I generally feel the same way as you do, (heck, I’m even an example of the people you refer to in your post, those who live here and want to leave.)
But there are places in Orlando that have a charm of their own, like the area between Fashion Square and Downtown. Decent sized houses that aren’t cookie cutter, actual trees and other various native vegetations, sidewalks (and sometimes bricked roads,) and plenty of [del]reclamation pools[/del] ponds some of which have little tiny docks. Plus most places there are within walking distance of downtown.
Now, one of the main reasons I don’t want to stay is the heat, and my job is not in a place that would make it easy to live there, and I dont wanna know what a decent house there would run me, but for someone who practically makes it his job to hate Florida, I have to admit that it’s a pretty good looking neighborhood.
Could you give a visual examples or two of this? I, too value mid-century authenticity, but strip malls are ugly in any condition. But some of them that are more down to earth like this (not a very close shot unfortunately) that I grew up near can grow on me if they’re not too upscale. (Plus, oddly enough, when I was growing up it wasn’t really a strip mall at all, that frontage road you see in front of it didn’t exist, only being added later. It was sort of a perpendicularly oriented strip mall.)
I’m just interested in what you think is an ugly 1950’s era commercial strip, not saying that I will disagree with you on it
elmwood, the Austin thoughts are interesting. I’ve got a friend living down there (native of the area, moved up here to Chicago for school and now he’s back home) and I’ve only visited once, this past year for SXSW (not the actual fest, but the free parties outside downtown). I found a lot of what you’re saying to be true (though you do seem to have a severe aversion to ink, haha) but I did enjoy the extended stay and have long considered moving down there with my girlfriend (should I find work in the area).
Some extra thoughts: the area my friend lives in is one of those student ghettos located in the barrio. I’ve never been roughed up in a life of living in Chicago (knock on wood), but I had the strangest run in with an obvious criminal down in Austin. Long story short, I was walking alone back to the house from a show a couple blocks away, and in that time I was accosted not once but twice and ended up giving the second guy (who’d clearly just robbed someone of their Macbook) a ride to north downtown (via Guadalupe). If you want to know more about this bizarre incident, feel free to PM, no use cluttering up the board with the anecdote.
So there is crime, and it’s a weird kind of crime unlike what I’m used to here in Chicago, if only because I’d never experienced anything like that before.
Other than that I did find the outlying, affordable areas of Austin to be somewhat fascinating. The range in options is so steep, but the prices are cheap. Here in Chicago you’re basically faced with deciding between a multi-unit walkup or a brownstone flat (some decked out with vinyl siding) identical to every brownstone flat you’ve ever seen within the city limits.
I could go on at great length about Chicago. As stated, I was born and raised here and it’s been high time for a change… but this thread will likely scare me into staying
My setup is actually pretty cool. I rent a studio-like space on the bottom floor of a house. Location is great (I’m a mile from work), I can interact with my housemates as much or as little as I want since I have total privacy with my own private entrances, and when I do interact with my housemates, they’re pretty cool people.
Unfortunately, the house is built into the side of a hill, and my floor is the one affected by it. It is a very long and narrow space, and there are only very small windows at the very front of the space. I had no idea how much I would miss natural light, but I’m finding after five weeks living there that I’m pretty miserable whenever I spend time there during the day. It sucks. My lease is up in five months. I intend to be gone at the end of it.
I live in a small village (about 300 people) on top of a hill (1,200’) in the Languedoc, in France.
Spain is less than an hour and a half’s drive. Andorra is about 2 hours. The Mediterranean beaches are 40 minutes and the Pyrenean ski slopes about 50 minutes. Italy is about 4.5 hours… Spoiled for choice.
There are very few children, and those that are here are well behaved - as are most kids outside of the big cities. Social life is humming along like I never knew it could in my home country.
