I live in the Big City and generally like it - I love that I don’t have to rely on a car to get most of the places I need to go, and I love the funky ethnic grocery shopping in one of the most diverse neighborhoods there is. I do wish we could afford an actual house with a yard in a decent neighborhood that met our public transit criteria, but I wouldn’t swap it for a house in the burbs if that meant needing 2 cars to commute.
I’ve spent time in a couple of older big cities (NY, St. Petersburg, Madrid) and visited a bunch of others, and though I’m a city girl at heart, it would be cool to live in some older cities for a while. These days, the inertia is getting me, though.
Depends on how much stuff you want open 24 hours. In our aforementioned small town, we’ve got the Walmart, a few gas stations, and a diner open 24 hours. The drive-up windows at McDonald’s and Wendy’s are open till 2. It seems sufficient to me.
I did spend a time living out in the country, in a beautiful log cabin, on 200 acres of woods and fields. Heaven! It was heaven on earth and I loved every moment. The down side? 40 minute drive to the nearest city to work on a lonesome stretch of highway, morning and night. In winter it was just terrifying. Pity it didn’t work out. If I had enough to retire on and only had to go into ‘town’ once a week I’d go back in a flash.
Toronto - I love it. Nearest jazz club is three blocks away, I was at a weekly poetry reading last night that was four blocks away, there are three good dog parks that we can walk to easily, the public library and university libraries are a twenty minute walk from here.
I could go back to living on a farm, I suppose, but I’d miss going out so often terribly.
I live in one of the largest cities in the world. I voted “love it” even though I could see living somewhere smaller like Chiang Mai up in the North. But I’m a city guy, I really like my cities. Used to hate Bangkok, but it grows on you like a fungus. We’re settled in. Bangkok’s a little extreme, an urban nightmare in many ways, but you’re certainly never bored. Ever.
Northeastern Washington…I live four miles up a dirt road on the side of a mountain outside of a town of about 400. Can’t see a neighbor, although we have three along about a two mile stretch of road.
One very small grocery store, 1 gas station/convenience store, 1 hardware store and 2 bars four miles downhill.
It is 40 miles to the nearest bank, large grocery store or fast food joint. 110 miles to the nearest large city with cool stuff like Costco and Target and Burger King :rolleyes:
I love it here even in the dead of winter with a power outage, no water and having to plow our way out.
The only thing I would change is the satellite internet. Faster than dialup, but still sucks.
One of neighbors recently sold off part of his land and the whole road was upset because it meant adding another household in our tiny piece of paradise.
As a side benefit, my weight problem has completely disappeared (with no plan or “diet”) in the seven years I have lived here. The lack of convenient fast food has big advantages.
No vote, because nothing quite matches my situation. I live in a medium-sized town, about 70,000 people. I haaaaaate it.
It’s not the size that bugs me - it’s on-par with the town I grew up in. In addition to some weird quirks (like the whole “unless you’re into art galleries and weird, experimental theater, there is nothing to do here” thing), the problem is location.
A town of 70k in New Jersey, where I grew up? Great. That was twenty minutes from Philadelphia, an hour and a half to New York, and three hours to DC. An hour and a half to the shore. An hour to some nice hiking and biking. There is literally nothing you could possibly want that you couldn’t get to for a day trip from there.
My current town is in the middle of the desert. Want to go to a big city? You’re looking at a seven hour drive, or buying a plane ticket (and then driving an hour to the damn airport). Want to go see some scenery other than godforsaken empty desert? You’re either flying somewhere or driving all day.
It’s not the size of the town that’s the problem, it’s the fact that towns this size should be suburbs of big cities, because they’re pathetic on their own.
I love where I live, but where I live in my pointy little head is the SF Bay Area as a whole, which embraces cities, 'burbs and bits of near-country. I’m not sure how to define it.
My actual town is currently Berkeley, which I like overall. But really the gradation between, say, Berkeley and Albany or Berkeley and Oakland is pretty murky.
