I say this as someone who loved living in one of hippest and most desirable neighborhoods in a large, cosmopolitan city for many years. I loved walking to work. I loved having great museums blocks away. I loved the great restaurants and cheap takeout places. I loved never really having to drive anywhere (though I had a car the whole time for weekend escapes). I loved the cute boutiques and the nearby performance venues. I get the appeal of the city and you will miss it sometimes.
If you’re expanding your business, you’re going to spend most of your time on that for the next year. Driving is miserable and a complete time suck. Commuting by public transit allows you to use your time better, but living in the city and commuting to your new office from the city would add over 600 hours of unpaid time to your work life compared to walking from a suburban apartment. You could use that 600 hours instead to travel from the suburbs back into the city for museums, plays, dates and meeting up with friends. If you live in the city, you lose all that time and you will never have enough of it left to do any of those fun things anyway. Saving money by living in suburbia will also reduce the stress and risk of expanding the business. Make that easy on yourself and give yourself the best chance of success.
But, you ask, why do so many people living in the suburbs feel so lonely and isolated? They have kids and terrible commutes that suck up their time. If you move to the suburbs, you will have neither of those things. If you stay in the city, you add the commute and you are half way to the loneliness and isolation suburbia seems to cause.
If you hate living in the suburbs after a year, move back to the city. But don’t delude yourself into believing that all the problems you had with the suburbs will be solved by moving back to the city. Once you add 600 extra hours of commuting, city life won’t be as appealing.
I’ve lived in the city, suburbs, and rural areas. I’ve enjoyed life wherever I’ve lived, but really prefer living outside of the city. The city will be there whenever you want to visit, but your life will be simpler without the two hours of commute time/expense each day.
I don’t really agree with this part of the advice: living in a city with all that it has to offer is a very different experience to having to commute into it for those things. For the latter, I think you would often find that you just don’t bother, and would settle into the suburban experience.
This is a distinctly personal question with no general right answer. I live out in the suburbs now and am fine with it. I think I’d slightly prefer living in the city but to be perfectly honest it is somewhat wasted on me. That my suburb is surrounded by hiking trails and restaurants within walking distance is important: I don’t think I’d ever want to live in a driving only place. When we lived in Atlanta we lived in midtown and both actually commuted long distances to the northern suburbs. Living in them would have killed us though.
Based on the opening post though, I strongly suspect she’d be unhappy in the suburbs. I wouldn’t move. If you love your community and it’s closeness I think you’ll be very sensitive to the isolation. It sounds like a bad fit. The obviously hard but probably best long term solution would be to find more local students.
Tough one but I would go with suburbs if I were you. 2 hours of commuting really adds up over time. That’s around 500 hours a year. It will take a big toll on you in many ways.
Move, but only if you’re prepared to spend more time alone (at first, anyway) and willing to put in the effort to start new friendships. It might take a couple of years to find the right people, and in that time you’ll probably have to deal with loneliness.
In the above paragraph, it sounds like you don’t have deeply intimate friendships with those people. Most of the things you’ve mentioned can be found in a small town or suburb.
Personally, I’d rather have to take a long trip to/from the city once in a while (entertainment or the odd purchase) than every day (work or living arrangements).
I’m a single woman who lives in Houston and commutes to the suburbs for my job, and I much prefer that to living in the suburbs. However, my commute is usually 30 minutes, if it was an hour or 90 minutes, I don’t think I could handle that. And most weeks I’m just working my regular 40 hours, if I was working a long day and then had a long commute home I definitely would go crazy. In your situation there is a lot more research I would want to do on how things would actually be.
How positive are you that that is really what time your commute would take? Have your driven it when your work time would actually be? If 1 hour driving/1.5 hour public transport is the worst case scenario, then maybe it’s doable to stay in your neighborhood. But if that is the best case scenario and it’s often longer then I’d lean more towards moving.
If you stayed where you are, would you have much time to enjoy your neighborhood, considering your long hours and long commute? Would you still have the energy to go out and be social or go to the museum or whatever, or would you likely just go home and crash? Would your time on the weekend in the neighborhood make up for it, or would you still be recovering from the week and the things you didn’t get around to then?
If you did move, how long would it take you to get into the city to do things you’re interested in? And how often would you be wanting or needing to come into the city?
Is there a compromise neighborhood in between yours and the suburbs? Something that would cut down your commute but maybe still be not terribly far away from what you love in the city?
Also as others have said, it’s possible the suburbs aren’t as bad as the moms have made it sound. I would look up online and see what I could find to do in the area, not just take the tired moms’ word for it. Meetup.com is a good place to see if there are people doing things in the area. I’d go out to where the office will be and find a bar or something that looks like a place you might be into and see what it’s like some night, and see if it’s something you could find yourself going to regularly.
Speaking as someone who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I say stay for now. You can always change your mind, but as you love your building and neighborhood, if you took a move to the burbs and didn’t like it, your apartment would be gone and it might be hard to find neighbors like those you have now. It would drive me crazy to hear other people’s noises, but you’d probably hate it without traffic noises and hearing the coyotes and foxes start talking at night.
