I live within the city limits in the inner ring suburbs, but I only go downtown maybe twice a year. All the stuff I need is in the suburban area.
My understanding is it works in a ring configuration.
Downtown/urban core is in the center
Then the inner ring suburbs surround that. That is within the city limits and surrounds the urban core area
Then the outer ring suburbs, which is the detached houses with yards
Then the exurbs, which are on the edge between the city and rural areas
So for me, in the inner ring suburb, I have everything I need. But I have no idea how it works for the outer ring suburbs.
Going into the city near me it’s not just pay for parking, it’s the extra 2% sales tax on everything that has sales tax & if you want to get something to eat there’s the soda tax (which also includes things like iced tea & diet drinks, too) & the extra alcoholic beverage tax.
A $1 soda in the burbs is $1.06 with tax but $1.78 in the city. I know it’s only 72¢ but a couple of them for the table, plus the extra 2% for the meal, plus the cost of parking makes a comparable restaurant in the shitty significantly more than eating in the burbs.
I rarely go into the city. There are plenty of museums & attractions in the burbs. Sure, there’s way more in terms of kid museums but then I don’t have anyone of the appropriate age to take there.
That’s very peculiar terminology, from my point of view. If it’s within the city limits, it’s by definition not a suburb. And a lot of the inner ring suburbs, or even the city itself, is “detached houses with yards”.
As a simple definition, I’d just say that “inner ring suburbs” are those suburbs that border immediately upon the city. Though there can be some edge cases: For instance, while Rocky River, OH borders Cleveland, the border between the two lies in a canyon impassible without a bridge, of which there are none between those two municipalities: You can’t get from any address in Cleveland to any address in Rocky River without either passing through some other suburb, or flying.
Exurbs, I’d define as still being associated with the city in some way, but you have to pass through a rural area to get from one to the other. Around here, it’s roughly equivalent to “outside of Cuyahoga County”, but larger urban areas might swell beyond their county.
That’s easy to answer. Because we don’t all share the same values and preferences. In my case, for instance, I live in a suburb that’s technically within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA – with a population of around 7.2 million) but on the fringes of it. I like it here because it’s a quiet area with lots of basic amenities, and easy access to more extensive ones in nearby larger suburbs.
As for the city itself, I rarely venture into the crowds and traffic but it’s nice to be able to do so once in a while, to visit relatives and friends within the GTA or for truly fine dining or a shopping trip to what has been rated as one of the ten best boutique grocery stores in the world. But I’m retired, and have no particular interest in the live theater or music scene, or the hassle of attending major league sports, so where I am is the perfect combination of country living with access to big-city amenities on those rare occasions when it seems like an interesting thing to do, in a familiar environment close to those I dearly care about.
OK, that does say that suburbs can be part of the same municipality in some cases, but there’s still a lot of area that’s neither city center nor any sort of suburb.
I think I have been “Downtown” six times this year. Four of those were when my wife was traveling. She hates going into the city.
The two visits with my wife have been to the ballet and the world class art museum we have here. We used to have a “subscription” to the ballet and another for the ballet, but stopped going when Mini Mouse arrived. She is not interested in resuming the subscriptions now that we are empty nesters because she thinks the parking is a hassle and she doesn’t like walking on city streets. She’s become more and more averse to crowds.
I will go in just to walk around the lively shopping and dining districts, get some exotic food. I got Cambodian food the last time I was in town. And Afghan food the time before that. But if I have a free weekend nowadays, we are likely headed to the local beaches or to suburban town centers. New England town centers can be very picturesque.
Agreed. Here in the Chicago area, those are sometimes called “the neighborhoods” – they are absolutely within the city limits, are more “urban” in feel (even if they don’t have the skyscrapers and office buildings of the Loop and the immediate surrounding area), typically don’t feature the larger yards which are common in the actual suburbs, and most of them have alleys which run behind the houses.
Very few, if any, people who live in a Chicago neighborhood would say that they live in a suburb: they live in Chicago proper. Here, the city is the city, the suburbs are the suburbs, and no one confuses the two.
Inner-ring suburbs here tend to look and feel a lot like a lot of the Chicago neighborhoods (I live in one such suburb), and were, yeah, typically built out sometime between the 1900s and 1950s.
Same around NYC. I live in a detached house inside the limits of NYC, but I can’t imagine thinking that my neighborhood of detached houses which are literally about 3 feet from the next house is a suburb. The houses that aren’t detached are mostly either semi-detached or row houses,although there’s the occasional house on a larger lot and small apartment buildings. Few houses have driveways, as cars were not common when the area was built. There are stores and other businesses mixed in with the houses. The look becomes more suburban as you get closer to the border,and when you’re at the border, you can’t always tell by looking when you are in the city and when you are in the suburb. When you ask people where they live, they are likely to give you the neighborhood name but few, if any, will tell you they live in a suburb. Not even people who just moved in recently.
IME/IMO in the early 20th century up through the end of WWII a lot of cities were growing rapidly and dense housing was being built on the farmland or forest adjacent to what had been built last year. For quite awhile as the built-up area expanded, so did the city limits. Not in every city and not entirely even in the cities where it was common.
At some point, sorta generally coincident w WW-II, that changed. The newly built-up land & residents did not want to be part of the main city; they wanted their own municipality. And got it.
Leaving the so-called inner-ring suburbs as the last stages of the former era. Which were an intermediate step of most detached houses on mostly separate yards, but still quite dense. Many of which are legally parts of the central city municipality. But not all.
And it seems like the fashion for lumping or splitting played out differently in different cities. If you’ve lived in a splitter city your whole life, the idea of a suburb that’s legally part of the city proper is an oxymoron. If you’ve lived in a lumper city, it makes perfect sense.
Anecdotally, I had a friend whose mother had not been into Chicago in nearly 30 years. If there was no traffic (ha!) it was a 30 minute drive to downtown Chicago (actual travel time would be closer to 45 minutes or more depending on traffic). Not far. Also, there was a train she could drive to in five minutes that would take her right downtown.
It boggled my mind that she would live so close to a world class city and never want to go downtown to see the symphony or opera or museums or amazing restaurants or nightlife or festivals galore. So much on offer.
To each their own but I do not understand that at all.
I’m sure there’s a lot of regional differences, but that’s very similar to Indy. I have an Indianapolis address, but I’d never describe my neighborhood as “the city”. “The city” is a roughly square mile downtown defined by dense and diverse buildings and housing. When I “go into the city” I can park, and walk around to where I want to go.
In Chicago I agree with @kenobi_65. If you live in Chicago, no matter how far from the main business district (the Loop) that person would say they are a Chicagoan who lives in Chicago. And rightly so.
If that person lived on the outskirts of the city and did as you described they’d just say they are going downtown.
Every city may do it differently though. I would not know.
Well sure - I’m an Indianapolisian who lives in Indianapolis (within the city loop, even). I just don’t live in the city. But there are plenty of neighborhoods between me and downtown where residents would say they do.
I’m still not quite sure how to compare “going into the City”, though… In Cleveland, for instance, I would say that Playhouse Square (the center of live theater) and The Flats (nightclubs, restaurants, and the like) are not quite downtown, but very close to it… but they’re still places where very few folks actually live, and where you go to Do Things. University Circle is also a place where you go to Do Things (such as Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, or the art and natural history museums), but that’s not at all close to downtown.
So, when I went to the Flats last night because that’s where the prom was that I was chaperoning, or to Severance Hall a couple of months ago for a concert, was I “going into the City” by the OP’s standards? I’m not sure.