Living in a small town - why?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Probably for the same reason so many movies and tv shows take place there. There is just this sense of being at the center of the universe. Most people read about Wall Street and all the financial meltdowns and throw in their 2 cents. I’m actually working for a large consulting firm in Midtown (technically most of the investment banks are up there, not in Wall Street anymore) that actually goes into those companies to fix these problems.

I like that I can go out to eat in any sort of restaurant or meet some friends in a bar any day of the week (but best if it isn’t EVERY day of the week).

Plus there is always some new neighborhood or block that I haven’t been to before.

Also, the combination of lots of people and relative anonymity means you can pretty much live whatever lifestyle you like without people giving you shit all the time.

I grew up in a relatively small town in Connecticut and it certainly has its pros and cons. Sure it’s pretty and all and I think when you are growing up, you kind of know everyone and share a common bond. But as I got older I found less to hold my interest.

42

I live in a small town, actually just a community, of a couple thousand people. Unincorporated, so that means no town council thinking up new bullshit rules, no local taxes other than state and federal taxes. But it is close-knit. I know most of the people and their children or their parents, depending upon age. If tragedy were to strike me, I would not be able to fight off the assistance that would flood into my life.

In 30 minutes I can be on the Pacific beach, and there will only be a few other people there, unless it is a good clam digging tide, then there will be thousands. I can drive my truck right onto the beach, the wet sand portion is public highway. All 400 miles of coast line is public property up to the dry sand line and no one can kick you off and say it is their personal beach. The Columbia River is a fisherman’s dream where I live, just a few miles from where it meets the ocean. If you have a boat there are islands and beaches you can have all to yourself.

In an hour and half I can be in Portland and all that a large, freindly city offers, including major sports, concerts, plays, and shopping. In another half hour after that I can be skiing on Mt. Hood, even as late as June. Add another hour and I am in the high desert.

In any direction I wish to point myself, there are opportunities for things to do that just don’t exist for a lot of the people in the world, or even in this country.

These are some of the things I am thankfull for this year.

If you are an urban person, you would find my little home town as dull as a flat rock. But I think I live in paradise. Cities to me are endless, souless, boring death. And that is probably what you would think of my home town too.

43

What amused me about the OP is that my husband and I just got back from spending a few days in Tokyo, and thought how could anyone stand to live here?! pretty much the whole time. I think the perks of country living have been pretty well covered, so I’ll leave it at that.

44

The closest town to me is 4 miles away. About 500 people. Then in the other direction a grocery store is 15 miles away.

I don’t go ‘shopping’ I buy things that I need. I don’t consider it a form of entertainment. There are plenty of good enough restaurants close enough for my Wife and I to eat out. But we prefer to cook at home.

We have no problem traveling and dealing with the city, or the bush (I right this while in a hotel outside of Pittsburgh). We prefer to be able to walk out our back door into national forest.

And have views like this from our deck.

Another from the deck. Clouds below and around

This is the trail we often walk our dogs on. It’s ¼ mile behind our house.

I would say the same thing. Why would anyone want to live in a city?

45

One major plus that I felt while living in a 7500 population town for 30 years (it was 3500 when we arrived) was that I really felt connected to the town and its people. I was a teacher, and knew almost every family and had repeat generations.

My sons friends chose to spend their time at our house, but when my sons visited other homes, I knew all of the wheres and whats.

Small town living requires one to move outside of the normal life. To pursue interests, I had to work at getting information and materials…personal involvement can become much greater, as you make your own environment rather than going somewhere near and finding it pre-make for you.

People were friendly. However, the folks in my retirement city (700,00 population) are great too. I just have to work a bit harder at making friends.

Also, I could see a Dr or dentist within an hour or two.

46

Someone upthread even made a comment about the costs being the same. My annual income cut by over half when I bailed on Silicon Valley and came out here, but I feel like my standard of living is far better.

Last time I was in Portland, a pint of (good) beer cost me $7.50 in a pub. Here, I can get that same beer for less than half the price. My property taxes for 55 acres here were less than my property taxes for 1-1/2 acres in California (and I’m now on three acres, so even cheaper).

Because working remotely is so easy these days, I have neighbors and friends out here in the middle of nowhere doing just about any job you can imagine. My wife provided the closed captioning for three of the World Series games from here a couple of years ago. She’s done days of Olympics coverage from here, too. There are engineers, rocket scientists, economists, you name it.

