Love/Hate relationship with where you live

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Dallas Fort Worth. I moved to the far western edge 28 years ago – close enough to drive in for work but far enough away to be out of the city limits and avoid the majority of “city” problems (crime/taxes).

Likes:
Mild winters:
As I age I prefer cooler temps for outside play and there’s just enough cold to drive the noisy rabble indoors. Along with school keeping 'em busy I have parks and lakes mostly to myself for 7-8 months.

Inexpensive housing:
Affordable housing doesn’t mean living in the ghetto here. You can have a decent house for a fraction of the cost in the coastal cities. But tech salaries are pretty close to our coastal brethren.

Low taxes:
Most of Texas’ taxes come from property taxes on your house. And this provides an opportunity to avoid or at least control part of what you pay. In short: I can buy a inexpensive house and allow Karen and Chad in their McMansion to shoulder the tax burden for me.

Politics:
Mostly far right. Far less likely to limit the rights I care about, and not as tax happy as the left.

Bland, boring, flat, suburban landscape:
This is actually a positive. I don’t care what the scenery looks like during my commute. There are incredibly beautiful parts of Texas, but they don’t put cities there. Those who bother to use 4WD or hike (or boat in some cases) can see amazing places, without having a city fouling the area.

Economy:
Absolutely blazing – on fire. If you trip and fall into a business’s front door they’ll hand you an application on the way out. The number of places that have Help Wanted signs is astonishing.

Dislikes:
Summertime is nasty. Blazing heat, high humidity, and lots of bugs. I’ve read news stories about all the disappearing insects, but no worries – I found 'em.

Economy:
The flip side. Everyone is moving here and the traffic has gone from OK to horrible. Last article I read put the average at 340 new people *per day *-- for the last 8 years. That’s a bit over a million new folks in that 8 year frame. And you can tell on the roads. Also, it’s driving up home prices (mine has tripled since I bought it). Good when you’re trying to sell, not so good at tax time. But, since I’m retired the traffic can be avoided by changing my daytime schedule.

Crime:
Not a problem in the past, our area’s crime rate was so low it didn’t get a color on the newspaper’s zip code crime maps. Now it’s rising rapidly in our local area. To make things worse, the city annexed us (we fought hard, but eventually lost). At the time we paid for our own police via our own utility district fees, now the city provides it. As expected being in the city “improved” our lives by raising taxes, reducing police presence, and providing us with the additional crime we’d been lacking all these years.

22

I’m just on the border of suburban Denver. I love that I can be downtown in 45 minutes and out to the airport in an hour while not having to deal with the city if I don’t want too. I live on an acre at 8000 feet and can only see another house out of 1 window of my house. We get to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist most of the time (no pollution, crime or traffic) while getting all the benefits of being in a big city (close shopping, sports, theater).

I hate winter. Denver doesn’t get real winter, it’ll be 70 in the winter, but I still hate it. I don’t like cold and I don’t like snow. We’ve already had 26" of snow in October and the low at my house has already reached -2F. Long term I’m worried about water availability and all of the people moving to the state. I’ll be shocked if the drought situation doesn’t become dire in the next 20 years. We are in a town that has its own river and reservoir with no one up stream of us so we could be ok. I also am a little worried about the hard drift left in Colorado politics. Once the kids are in college we’re looking at the Spokane / Coeur D’alene area for retirement.

23

Well, I just got treated to my mom giving a big thumbs-down to a play based on how it had a girl who was a lesbian in love with a transsexual, so yeah…

I think that within my miniscule social circle the subjects just don’t come up much.

24

I live in Chicago, and I love everything about it except the excessive taxes (and the winters). But the culture, the food, the people, the other three seasons, the lakefront, the architecture, the public transportation, the rich history, and the entertainment options make it a huge net positive.

The road and traffic issues that **kenobi **mentions are real, but mostly a bane to the suburbanites. Being in the inner city, I rarely need to drive anywhere.

25

The traffic is bad enough, and I’m really glad I don’t have to commute, but it’s the drivers that make you homicidal. They seem to make up their own rules without regard to anyone’s safety. If someone is blocking part of a lane (like a bus), they’ll swerve into oncoming traffic and expect you to get out of the way. Throwing open the driver’s door into traffic is a real heart-stopping experience for other drivers. Cutting corners and having a head-on collision with another car at the stop sign is favorite of mine. But the most annoying for me are those who will try to be “Portland nice” and stop when they don’t have to to wave you through an intersection where you are sitting at a stop sign. Just. . .no. Just do what is expected by law and I’m happy. When you do the unexpected, an insurance claim is likely to follow.