The health service is superb - an important consideration as one is advancing in years. I pay Euro 22 for a visit to the doctor. Euro 14 is refunded by the state into my bank account. I can see a specialist usually within a couple of days - apart from opthalmologists, who are scarce on the ground. I get a blood test with no appointment necessary. They give me the results next day and I read them on the phone to the doc. But I can see already if there is a problem as the normal paramaters are indicated, and any result that is outside that is printed in bold. Hospital is paid for by the state, and I have top-up insurance that costs me about Euro 1,000 per year which gets me 5* hospitalisation. If I chose I can pay this in monthly instalments without incurring a charge for doing so, so the amount still totals the 1,000. Insurance companies cannot refuse even those with pre-existing conditions.
We have four definite seasons. In spring the countryside becomes a garden of wildflowers, and the heat build to what would be summer temperatures in Ireland. It can rain, but not too much. Summer is hot and dry. Temperatures can go very high. When we had the heatwave in 2003 it was 47 degrees in the shade on my terrasse. But normally it goes to about 35 - 37 C. ( C x9 ./. 5 + 32 = F ). There is practically no rain from June to September, although there can be some spectacular electrical storms with torrential downpours. Autumn come regularly about mid-September. Temperatures return to lower levels, and we have some rain. Winter begins about 2nd week of January. We are high, and the mountains are serious ones. (Already they are covered with snow.) They can send cold waves down even the 30 km to the foothills where I live. But winter tends to be short, so by the end of March we are starting back into warmer weather and Spring again.
I love the quiet here. Shutters and doors are generally closed at 9 pm, apart from high summer, and the village is a haven of peace until morning, give or take the amours of local cats who serenade the object of their feline lusts.
The roads are uncrowded and driving is a pleasure. What would have taken an hour and a half in Dublin is covered in 20 minutes here. Bliss!
Kyla
Because I moved from where I hated to somewhere that suited me a lot better. Take a hint. If life is such a bitch, it’s pointless just moaning about it. Do something about it.
One difference between WNY and Austin: in the Buffalo area, where there’s still many 1950s-era shopping centers that haven’t been plowed over for lifestyle centers, the centers are still more-or-less intact. Residents see it as just an old plaza. In Austin, though, such shopping centers and districts often have pretensions of hipness. Instead of tenants being the usual hair salon, State Farm insurance agent, hardware store, Chinese restaurant, Catholic bookstore, pizzeria and so on, they’ll be filled with indie record stores, vintage resale stores, tattoo parlors, yoga studios, and the like. The types of uses seen in hip urban neighborhoods in other cities are in the 1950s-era plazas and strips in Austin, because there are no urban neighborhoods as most from the Northeast or Midwest would define them.
Those 1950s-era strips in Austin are the given the same level of adoration in Austin as Buffalonians give Elmwood Avenue or Hertel Avenue, or Park Avenue in Rochester.
I wanted to retire to Santa Fe! Oh well, how is Taos? Can an ordinary guy affort to live there?
How about Madrid?
New Mexico looks like the place-I just have to zero in on a town.