I will say that I think the isolation these mothers are talking about probably has more to do with being a mom with kids no longer needing her as much, with a life centered around a family that’s changing. I’m sure there are plenty of moms in NYC who never go to museums or parks and their trips to the store are their big outing.
I am not familiar enough with NYC but that isn’t always the case in all cities. Some places the outbound morning traffic can be as bad or worse depending on where the jobs are and who has them.
Looking back at my OP, I’m not sure why I even mentioned driving to the office as a viable option for commuting. My car-related costs–parking garage, insurance, gas, and maintenance–are about $675/month. (Yes, for real.) And that doesn’t take depreciation into account. Right now, I can deduct all my those expenses on my taxes. Once I start working out of my office, my total travel costs would be close to what I’m paying now, but I’d have to pay for everything out of my own pocket. Ugh.
I haven’t made any firm decisions yet, but I’ve started looking into moving. I might move to the suburbs, within walking or biking distance of my office. Or I might pick somewhere in the city that makes it easier to commute by train. So far, apartments close to my office all seem expensive and terrible, with few to no amenities and too much noise, but maybe there are some semi-affordable apartments that would be OK to live in.
Tomorrow (Tuesday), I’m going to meet someone who advertised for a roommate in her big suburban house. Living there would give me a very different style of life from what I’m used to, but I think it could work out, as long as the owner and I like each other. I’d get a 7-minute commute by bike to the office (25 minutes on foot), an even shorter travel time to commuter rail into the city, 24-hour access to a washer and dryer, a place in the garage for a car (at no added cost), my own space within the house (including my own bathroom), and a place for my bicycle on the porch.
The owner said she’d really like someone who could plant part of her garden with either veggies or flowers. She’s getting older and finding it difficult to maintain the garden on her own. Before I moved to NYC, I used to have a vegetable and herb garden. I’d love to have one again.
To the OP: How would you be commuting out to the suburbs, if you continue to live in NYC? Is it feasible to do it by train? At least then you wouldn’t totally lose the time you spend traveling, because you could read or do whatever work you might have to take home. Or you could sleep.
So I just got done seeing the house and meeting the owner. No way am I living there. Ever.
If Miss Havisham had lived in 1960, her house would look like this one does now. Everything is old, frayed, and worn down to the nub. There’s a thick layer of dust on every single surface. I can’t even begin to describe the layers of grease adhering to every surface in the kitchen.
Furthermore, she’s converted what was obviously once a beautiful sunroom into a neglected shelter for feral cats. The place reeks of cat pee, and the dust from cat litter hits your eyes as soon as you enter.
The woman who lives in the house seemed really hurt that I didn’t say yes. She actually physically blocked me from leaving and kept telling me all about how wonderful the neighborhood was.
I tried to, as politely as possible, tell her that the house was going to need some upkeep. She told me not to worry about it, because she likes to do the cleaning and arranging of things herself, so that everything is well taken care of.
Eventually, I had to literally walk around her, squeeze behind her, and open the front door to let myself out.
Only you can make that choice. Personally, I dislike city living. I have anxiety, so constantly being worried about offending neighbors drives me batty. Living in a city to me is for young people who want to go clubbing and don’t want to drive home drunk. Almost everything else about it turns me off and here’s the truth of the city, you tend to live in your neighborhood, not in the city itself. How often are you really going to shows or museums or any of the places that suburbs don’t have? A couple times a year is usually the answer which is pretty much exactly how often you go when you live in the suburbs. Of course, suburbs are their own kind of hell. Like you said, people live on islands with no human contact. For me, medium to large-sized towns are the ticket. That under 100 thousand people, more than 10 thousand people range. Big enough for local theater and arts programs, small enough that you have a yard and a driveway. I’m religious, so meeting people is a cinch and a friend group takes only a couple of months. College towns are really the dream for me. Lots of stuff to do, lots of room to roam. Anyway, I’m off-topic. You probably know what you want to do and it sounds like you made up your mind. I will throw in one other thing. A short commute is a life changer. Mine used to be 40 and now it’s 7. If you go from an hour commute down to 15 minutes, that’s an hour and a half every day that just magically appears. Do the math on that for a moment. If you work 220 days a year and you’re awake 16 hours a day, you just added 3 weeks every year to your life. It really changes everything. You get to stay up later reading. You get home early enough that you can cook a meal without it stretching into the evening. I would probably cry if I had to go back to a 40 minute commute.
You’ve probably already made a choice, Scribble, but if I were in your shoes… I would try and combine office space with living space.
With a minimalistic style of living, and a stern culling of stuff, Marie Kondo style, you could change your living room into an office. Put your personal stuff in a big lock box that is designed to look like a beautiful piece of office furniture, a bit like this Murphy bed ). Converting the room would take far less time every morning then a commute would.
You could do this in both your inner city apartment and the suburban office. You’d have a business with two locations, and not need to rent an additional apartment. The NYC location is in business Saturday to Tuesday, the suburb one Wednesday to Friday. Maybe even rent out the office to your co-workers on the days you are not there.
Ditch the car alltogether and make the commute by public transit only twice a week (Tuesday evening and Friday evening).