47

I’ll skip the quoting and just say that you can take Gary’s list and tack my name on the end, though we’re on a smaller lot and have neighbors. I first realized just how small it was here when we asked our librarian how many people live in this town, and she responded, “well, let’s see, there’s the Smiths, the Browns…”

48

Oh, and if there is an EMP strike and the entirety of the government gets wiped out, there is a higher chance of survival.

49

I was thinking about this earlier today – ISTM that on opposite ends of the population density spectrum, you get anonymity. One of the things I prefer about a small town: I interact with very few people, which is just the way I like it. When I worked in Manhattan (yeah – a midtown office, with financial clients just a few blocks up 5th), there was always a mass of people to deal with. Overwhelming, in fact – but almost always as mobile meat and not individuals. A city has its own type of anonymity. The choice might be summarized as: getting lost in the crowd versus not having a crowd at all.

Now suburbs (like where I grew up in NJ) – they’re teh total suck.

50

While I know pharmacists do earn pretty high salaries, the girl might have meant that there were some really rich families there. Like trust fund kids who inheret millions on their 21st birthday and live in Park Avenue penthouses (or Back Bay townhouses I guess if it was Harvard) and whatnot.

But one advantage of living in a small town is that money tends to go further. A disadvantage of many big cities is that they are impossibly expensive.

51

My abode is in a semi-rural township with barely visible government and unobtrusive neighbors - something I couldn’t have living in the medium to large city that’s a short drive away, should I want more upscale dining or entertainment. We have terrific wildlife too - fox, skunks, opossums, vultures…

The classic answer to the question of why one would want to live in a small town is “It’s a great place to raise children”. Whenever I hear this cited as a prime reason to move to a community*, I figure it’s a dump in the middle of nowhere and about the only thing to do is reproduce.
*this comes up fairly often in job ads when they’re coy about where the position is located. Another hint that the place is out in the sticks is if they talk about your being “only an hour from a major population center!” It usually turns out that the trip can be held to an hour only if you own a helicopter.

52

Damn. That’s like… movie location/19th century natural artist beautiful.

If I ever do somehow have kids I definitely want them to be raised in the country or a small town, so long as I myself am living in a city. (I’ll send checks and they can send pictures, preferably with views like those in enipla’s pics… in fact the kids don’t even have to be in them since chances are they’ll look part like me and part like their mother and presumably I’d already know what we look like.)

53

1.- I’m from Spain, where in order to get “no nightlife” you need to look for a place with less than 40 inhabitants and an average age over 80. Now, in an aldea of 40 inhabitants in the winter, 60 in the census and 400 in the summer due to locals coming home for vacation/long commute (which may be one hour), “night life” which doesn’t require a car will consist of having drinks with your neighbors in the “cultural center” (which has a big plasma TV and a couple of game consoles, both owned by city hall), but if you’re ok with driving, the farthest you’ll be from a bar zone or a dance club is 1 hour: you’d take longer going from Madrid’s outskirts to any of its bar zones.

2.- In Spain, specially in the north and west (Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Euskadi, Navarra, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Balearic Islands) it’s very common to have tiny villages close together. The town where I live is the capital of a comarca with such a structure. 2109 inhabitants in the census in 2005; again, in the summer the population multiplies. One church. Twelve bars, all of which also serve meals or sandwiches. Two restaurants which aren’t bars. Three hotels (two others in villages which are part of the same “city hall” but not part of the main nucleus). Two gastronomic societies. Cultural center (covered pool, jai-alai, library, movie theater, theater). School, from 3 to 18 years old. Civil and criminal courts. Guardia Civil headquarters for the area. All the government services for the area happen to be there.
Pamplona (197.275 inhabitants listed in 2008), the province’s capital, whose “metropolitan area” includes some 500.000 inhabitants, is 20km away. It takes us less to go from the village to the biggest movie theater in Pamplona than it takes people living in downtown Pamplona (the most expensive area).

Price of my flat (2B1b, 3rd floor walk up): 50-60% of the price of one the same size, with worse materials and higher up (5th or 6th floor walk up), in one of the bad parts of the towns touching Pamplona. Less than 25% of the price of one the same size in downtown Pamplona.

My only complaint is the lack of a decent internet service, but that’s me and the whole valley, so hopefully our children will see it arrive :stuck_out_tongue: For now, it’s got to be DSL or radio-based.