Oh boy, where the heck do I start? Tucson just plain sucks. The weather is the worst. People from here are like “Oh, it’s only bad 3 months out of the year…”. Not true! I would consider it too dang hot about 8 months out of the year. Who cares if the weather is “perfect” in the winter? I would rather have perfect weather in the summertime, and then cold and snowy in the wintertime. It is 85 degrees at Thanksgiving - that is just wrong. And then where ever you go, there is a serious lack of shade (lack of big trees) - it’s like there is no relief from the heat and sun. If you live somewhere cold, you can dress warmly to make yourself comfortable. In Tucson, you could be wearing just about nothing and still be dying from the unbearable heat. There is a serious lack of water sources here (creeks, rivers, lakes, the ocean). I grew up in the Seattle area, that is what makes living here so hard, I believe. Growing up we had a creek in the backyard, lived 5 min from the river, 15 from the lake, 20 min from the ocean. And always soooo much to do outside - year round. There was so much green, trees, grass and water - that equals life to me. The desert is like death. Dirt and cactus, unrelenting heat and sun. We have to drive like 2 hours to get to a lake (again without shade!)! I have been here for 5 years now, and I’m not getting used to it. It is definitely getting worse for me and I feel like I have reached my limit. I am a stay-at-home mom to 3 boys - a 4yr old, 3yr old, and 1 yr old - and it is so hard keeping them happy and entertained all day, everyday. I can’t even let them play outside in our backyard for 1/2 the year because of the frickin’ heat. And there are not very many things to do here at all. Tucson seems very desolate, empty and depressing to me. I would do ANYTHING to leave this place. I HATE IT!!! I tell my husband this all the time and he gets so annoyed (his job and family are here), but I just can’t take it anymore. I look at my boys and see their childhood compared to mine, and I am sad, because I feel like they are missing out on so much. I’m totally a wimp when it comes to the sun and heat, I’ll admit it. If I am outside on a hot day for more than 10 minutes, I will have a pounding headache for the rest of the day. I would much rather have it been on the cool/ cold side, that way you could just put on a jacket - problem solved. There is no escaping the heat here. So, why don’t we move, you might ask. Well, believe you me, I am trying my darnedest! I just truly don’t understand why people would EVER want to live here. It is HELL on earth.
Upper middle class neighborhood in northern VA. I have nothing in common with anyone who lives there, even besides the undercurrents of antisemitism (I’m of Jewish ethnicity on one side). I don’t have a car and I hate driving, and because I live out in the suburbs it’s impossible to get anywhere without driving, in fact without driving on major highways. (We have a bus stop but the bus comes rarely and never on schedule.) I have some really wonderful friends in the area but most of them live at least a 30 minute drive from my house. The summers are unbearably hot and humid, to the extent where going outside is not even worth it. Why do I still live there? Because I live at home when I’m not at college. Like a lot of people in this thread, my parents own the house, and are in no hurry to leave.
I love where I live when I’m at school, and if I take time off between undergrad and graduate school I’ll likely look for work there in the Chicago area.
I’m with you. I live in Tampa, Florida and I hate it. It’s so freakin’ hot and humid ALL YEAR LONG. Fla is just the opposite of Az. While Az naturally doesn’t support much life, you have to fight tooth and nail to keep nature out of your house.
I moved here for my man. It’s ugly, hot, and there’s nothing to do. The people here are (with a few exceptions) rude, nasty, and angry…so angry.
I’m originally from Vancouver Island so it’s been a cultural & environmental shock that I can’t get used to. I wouldn’t mind the lack of entertainment so much there was anything remotely pretty about this place. There are a couple of parks along the river and a nice little nature reserve but that’s about it. If we want to hike or enjoy some scenery, we have to hop into the car and drive a couple hours east or west to find some nature. Sand, dirt and tumbleweeds just don’t do it for me. I also don’t want to hit the bars, get drunk, and collect DUIs like my husband’s coworkers seem to do every weekend.
There aren’t any nice areas to just stroll around in. You have to drive everywhere. I went to Portland a few weeks ago and blissed out at a street fair. Unless you want gun or car shows, there’s nothing like that here.
Unfortunately we both have sweet jobs & a house so that makes it hard to pick up & relocate to somewhere new. The recent housing & job issues have barely affected this area and we have been very fortunate. I think my husband is finally getting fed up with the area and we’ve been talking about Wyoming, Montana, Alaska or Canada. I’d kill to return to Victoria but I could never afford that place now.
This thread goes to show that just about the only people left in the Detroit area are those that actually like it here. That’s the only possible explanation I have as to why it didn’t come up.
Moderator note
Haven’t you guys seen the sticky about the new, improved, and relaxed zombie rules? It’s been up for months, so you might want to check it out.
In brief, most zombie threads, especially ones like this, are OK. On the other hand we still might close them if there were old fights and arguments that we don’t want dredged up; or if a resurrected thread can lead to confusion, for example as with ones discussing almost-recent events in the news.
