That doesn’t actually answer the question. And you then go on to list how you do benefit from the city, basically reiterating my point.
I didn’t say everyone has to get the same benefits as me. Just that (if one has a choice) one lives close to a city to benefit from it somehow. I didn’t say everyone has to enjoy those benefits at the same frequency I do.
Cool. I’m not trying to argue with you, just using your comment as a reference point to answer the OP’s question. More specifically and quantitatively, the answer to “as a resident of a suburb of one of the world’s great cities, how often do I visit the city itself?” is that, at this stage of my life, hardly ever – less than once a year, and typically maybe once every couple of years. I consider myself a small-town resident, and live close to a big city mainly because this general area is where I’ve spent most of my adult life. If the core of the city disappeared off the face of the earth, I wouldn’t miss it much, as long as friends and family were still around.
I live in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I spent over 2 different stints probably 25 years travelling to the “city” for work. I haven’t been there for 6 years and have no interest in going there.
Good question. I’m not sure what they meant either.
My knowledge of the OP’s life suggests they’ve only ever lived in isolated small cities (~<100K), small towns, or no kidding rural. Such that their idea of how major cities, their various rings of suburbs, and their exurbs really work is sorta sketchy. And probably assumes a stronger divide between “The city” and “The burbs” than exists in most of current era America.
Of course different cities do all that differently as a matter of the many historical accidents of their growth and evolution.
Overall though, we’re each telling about the part of the elephant we have ahold of. And that’s good enough. The picture that emerges from all the posts collectively is: … “It depends”.
When we went to Chicago for our daughter’s wedding we found it hard to tell when we were entering the city limits, since there were no “Welcome to Chicago” signs. Our first and last nights we stayed in Skokie since it was more convenient to the airport, and everything just got more and more dense. It wasn’t difficult at all to get to their place in Edgewater near the lake. It’s kind of the same thing where we live, inside the DC Beltway. Gradually the detached houses get closer together, and then disappear altogether. There is a Welcome to DC sign on the road I usually take, but that’s not true everywhere. If you don’t notice you’re crossing Eastern Avenue, or notice that streets are designated NW, NE, ect., you won’t necessarily realize you’re in DC.
I live in Greater Suburbia & like it there. I have sidewalks & trails to walk/run on. If I want a pizza, I have almost a dozen within 5 miles, I’m not stuck with ordering from one lousy place because its the only one within a 20 or 30 min drive. I have multiple supermarkets nearby, & a strip mall with a Tar-jay & a big blue hardware store in it, but if i done want to go there, I can go to the nearby orange one, or the super-friendly & knowledgeable Tru-Value in the other direction.
There are some reasons I want to live in the country but there are some reasons I don’t. Safe roads & retail access are among them.
I presume the OP means the central core to do “city shit” like go to restaurants, museums, etc.
I’m not sure how to answer the question. We live in Hudson County, NJ on the Hudson River across from Manhattan. For all intents and purposes, this region (the towns between the Hudson and Passaic Rivers from Jersey City up to Fort Lee) are sort of a de facto “sixth borough” of New York. JC being a city of 300k people unto itself. That is to say much of the housing is apartments and condo buildings and the towns are all integrated (ish) to NYC each other through bus, ferry, rail, light rail, and subway (PATH) service.
Aside from work, I’d say I go into NYC pretty frequently. Not as much as I used to since I’m older with kids and just don’t go out as much. Really the main reason is we tend to go out “to the country” or spend most of our weekends driving the kids around to their various activities in the suburbs of NJ.
As a few others pointed out, even NYC by itself is such a huge and diverse urban area that even living “in the city” you kind of need to define what you mean by “going to the city”. Like if I go visit my friend who lives in a single-family house in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, I don’t really think of that as “going to the city” any more than say, driving to downtown Rutherford, NJ (which also apparently has a nice little downtown area).
Arguably, I already benefit from it in the form of sizable suburbs that have most of what I need.
I take the ~45min trip into Chicago maybe once every 4-6 weeks between music performances, a store my wife wants to visit, a hotel weekend or something similar. For the most part, the twin forces of suburban sprawl and internet shopping means we have most of what we want/need here and city luxuries (fine dining? In THIS economy?) are reserved for occasional events.
(The next couple of weeks are a weird cluster of visits with music shows tomorrow, next Friday and mid June. But that’s a bit out of the ordinary for a four week period)
Yes, you were.
The suburbs in Cape Town tend not to be where you find the art galleries, the arts center or the good restaurants. There are a couple good theatres in the 'burbs, and a couple music venues for big groups, but in general, anything actually cultured is in the city (or the rural winelands, for restaurants). Doubly so with First Thursdays.
My own suburb has a lot going for it, but also big gaps in what’s available. And it’s one of the best suburbs for culture in CT.
Have you met the South African Rand?