I consider myself to be living in an almost perfect location for my interests in life. In half an hour I can be on the Pacific beach or the lower Columbia River for a wide variety of fishing and water sports. If I want the metropolitan life I can be in Portland in about an hour and half. A little bit longer and I can be on Mount Hood for all the winter sports. The high desert is only a little bit further on the other side. Right outside the window where I am sitting is nothing but forest for as far as I can see.
Within one days drive or a weekend adventure there is quite a lot to do. A cool, wet, green, wet version of wet paradise.
I’ve lived in/grown up in nearly every environment possible (super rural, suburban, uber urban) so I’m pretty flexible about this stuff. I just moved from Los Angeles to a Midwestern college town and I’m enjoying the relaxed pace of life and traffic situation.
My preference is to be in a major urban area, but I tend to enjoy myself wherever I end up. In general though, I like being near a big airport and having better shopping. However, I will say that when you live in a college town for a major research university you get pretty easy access to lots of cool cultural stuff, so at least I’m not missing out on that. This was the biggest issue my family had when we were growing up in a super rural area.
I feel like I should be dying to live in New York since I’ve loved/liked aspects of Montreal, Chicago, and Los Angeles but…I’m not. All said and done, Chicago and Boston probably top my favourite city list.
I’ve always lived in cities (Milwaukee, San Francisco, New York, DC and now Paris) and love(d) them but I would also love to live in a small French village or even in the countryside.
I’m not a fan of the suburbs in the US because of the need to drive everywhere.
I live 4 short blocks to the ocean and can walk to my local village area that has everything one would need and within a large city San Diego. I like it here but it isn’t the country I was raised in so while many people have told me they would love to live here I sometimes miss my family and Toronto and wish I could move back. But for US places to live it is one of the best that I’ve seen so it’s okay and sometimes lonely but just right in terms of size climate and amenities.
I vote for the “living in the burbs, but would like to live in a big city” option, because it was the closest to my situation.
I actually live in a very “burbs” like neighborhood of Sacramento. And while I really like where I live, I would love to live downtown and be able to bike or walk most places. Downtown was not in our price range when we were buying our house.
Hmm. Technically I live in a city. Though to anyone who has lived in an actual city, it is clearly not a city. It’s a large town, which recently absorbed several small towns, to boost its population to minimum city levels.
I assume there was some benefit to doing so, though no one told me what it was.
So, I’ll go with ‘small town’ though it’s clearly not a small town, either. The whole region has a nice, even grade from rural farmland/forest, to small, village-y clusters of homes, to a pleasant, walkable, almost urban downtown area. No flat, suburban sprawl. I never realized that wasn’t the norm until I left the area.
I love it. A good balance of most of the good stuff you get in big cities (everything’s within walking distance, lots of people, fun weirdness, art) you get a lot of the benefits of small towns and country life as well. (familiarity, wildlife, bears!) And Paradise City itself has considerable charm.
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Though, the high rents are notoriously un-paradise like. Can’t have everything, I guess.
Obviously polls like this are difficult, because so many definitions are subjective. What is a “city”? I wouldn’t call a capital city of 250,000 “small,” as Bites When Provoked did. I live four miles outside of an incorporated city with a population of 2,300. Yes, legally, it’s a city. The biggest city in the whole state of Montana has a population of 100,000. Yet when I lived in Castro Valley, California (population 50,000), people there called it a small town. Frankly, it had fewer services than this little town of 1/20th its size that I live near now. We have good restaurants, bars, car and motorcycle dealerships, two hardware stores, grocery store, drug store, movie theater, and so forth.
Part of what I love about where I live is that I can walk down the street and know half the people I see. I really feel like a part of it. There are neighborhoods in cities that have that same feeling, but I remember living in an apartment complex when I was in college. I was there for several years and never met the people living on the other side of the walls from me.
The things I couldn’t stand about a “big city” (noise, lines, crowds…) are exactly the things that other people love about them.
I’m in a town that’s not really small, but it’s too old and established to be considered a 'burb. It’s a seaside New England town and one of the Pilgrims and his family settled here in the 1600s.
I’ve lived here virtually all my life. I love it.
The town is my employer, in fact. My job is to attract visitors to it.
