
Where I live (outside of Parkville), there are no local walking distance parks for children. None. There used to be, but one was torn down because a drunk driver slammed into the slide set with his car, and another was taken away to make room for a mini-mall. Oh wait, there is one, but it’s so pathetic that I wouldn’t even let my dog go there. There are no good sized parks.
Also, there are hardly any sidewalks to speak of. I’ve given up trying to ride a bike, because there are huge hills on narrow roads that do not have sidewalks. I think it’s pretty pathetic that where I lived in Las Vegas (LAS VEGAS–SIN CITY!) had a better community for children than where I live in Kansas City.
Are you sure you don’t live here in Maine? It like that here, I live in a small town just outside Portland. Just like you described, but it has a reputation for being a rich white yuppie town, and frankly, it is. The school system is insane. They have special grading scales that are insanely hard (95 and above is an A, 94 - 89 is B etc) and everyone just thinks the are so goddamn special. I get treated like absolute crap every single day because I don’t have money and my parents cannot afford to buy me a car and we don’t belong to the local country club. That’s just the beginning. I am counting the days until college.
I was born and bred in the sunny, harbourside city of Sydney, Australia but I spent about a year and a half of the hardest part of my life in London.
London has horrible food; unfriendly, xenophobic, small-minded, conservative people and it’s dirty and expensive. Worst of all though, coming from a place of open expanses and outdoor activities; it’s miserable, dark and it’s always raining. The clouds always seemed to hang so low in the sky such that despite London having a low city skyline, I always felt claustrophobic. I remember going out to buy lunch with a colleague one day at noon in the midst of Winter and the sun was about 45 degrees in the sky. At 3pm, cars would turn on their headlights because darkness was setting in.
On the bright side, in Summer, it got dark at about 10:30pm. There seem to be no other redeeming factors other than the fact that if you work in the banking industry (as I do), there are few better places to advance your career.
I’m now home and glad to be here. Sydney is beautiful, we have many jewelled beaches, the population is ethnically diverse, educated and tolerant; the food is beyond fantastic and the lifestyle glorious.