I refuse to live anywhere that isn’t urban enough to have a Chinatown and at least 2 national sports teams (I hate sports, but it’s a good rule of thumb). Nothing is more depressing to me than the suburbs, and I just find rural living creepy. I need to be somewhere with lots of culture.
Boston was the first city I lived in as an adult (NYC being the second). Actually went to grad school up there. Although technically I lived in Waltham which is a suburb. I also liked it a lot.
Manhattan was my first taste of living in an actual city where I didn’t need a car and could just walk or take cabs everywhere. People are like “New York is full of self centered, capitalist, hipster jerks who are all in a hurry to get somewhere”. Yeah. That’s why I love it.
Let me put it this way. When I first moved to Manhattan, my friends from Boston would come and visit from time to time. I didn’t know the city that well, so we just wandered around the East Village / Alphabet City checking out random bars and clubs until 5am. I’m like “sorry there’s not much going on tonight” but for them it’s like the best night out they’ve had in years.
Although, when I went back to my hometown for my 20 year high school reuninon, I can see how people would also like the suburban/rural lifestyle as well. Developing a close-knit group of friends and whatnot.
The thing is, people in large cities develop small communities of people they know, just like in the rural areas. You don’t realize it when you visit a place like NY because all you see are buildings and people everywhere. But you develop, relationships and regular bars, restaurants and other activities and that becomes your world.
Here’s an example, to make it plain:
Link to Chicago Reader search for events for Thursday, April 18th. I linked to page 12 just for shits and giggles.
Go ahead, click on that, and you can refine the search to what interests you. That’s 310 things to do, just what’s listed in one free paper, on a Thursday in Chicago - excluding restaurants. Big-time plays and musicals, plus so many small local theater troupes with tiny theaters that are gems (and cheap), comedy-improv, museum gallery exhibits and art gallery openings, book readings by authors of all types, concerts of all kinds of music genres and from free local bands just getting started at a dive bar to big headliners at large venues, DJ’s at dance clubs who people follow from gig to gig, open mic at bars and coffee houses, game nights at dojos and tea houses, wine tasting.
And to fuel up before hitting the town, here’s a Reader listing of restaurants that are just in my neighborhood, just a walk or short bus ride away - there are 142 results, and if I expand to the other three neighborhoods I frequent for dinner/drinking the number expands by another 160 - that’s about 300 restaurants for those keeping track. To put it in terms a rural person understands, that’s 300 restaurants within a 15 minute drive from my apartment.
I suppose it’s clear from the above that I prefer urban living. I like to be able to walk to whatever I need, and in my particular neighborhood, that includes the beach! I do kind of “need” the open space and fresh breeze provided by the lake and can’t imagine living farther away from it. There are people who live here for years without seeing all that water, and I see it every day. Plus, it has its own weather system and often has different weather happening from the rest of the city and suburbs. I enjoy not being bogged down by car ownership and am a carsharing member so can get wheels whenever I need them.
I also enjoy the anonymity of city living. No one knows my business, no one cares. The small stores I frequent, with local owners, those are the places where we know each others names and have conversations, the pet supply store where the owner knows I work in the animal industry and he knows about my cats, and the small organic grocer where they know to stash away certain items I buy every week but they sometimes run out of. In the city, people only know my business if I choose to, and I won’t become the weird old lady who lives alone down at the end of Rooster Road in a haunted house or some shit.
I like spending a day or two in the Big City, but I honestly find the sensory stimulation overwhelming and exhausting. I -really- hate traffic and trying to find parking, but maybe if you lived there you’d be better acquainted with mass transit alternatives. Otherwise, it’s just too many people, too much noise, too much dirt, bleh.
Ditto.
I never want to live again where nobody notices if five gunshots are fired in the middle of the night or if your house catches on fire in broad daylight.
I have done urban and suburban, and I vastly prefer suburban. I don’t mind hopping in a car to drive a short distance for food or shopping or whatnot, and would prefer not to do it in the kind of traffic that exists in urban areas (particularly in LA). Plus, I like the quietness that comes with suburbia.
Urban, and the more urban the better. Chicago is a great place for me to live and I plan to stay here unless I move to another urban area.
I like the idea of living in the country, but I get lonely in the country because the neighbors are too far away.
I guess I want my neighbors to be close enough to ignore. So I live in town.
I don’t get why everybody is saying that everyone knows your business if rural. It’s the EXACT opposite for me. And one of the reasons I like living in the sticks. I have one ‘neighbor’ that I may talk to every other month for two minutes.
When I go into town to go shopping, it’s no different than anyone else that lives in town and shops/eats there.
I prefer an urban medium-density environment, and have lived in such areas for most of my adult life. Typically the residential streets of these places are mostly rental apartment houses interspersed with a few condominiums, and amenities can be found within a few blocks.
Access to local rail transit is essential.
This is true where I live as well. We’re nowhere near a town and have sporadic and completely comfortable contact with our neighbors, with a reasonable amount of waving while passing by and buying of Girl Scout cookies, etc.