There’s galleries and restaurants in the Chicago suburbs but, really, I don’t visit many art galleries. Chicago is home to the renown Chicago Art Institute but that’s a place I visit maybe twice a decade. In general though it sounds as if Chicago suburbia probably offers more than Cape Town suburbia. Which isn’t to say it’s “the same as Chicago” but it covers a lot of needs especially if your needs are relatively modest most of the time.
Not personally, but it doesn’t inspire me to go into the city and spend my money.
A distinction I’ve always made, although I don’t know if it has any official status, is between connected and unconnected suburbs. A connected suburb is one where you never leave the heavily developed area when you travel into the main city. An unconnected suburb is one where you leave the developed area of the suburb and travel through a portion of the country before entering the main city.
In my area, for example, places like Greece and Irondequoit and Pittsford are connected suburbs. And places like Hilton and Spencerport and Victor are unconnected suburbs.
Cities and suburbs grow and these statuses can change. I can remember when you had to drive through the country to get to Katy from Houston so Katy was an unconnected suburb. But now all the area between them has been developed and Katy is a connected suburb of Houston.
There are a number of small cities/towns north of Denver. I’m in one of them. They have everything I need. I avoid Denver like the plague. The traffic is insane. But sometimes I’ve got to go.
Your assumptions about where I’ve lived are correct, though the city where I spent most of my life is closer to 120k, not <100k, but whatevs. But I know how suburbs and exurbs and residential areas that are still in city limits but not in the heart of the city work. Please. For the sake of this thought experiment, I don’t consider crossing the border from Suburb to City, where there is fundamentally no difference between what’s happening on one side vs. the other, as “going into the city.” If you live in East Cupcake and your kids go to East Cupcake High School, but you go into Chicago to see a Cubs game, or watch 2nd City, or go shopping for bongs in Old Town, or your niece is getting married at St. Cantius, or whatever, that’s “going into the city.” If you cross the border from where the houses on this side of the street have East Cupcake addresses, and the ones on that side of the street have Chicago addresses, I don’t really consider that “going into The City.”
That’s what I thought about the kids I met in college who had such a “meh” attitude towards Chicago. If I lived in a Chicago burb, I’d be in town every weekend; for Chicago Fire FC games, for live music somewhere, for unique dining experiences, for stand up comedy, for world-class museums, for this, or for that.
BUT, I’m an adult. When I was a freshman in college, meeting other freshmen in college, I was meeting people who were just entering adulthood, meaning that, for most of their lives up until that point, going into Chicago required either their parents taking them there (when they were too young to go by themselves), or getting their parent’s permission (when they were old enough to go by themselves). It’s not like any 15 year old in Tinley Park can decide to go to Chicago today and her parents are going to be like “OK, sure, be home by 10:30.” I imagine it’s not quite that easy, nor was it that easy in the late 1980s.
I’m not going to speak about now - but unless the late 80s were very different from the late 70s , or the Chicago area was way different from the NYC area , there was some other reason for their lack of interest in Chicago. Because as a general rule, my parents didn’t know where I was if I could get there by public transit or in a friend’s car. If I didn’t go to Manhattan or New Jersey or Philadelphia, it was because there was nothing I wanted to do there.
This does clarify your OP. By “The City,” you really mean “going downtown” or “going to the part of the city where museums/restaurants/theaters/sports are concentrated.” A fair amount of the discussion upthread was because your OP wasn’t as clear as maybe you thought it was.
Also, your OP talked about kids from suburban Chicago whom you met in college, and you just built on it:
I’d hazard a guess that relatively few 18-year-olds care about “unique dining experiences” and “world-class museums.” Live music and sports might be more attractive to people in that age group.
I’ve been to every major museum, & many of the smaller ones in my nearby city at least once, some of them multiple times. How often should I go to them?
Between now & the end of June I have one weekend free, no plans, that includes going to three festivals not in the city.
If I were to go to a chain restaurant, even a high-end chain, the exact same meal will cost $30 or more in the city, just from parking & extra taxes alone. There are some very good non-chain restaurants not in the city too. (Public transit runs once an hour & the train station at night us not a nice place to hang out, so yeah, I’m driving.)
I’m busy half the week nights as it is & I can’t tell you the last time I went clubbing; what nightlife am I missing?
I don’t like opera & I can see a symphony in the suburbs if I wanted to, including one a friend us in. Granted they’re not world-class but i don’t know if i could tell the difference.
I live in Los Angeles, the county, not the city. Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA to locals) has some places worth visiting, but is not a major destination relative to all the other areas.
We go wherever… a particular restaurant, or museum, or theater, or beach, etc, etc. We go out weekly to local places, within our suburb. And weekly to places in adjacent suburbs or neighborhoods. Maybe monthly to more distant parts of Los Angeles. Probably DTLA twice a year or so.
Does going to Northridge count as going to “The City” because we’re technically entering the City of L.A., coming from a suburb that’s not? Or is going to Santa Monica, which is technically a suburb but with a well defined downtown, going to “The City”?
PDF map of Los Angeles, with the City of L.A. in white.
I, for one, understood perfectly well what the OP meant.