26

I commute and do almost all my errands on bike. It’s great, until some Saint Francis of ASS-sisi takes pity on me. Sees me 30 feet away and stops their car in the middle of traffic. There’s a spot where a bike path crosses a busy street, and so many people will slow way down or stop. Cars are piling up and I’m not even close yet, so I’m waving frantically “GO!”

I yelled at one car “Drive! Your! Car! That’s your ONE job right now! MOOOOVE!” They started shaking their head with a syrupy smile as if to say Oh, no, I’m being niiiice, you can’t stop me… despite all the people honking behind them.

I didn’t cross the street, I turned around and headed back the way I came. Hopefully that got traffic moving a minute sooner than it was going to.

Oh, and this driver was holding up one side of a wide street. There was no guarantee traffic coming from the other direction would be as co-dependent.

If everyone just drove, everything would work out fine. But people here (Wis. and Minn.) are too “nice”.

27

PRO;

  1. Low cost of living. Low housing costs. Relatively speaking that is,…it’s going up.
  2. People are generally pretty friendly. Crime rate low.
  3. The city closest to me offers a lot to many people. Sports teams, night life, great hospitals, great library, universities…got it.
  4. Close to a lot of lakes, if you have the money you can have a pretty nice lake house.
  5. If you are a shooting enthusiast we have some of the most gun friendly laws in the U.S.
  6. No earthquakes or big wildfires.

Con;

  1. Weather extremes, tropical heat in summer, frigid tundra in winter. All time high 106F, all time low -24F. Typically in summer it will be in the upper 90s (it’s not a dry heat) a lot and winters will have many days in the teens or lower. Can change back and forth pretty quickly.
  2. Now that a hospital corporation has built a world class campus here, people are moving here in droves. Driving housing costs up. And traffic.
  3. No mountains. Or even hills for the most part. Rivers look like mud flows. There’s a creek near me that has pretty good water quality but even it is murky most of the time.
  4. A high percentage of the generally nice people are Trumpy as hell.
  5. If you hate guns, you will not like our liberal (heh) gun laws.
  6. Tornadoes. In my 62 years, I have not experienced one first hand but it’s always a possibility.

For what you would pay for a small bungalow on a postage stamp lot in L.A. you could probably have a McMansion on twenty wooded acres here. I have an old 3 bedroom ranch on 3/4 of an acre and almost 3 acres of woods across the street for under 200K.

28

I’ve lived in Left Coast Portland for almost 25 years and Chefguy is spot on about the city government. I’m about ready to kick the lot of them out of a high flying helicopter sans parachutes. The city is doing nothing about our burgeoning homeless population and they basically expect that working class neighborhoods like mine will just put up with the endless car break ins and stolen bikes and dogs and the piles of feces and needles that festoon every bit of vacant city land that isn’t covered in tent cities. It sucks and I really want to get outta the city bigtime but can’t quite swing it yet financially. Soon as I can though, I’m outta here. Rural Oregon is still pretty fuckin’ nice.

And yes, the traffic here blows syphilitic donkey dick. The city keeps putting all the major arterials on “road diets,” bringing them down to one lane each direction and although I generally approve of traffic calming measures, some of what they’re doing appears to be actively hostile. Look, I have no problem with trying to encourage people to drive less and use public transit more but you are never going to get anyone to exchange a 30 minute car commute (no matter HOW teeth grindingly annoying it is) for a two hour transit commute. It just Will. Not. Happen. Stop pretending that passive aggressively antagonizing drivers is going to solve the problem because it won’t.

29

For me and my wife it’s actually gone past the love/hate point and it’s a damn shame because Montreal could and should be an example of cultural diversity and harmony but the damn provincial government (which won very few seats on the island of Montreal itself) which is made up of a bunch of petty, xenophobic, narrow-minded, bigoted assholes, is desperately trying to fuck that up.

I work in a fairly large company in Montreal which has a huge number of skin colours, ethnicities, linguistic backgrounds all working together and it’s a thing of beauty to see. And at work, and in the city, a lot of cross-talk (anglos and francos using a hybrid of both languages when talking to each other, or “franglais”) is often seen. There’s a great column about it here: https://www.mtlblog.com/opinions/canada/qc/montreal/montreal-culture-is-blessed-by-a-beautiful-thing-called-franglais

So our provincial government has enacted a law - bill 21 - which bans anyone in a provincial government job from wearing any sort of religious symbols at work. So if a teacher is a Muslim women who wears a hijab, she either has to remove it at work, or find work elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in another province), or if front counter-worker is a Sikh he would have to remove his turban at work or find work elsewhere. Ironically, the population of the island of Montreal (the economic engine of the province) couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this stuff, but are almost the only population of Quebec affected by this. Of course, according to the government, this has nothing to do with bigotry yet, conveniently, Christians don’t wear obvious, visible symbols, except possibly tiny crosses etc.