The situation seems to be different among residents of some towns, though. In some small towns around here, everybody knows who everybody else is sleeping with, has slept with in the past, and would sleep with if given the opportunity, and much time is spent hanging around in The Bar discussing that.
This was my experience in the small town where my grandmother lived. Everyone knew who I was as soon as I drove into town, before I even got to Grandma’s. I stopped in the market/gas station before getting to her place and the proprietor said, “Oh, you’re Margie’s granddaughter! I’ll ring her and let her know you’re here!” It’s a really small town.
I can’t for the life of me tell which one of these is supposed to be deep urban or deep rural 
Rural has it’s charms, but I way prefer urban. I don’t get anyone living in the burbs unless they were raising kids. It seems like it has the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither.
Yeah, having kids does change the game. I love big cities with a passion. I recently had some kind of midlife crisis I think, because I dropped everything, found a roomie and moved to Manhattan. My daughter stayed with her dad in Rochester, and I know that by the time September rolls around and school is in, I will have to go back to Rochester. There is no way I will ever find a school in NY that equals the great school she is in now. The school she is in now changed her life, and there is no way I can uproot her without finding a school that is as good.
But in the meantime, I am having the time of my life. There is nothing like big city living man. Nothing.
Holy shit, you’re in NYC? I’d love to get together with you for coffee! Well, I hate coffee. I also don’t drink so…do you enjoy pie? I’d love to get together with you for pie or something.
I grew up in Connecticut, and until graduating college I didn’t really leave the northeast.
Connecticut, and the northeast in general, has beautiful suburbs. They’re not really suburbs in the sense that the rest of the country knows the term - all the towns there have their origins in the colonial days and have beautiful, twisty, tree-lined streets running through forests, hills, and mountains. The population density is high enough, especially near the coast, that no one would ever call most of the places I grew up “rural” - you’re hardly ever more than 10 minutes away from the nearest major town or shopping district. But the geography, the terrain, the trees, and the quaint (read: disorganized and haphazard) colonial road layout mean that even homes right off a major commercial strip feel private, secluded, cozy, etc. Growing up there, I really never understood what all the people complaining about “the suburbs” were on about, since the setting was perfectly wonderful and idyllic from my perspective, and pretty much ignored it as malcontent hippie whining.
And then, during and after college, I spent a bit of time in the rest of the country: Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado, etc. And I quickly learned what “suburbs” means to the rest of the country: endless rows of bland, virtually identical houses plopped on the plains in some kind of monotonously, oppressively efficient grid, dotted with cheaply-constructed but well-trimmed, cookie-cutter banks, gas stations, drug stores and supermarkets, with a few mega-malls and gigantic movie theaters right off the interstate. Yeah…count me out.
I have also spent quite a bit of time in dense cities, particularly Manhattan and Boston, and while I enjoyed it and can see why some people love it there, I am too reserved and introverted a person to enjoy living permanently in a city. I don’t like the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the dirt, the hassle, the need to coexist in close quarters with a zillion other people, to ride around on buses like cattle.
In my view, the suburbs in the northeast are perfect. They have the privacy, quiet, (relative) solitude and beauty that I enjoy about rural areas, but the convenience of living near a Whole Foods, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and whatever other specialty shopping you might want.
However, I have grown to like the wide-open spaces of the mountain west, and out here, there is no such compromise available. You can either live in a cramped, dirty, run-down city, or bland, soul-less suburbs, or rural areas inconveniently far away from civilization. At the moment I am renting, and I live at the very edge of the suburbs, in an area that is still fairly rural but will be full-fledged bland suburbs within the next decade. If I continue to rent I wouldn’t mind a house in the suburbs, merely for convenience sake, but if I were buying a house of my own I’d probably get one 30 miles outside of town.
As an alternative, I might buy a house in the suburbs and a cabin in the mountains to retreat to on weekends, but I do not envision that fitting into the budget anytime soon.
In summary: I voted rural.
We should have lunch. I am trying to kick the pie, because living in NYC is teaching me that being this overweight isn’t going to wash. Too much fast walking to carry so much weight anymore. And I am the type who can’t just have ONE slice of pie.
But, let’s get together for lunch, I’m so hype to be hereeeee!!!
I love city-living. Not all city-living is the same, though. I grew up in Atlanta, went to school in northern NJ, did some time in Miami, and now live in Richmond. I liked northern NJ the best (proximity to NYC), but Richmond–the most podunk of all those places I listed–suits me very well too. I absolutely hated Miami, though.
I do like the cultural opportunities that are so easy to take for granted in the city. And what’s great is that a lot of it is free or low-cost; I can be enriched without really trying. But really, the best thing about urban living IMHO is not having to drive everywhere. Transportation is one of the biggest sources of stress in adulthood, and it is great not having to worry about it. If my feet can’t take me there and my car is broken, I can hop on a bus. Or at the very worse, catch a cab.
I don’t mind driving. It’s just that I hate having to drive.