54

I’m driving to my satellite office today and returning tomorrow. 800 kilometer / 500 mile round trip. The good thing is that the scenery is remarkably beautiful.

55

I am a big city boy, it’s hard to live in a small town. I lived in Marathon, FL in the Florida Keys. It took awhile to get used to small town life.

I remember I was on my way to Key West, and saw a sign outside a hotel in Marathon. I wanted to live in Key West, but the help wanted sign got me to thinking. I said, “I’ll stop and apply and get an idea of what salaries are like.” My interview went, “Our books are a mess, look at them, can you fix them?” I said, “no problem,” They said “You’re hired.”

Then I filled out the application and got it set, they told me I started the next day. Then the asst manager says “Mark do you have a place to live?” I said, “no,” she says, “I have a room for rent, you want it.” So a half an hour later, I follow her to her house, and she gives me a key and goes back to work.

So I’m like, in a total of an hour I went from being unemployed to getting a job, and a place to live, and a total stranger just gave me a key to her house, then going back to work and leavig me all alone in her house, after knowning me an hour. :slight_smile:

It took awhile to get used to such thing. People were like, “Mark this isn’t Chicago.” One of them said, “If someone commits a crime against you, you don’t call the cops, you go tell his mother.” I looked all oddly at this statement and the person says, “Mark there are only five people in this town that commit crimes and we know who they are and how to keep them in line.”

The worst part was everyone knew your business. I had a doctors appointment and the cashier at the Winn-Dixie (supermarket) knew it. I didn’t even know who she was.

I recall I had to get a heating pad, and I went to the K-Mart in Marathon and they didn’t have any, they told me to drive to Key West. (That’s 50 miles one way). When I complained people said “So what, you got a car, drive it.”

The lady that rented me the room was pregnant, and at the time hospitals in the Keys didn’t deliver babies. She had to go up to Homestead about 90 miles north. I was like “Jan aren’t you afraid something will happen.” She said, “No, I’m not worried, I’ll just pull over to the side of the road and have it.”

The attitude toward things were just so different. I don’t mean they are better or worse, but different. The nice thing about a city is the choices. If I don’t like this Walgreens another Walgreens is 5 minutes away.

The worst thing about small town is decent medical for certain conditions. I developed bad allergies in Florida and even when I lived in Naples, FL or West Palm Beach, I had to go to Miami or Tampa to get treatment. And even then they sent me to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, 'cause they ran out of ideas.

But there are pluses and minuses to everything. One of the coolest and scariest things I ever observed was drivng at night from Key West back to Marathon. It is SO BLACK. I have never seen such darkness. Living in Chicago, even when it’s dark there still is light. Even out in the suburbs of Chicago the darknesss is no where near as black as in the Florida Keys.

56

I also love the seasonal disclaimers. My house, for example, is less than two hours from Yellowstone park … in the summer. In January, it can be easily double that.

You can tell a lot by how people give directions, too.

In the big city, it’ll be street names: “Go down Broadway to 34th, turn right, go six blocks…”

In the 'burbs, it’ll be landmarks: “Hang a right at the Conoco station, turn left at the second street after the fire station…”

Out here, it’s a whole different world: “Take the road to Luther and go to the 10-mile marker. Take the next right, and then turn left on the county road where Jenkins’ old grain elevator used to be…”

57

My favorite which I not only got but which actually was easily located: “…you’ll see this old house and there’ll be an old man looking out his screen door, turn left at the crossroads right after there…”. I drove a few miles and sure enough there was an old house with an old man looking out a screen door. (Evidently for lack of a Starbucks or numbered streets he’s a designated landmark.)
A similar one in New Hampshire was “not far past where the little boy got killed in the road last month”, and then- on my oath- when told I wasn’t from around and didn’t know where that was- “okay then, you’ll see a double wide trailer with a big porch, and like as not a bunch of kids playing in the road outside it…”. And I did.

58

I’m not a native but I felt a little bit more like I belonged when I did this recently!

59

Which is kind of funny, because Rochester has a population of just slightly over 100,000 people - a “small town / city” in some people’s minds!

I live in a town of about 20,000 people. I don’t think I have any problem with good healthcare though. Our hospital is part of the Mayo Medical system, and in a worst-case scenario, I can be in Rochester in an hour.

60

:eek: :frowning: