You’re right I looked up ‘please’ when I should have looked up ‘pleas’ because he said ‘pleasing’ and I was looking for variations on ‘pleased’.
I’m not going to play this game. You’re the ones who are jumping around. I have made the most conscious effort of anyone in this thread to parse the distinctions. If you want to have a real argument please do so. I am uninterested in your ‘gotcha’ gratification.
Please go back and re-read my posts you will see that I have pointed out the problems with using terms like ‘suburban’ generically as Jersey City is a suburb that is more densely populated than the city of Phoenix. As you are one of the culprits who has been twisting the definition of suburb to include ‘rural’, it’s important that YOU clarify your meaning.
You’re just making stuff up out of whole cloth. Where does NYC gets it’s power? Where does it get it’s water? Where does it get it’s natural gas? All that is brought into NY from afar at great expense.
cite? Suburban areas aren’t clogged with traffic. We don’t have any problems getting police, fire, or ambulance service and apartment buildings are not the place to be in a fire.
When was the last time you had a cookout in your apartment? We do it all the time in the suburbs. We sit outside under our trees and talk about the flowers and vegetables we planted. The horror of not living above a Chinese restaurant in a concrete canyon that echos all the noise and traps the pollution in a maze of breeze stifling buildings. And the worst of it all is that our inefficiencies cost less.
Oh, I can make that monthy for you. In Toronto I was paying $2000 for a car and rent; here, I pay $2000 for a mortgage and rent, and get a house instead of an apartment and I’m building equity and can write off some of my mortgage. It’s not even a close call. I could have equivalent housing in Toronto but it’d cost quite a lot more.
Don’t think for an instant living in Toronto means you don’t need a car, unless you’re amazingly lucky.
Beyond that you just keep denying the benefits I see with my own eyes. Fine; you don’t believe me. The thing is, I believe me, and so do the millions of other people who prefer to live in suburbs. Not everyone wants to live the way you do, and they have valid reasons for it. You may as well accept that.
Have you ever been in the neighborhoods I’ve lived in? If not, how do you know?
Monthly is not as useful as you don’t do maintenance on your home and your car monthly. Unless you are doing a breakdown of the last time you had your roof checked, fixed a garage door or replaced a muffler. But based on your monthly figures living in the suburbs is more expensive as you didn’t include the car cost. But you’re building equity which is a definite bonus.
Toronto doesn’t have good mass transit?
I’m not denying anything. I never said there are no benefits to living in the suburbs, I said that they are environmentally inefficient. I’ve lived in the suburbs before.
I don’t and that’s why the subjective criteria isn’t that useful. Some suburban neighborhoods are prettier than other and some are uglier than others, some urban neighborhoods are pretty than some suburban ones. Prettiness is not an objective category that one can apply to the suburbs.
#1. It’s something like 2% of the population that is directly involved in farming. #2. Very little. The occasional garden but most people in my neighborhood don’t garden as a primary means of providing themselves with veggies. #3. Eh, we’re not really running out of either.
Odesio
I was figuring in maintenance. You’re going to have to trust that I know my personal finances pretty well. I’m a big boy now and I know where my money is going.
No, I was including the car; I accidentally typed “rent” when I meant car. Obviously I am not simultaneously paying a mortgage and rent.
No, it’s very unreliable, slow, and doesn’t have good service to most of the city.
Subjective criteria are very useful when a person is deciding where they want to live. The choice to live in a city, or in the suburbs, or in a rural area, or on a houseboat, or whatever, must be at least partially, if not MOSTLY, subjective. I like New York City, I really do, but it smells of garbage almost everywhere in the city when you’re outside (the only place I didn’t notice it was inside Central Park) and it’s just too loud. I would not want to live there, but msmith37 does want to. I value space, quiet, and cleaner air; msmith37 may prefer an active lifestyle, vast restaurant options, and easier access to museums. He might find that the beautiful architecture of NYC outweighs the dirtier streets and bums, whereas I may feel the architectural dullness of Burlington is outweighed by the openness and cheaper daycare. Those are subjective choices.
A discussion of how to construct our living spaces has to hinge at least in part on what people want to live in, or else you’re subtracting the most important factor. There is real utility to me and millions of other people in not lviing in Jersey City or Etobicoke or (insert city.) Of course that’s subjective in part; utility is subjective.
I was making a cheeky reply to someone who had no idea why people would have to venture outside the city if everyone lived in a city. Nothing more, nothing less.