And then the corruption and gross, gross incompetence in the construction industry and the crumbling infrastructure is so fucking vile and frustrating. For Montrealers on this board, this will be familiar: we live in Lachine because of other circumstances (we’re not suburbanites as a rule) but going downtown is such a massive pain in the ass that we’ve been forced into being full-time suburbanites.

We used to love Montreal (so much so that my username is velo (for my love of bicycles and cycling) and mont (for a city I once loved) but the circumstances are such that we can’t wait until I retire and we can pull the plug on this bloody dysfunctional place.

30

Thats too bad velomont, and sad too. It’s not like that here thank goodness, but we do have plenty of garden variety [del]shit stains[/del] bigots, racists and assholes. Worked with a muslim kid for a few weeks who was born and raised here who was accosted one day leaving the mosque he went to. Good kid, nice friendly smart hard worker. That was the final straw for him and he was gone to socal within two weeks.

31

Don’t kid yourself. Rural Oregon towns have the same problem as rural towns everywhere: epidemic oxy and meth usage.

32

Cornwall, England (aka, the tip of the pointy out bit, bottom left).

Pros:
It’s pretty, it really is. I’m not a beach person, which is generally reckoned to be the main attraction, but I have to admit there’s some really lovely coastline here. The springs, just before all the tourists arrive, are also unbelievably pretty.

Some of the people are also delightful; I went to buy a second hand desk just after I moved here, for like £15, and the guy I bought it off not only helped me get it in the car, he fixed the lock on the boot. That sort of thing has happened multiple times.

The job situation is also surprisingly not bad. Everything I’d heard before I came here implied that there was no work, at least only summer tourism work (I moved here for university, so was hoping to find a summer job), but I’ve honestly just fallen into multiple jobs here. Not great jobs, though my current one’s pretty decent, but then I’m only available part time anyway, and it’s enough to pay the bills.

But…
The cons:

The rest of the people.

There’s a chunk of locals who’ve never left the county, and it shows. They genuinely believe that this place is being utterly screwed over by the rest of the country, and are furious about it. The fact that the things they’re complaining about are happening all over the UK (housing prices shooting up, NHS cuts, lack of local services, rise in homelessness) is a genuine surprise to many people I’ve talked to, and I’m not sure they believe me.

I’ve had people tell me, with a straight face, that this is the most expensive place to live in the country. I’ve got a really nice 1 bedroom apartment here for slightly less than I was paying for a room in Bristol, in a dodgy area. House prices here are actually below the national average, and it’s only the coastal high-end places that push it up that far. It’s simply delusional.

They also resent anyone living here whose great grandparents weren’t locals, and accuse everyone of clogging up the doctors’ surgeries and filling up the schools, like those are natural resources that are somehow being stolen. Not one of the doctors at the town surgery has a local accent.

There’s also a chunk of them who consider tax-dodging to be almost a duty, while complaining that the council is broke. And they drive like maniacs (had people tell me they only bother about speed limits in summer, they’re really just to catch tourists). Many are also really racist, and truly resent all the tourists that are the basis of the local economy; I don’t just mean get annoyed by the occasional people driving 1/4 of the speed limit in order to admire the view, or the crowds filling up the beaches, I mean genuinely believe that they’re the only people with any right to be here at all. They apparently think that if the tourists just left, the fisheries would open up again and presumably the tin would grow back.

Needless to say, while complaining about how all the public services are broken, they also voted for brexit and the conservatives. Despite the region being a net recipient of EU funding…

33

That’s a “pro” I should have mentioned about Chicago, as well. Though we get the occasional blizzard in the winter, or severe thunderstorms in the summer, we don’t get wildfires or hurricanes, and while we get a strong-enough-to-be-noticed earthquake every once in a long while, we’re not at significant risk for any sort of major earthquake.

34

Yes, but in the rural areas they keep that shit inside their crappy mobile homes which will be a lot further away from me than the tent cities that spring up along the bike trail I live next to where I have to hear the screams and smell the burning trash 24/7. Siting your house right in the middle of 10 or 20 acres down a dirt road with signs posted and fencing tends to keep the meth head population at bay.

35

I love my neighborhood for the most part and the diversity of the city. You can go from Soho to Long Island to the People’s Republic of Santa Monica and never leave Pittsburgh. You can hear 6 different languages standing at the same bus-stop. You want anything from opera to head-banging its going on here somewhere.

What I hate is our one-party rule. This city is solid and even though I agree with that particular party 85% of the time, I wish there was some competition of some kind. At least some debate. But whatever the local committee decides or endorses is basically it. It is so bad that even when we’ve had various referendum votes they sometimes find ways around it all. If I move, or more likely when, that will be the reason.

36

John Day is the place I’d go for a vacation. Spent a few weeks there doing a project a couple years ago and one of my crew suggested opening a small movie theater. I said nope, when the local bowling alley and McDonalds fail, thats not a town with a bright future. The scenery there is amazing though

37

I’m in SoCal, too. Westside area being touted as Silicon Beach. Heh. Fortunately, my sister and I bought our condo in the 80s, and it’s paid off. A comparable condo in our immediate vicinity would cost you about five times what we paid. How do people afford it??? I love the diversity, the restaurants, other cultural amenities, sports, etc.

But the traffic? We used to go on “drives” for pleasure. Now, I allow myself at least 30 minutes to get to a doctor’s appt that’s less than 6 miles away. Good thing that clinic is moving closer to me next year – score!

Weather where we are is nice. We don’t need a/c. Maybe a week or two in winter, we’ll need a portable heater running. But that’s about it. My other sister’s in Ventura County, and they’ve been evacuated several times over the years due to wild fires. We never have.

38

I live in Napa. The beautiful wine country. I’ve lived here since I was about three years old in the mid-1960’s.

Pros: The beautiful wine country. The food, the wine, the culture.

People here are pretty nice and we still have a bit of the small town vibe.

The climate is outstanding. (Y’all with your four seasons including snow can keep it.)

We’re still a bit off the beaten path. We don’t really have any major freeways in the county, so if you’re here, you meant to get here. Unless you’re on the way to Lake county, which you probably are not.

Cons: The beautiful wine country. The food, the wine, the culture. What that means is that we get a LOT of tourists. Lots and lots of tourists. (The upside is that they leave a lot of money here.) The food is expensive. The wine is expensive. (I go to Grocery Outlet for wine. Great prices, pretty good wine. Yes, Napa wine.)

Hey, let’s talk housing prices! An awful lot of people who work here can’t live here. They live over the hill in Solano County and drive in here every morning and drive out every evening on two lane highways. Since it’s a LOT of hospitality workers, they work weekends, too. Right when the tourists are coming and going. The city officials are going, “We have lots of jobs available in Napa, where are the workers?” Excuse me, but no-one can afford to live here on the salary of a hospitality worker!

The culture has turned into out-of-towner culture. We’re still a fairly smallish town, but promoters here are trying to put in major acts at some venues. I don’t really think we have the population for it to be sustained. A large NY company leased our historic, newly remodeled opera house, took the beautiful theater seating out, installed a gawd awful wooden floor and ruined our little jewel of a theater, then promptly went out of business.
We have a film festival now. We have a “major” music festival now. We have a new park with a large stage so we have ticketed shows all summer now. Many folks think they’re great, but I can’t stand the traffic or the disruption to my town.

My biggest con: the local music scene (my source of revenue) blows. There’s been a proliferation of “old white guys playing classic rock”. Seems like about twenty musicians are working 95% of the gigs. The gigs themselves are mostly being booked by the folks who produce that big music festival, so good luck getting their attention. Another big chunk is being booked by the current residents of the opera house. (Blue Note. As in Blue Note jazz club in NY) None of them pay well.

Whew.

All that being said, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. My wife and I bought our little working class house in a working class neighborhood before the housing bubble hit, so we can afford to stay here. We’ll probably die here.

39

I live in Wellington, New Zealand.

I love New Zealand. I mostly love Wellington. But … it is, literally, the windiest city in the world (going by average wind speed).

I don’t want to move. But, god damn I get tired of the wind sometimes.

40

I’m in the suburbs east of Sacramento, California.

The pros:
-It’s a short drive from the natural beauty of the Sierra Nevada foothills, with plenty of good hiking spots (I’ve noticed this seems to be a common theme for everywhere in California).
-It’s relatively affordable compared to other parts of California.
-It’s about two hours from San Francisco and two hours from Lake Tahoe, making either an easy day drip.
-Miles and miles of bike paths.
-The risk of earthquakes is actually quite low in this part of the state. The major fault lines are mostly out towards the coast.
-Some of the best Mexican food you’ll find outside of Mexico. That’s really true for all of California, not just my particular locale.
-In-N-Out Burger, which comes with the same qualifier as the previous one.

Cons:
-During the summer it gets oppressively hot. There are typically a couple of weeks each year with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, it’s a dry heat, but it’s still hot.
-It doesn’t rain at all during the summer. If we can store enough water in the reservoirs during the rainy season everything is fine, but during drought years there can be water shortages.
-I said in the pros section that it’s affordable by California standards, but it’s still more expensive than much of the rest of the country.
-The lower cost of living compared to other parts of the state has led to a recent influx of people moving here from the Bay Area, which is leading to a shortage of housing, which is causing housing prices to rise. So that thing I said about it being affordable might not be true for much longer.