Please prove that suburbia is worse than city living. All I’ve heard from you is how much you prefer city living. But as for me, there are a great number of benefits, such as…
In the suburbs I can own the property I live on. What I pay in a monthly mortgage is analogous to the rent I would have to pay to live in the nearest city.
In the suburbs, I need a car, but I would still need that car if I moved to the nearest city as public transportation is terrible around here. And pretty much anywhere not named New York, Chicago or San Fran.
I am further away from the funky shops, however those shops have horrible operating hours. I can still drive to these places with my car. Also, the nearest city does not have a monopoly on funky shops and nice restaurants. In fact, most are in the various suburban towns.
If you want to go to a supermarket, you need a car and you need to be in the suburbs to be near one.
I have a yard. I have a fence around that yard. My dog can hang out in the yard with the fence around it and run around and chase birds and have a good life. My eventual kids will be able to do the same.
I have my own driveway. Parking in the city is atrocious.
The suburbs are safer.
Oh, and while we’re apparently using movies as a meter of the public’s feelings, how many movies portray city living as this soul-sucking empty thing where “everything is happening” but no one has any connection to another person? And don’t forget all the murderer-in-the-city movies.
I think what msmith537 is talking about is that it seems as though all the advantages of “suburbs” are advantages of “non-city” living, to the extent that they are advantages at all. People in rural areas and small towns can own their property and have fenced in yards and don’t have parking problems.
Everything you listed as being an advantage to suburban living applies equally to small town living or rural living, and those places have advantages that the suburbs don’t. What’s better about a suburb than those options?
Let’s see-
can own your own house with a fenced in yard- really anywhere. Less likely in the city, but still possible
walkable- city, some parts of some older suburbs and small towns
supermarket- everywhere except the most densely populated parts of a city
space - rural. I'm sorry, but I've never been to a suburb where people have a lot of space. There are suburbs where the houses are nearly as close as the city , and there are ones where the houses are further away , but only rural properties are large enough so that I can't hear the music from my neighbors outdoor party.
There are going to be situations in which cities have the advantage, and situations where non-city areas have the advantage. But I can’t think of a single situation where the suburban living beats both rural living and city living.
Good grief, how complicated is this for some people?
I want a decent sized yard, but not forty acres(well i would if I could afford it). Suburb beats city and country is overkill.
I dont mind a one hour commute, but two hours is too much. Suburb beats country.
I dont want to live in a multistory building with other folks around or have people everywhere when I step outside. Suburb beats city.
I only need a few different places to eat within a short drive, not dozens or hundreds. Suburb will do and the city is overkill.
Suburban living offers SOME (level) of the advantages of both while also avoiding the worst downsides of both as far as some people with certain priorities are concerned.
If you don’t have those priorities thats fine. Just dont act like others that do are ill-informed idiots.
And yet you are communicating with other people, and the information provided was pretty much useless as it didn’t make your point. Based on what you provided you stated that suburban living is more expensive. So can you use your big boy skills to disambiguate that for us?
Personal benefits are irrelevant to my argument. It’s less efficient. You’re trying to argue from personal preference, I am not.
You can own in the city too.
Well we are talking about revamping the way urban/suburban areas relate. IE this thread is about sprawl not why **RickJay **prefers the suburbs and feels the need to be very condescending while explaining it. One of the problems with sprawl is the lack of effective public transit.
I find it hard to believe that funky shops and good restaurants are in short supply in Toronto. This paragraph strikes me as meaningless hyperbole.
I have a supermarket a block and a half from me. I walk there. There are half a dozen more within ten blocks and countless delis in the same radius.
I have hundreds of acres of park. Your dog, admittedly does have it better than a city dog. I cannot count the benefits my daughter will have growing up in New York City. Having a yard of course is not one but there are several playgrounds and hundreds of acres of park.
I don’t own a car nor have I needed one.
Marginally.
There are lots of murderer in the suburbs movies too. Lots of movies about people in the suburbs having no connection to each other.
You’re just talking to yourself here. I explained why cantilevered solar panels in NYC would not impact the height of a building in any way. Because the roofs are sunken compared to the height of the walls, by anywhere from 1 foot to 6 feet.
The ignorance is astounding. This paragraph is simply incorrect.
Justin Bailey Sorry I thought I was responding to RickJay. That big boy comment was about how he failed to adequately answer the question he was being condescending about.