ive lived in the midwest my whole life and probably will until i die. The only 2 towns ive lived in had 10k & 67k people in them.
So what is so great about living in a huge town like Boston, san francisco, DC or LA? I’ve been to indianapolis (never lived there) but it looks like just more of the same. 5 malls instead of 1, 60 grocery stories instead of 10, 20 movie theaters instead of 5, etc. etc. etc.
Does a big town really offer anything special that you can’t get in a small/medium size town?
I live in Toronto, a very large city indeed, about 4-5 million people.
I lived in a small town most of my life (Kingston, Ontario) and moved here when I was 27, so I have both perspectives. I much prefer Toronto. Why?
There’s more to do. More attractions. Toronto has professional sports, great centres of the arts, museums, theatre, and entertainment at a scale way, way, beyond what a small town could ever have. If I want to see my beloved Blue Jays, I’m 20 minutes away. The latest musicals like The Producers or The Lion King are 20 minutes away. Every possible kind of theatre. Art house films - Kingston doesn’t even have a theatre that shows limited release films, while Toronto has more than I can count. The Royal Ontario Museum? 20 minutes away. Toronto Zoo? 40 minutes. Whatever you want, here it is.
It’s vastly better for my career. I moved here BECAUSE I had the chance to take a better job. If I were to find another job tomorrow, 99.9% of them would be in big cities. It’s not that Kingston had fewer jobs because it’s got fewer people; there are jobs in Toronto that do not exist in Kingston at all. Toronto is an air travel hub and one of the six or seven biggest commercial centres in North America.
The shopping IS better. Malls are all the same, but a large city has speciality boutiques a small one does not. For instance, I’m an amateur astronomer and Toronto has several top-notch astronomy stores; Kingston has none. Large cities also tend to have much better dining. Kingston is unusually good for dining as small cities go, but it can’t hold a candle to Toronto. Groceries are better here… I can find fresher produce here than in a small town, because the Ontario Food Terminal’s right here so all the produce is routed out of Toronto; here you get anything you want two days after they pulled it out of the ground. In Kingston the produce wasn’t nearly as good. Big ticket items are generally cheaper here, like cars. Gas is cheaper.
I just like Toronto’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. Stuff happens here. A very large portion of the city is made up of immigrants; the city is diverse, with all sorts of different kinds of people. Toronto has cultural festivals and events on a monthly basis that include more participants than Kingston has residents. You can go to Caribana, the African-Caribbean festival that draws a million people a year. You can walk down the Danforth when the Greek community puts on a show every year. You can go to Chinatown when they have an Asian new year, which is every couple of weeks; I swear the Chinese year is only seven weeks long. Kingston was sleepy and boring and everyone was white and anglophone. And frankly, I know everything about Kingston; even at 100,000 people, I had more than enough time to see every store and every neighborhood. But there’s always something new in a metropolis like Toronto.
I’m not sure this is true in the USA, but in my case Toronto is actually safer to live in than Kingston or most other small towns; the crime rate in Toronto is very low, even by Canadian standards. That may just be a Toronto thing and would probably not apply to American metropoli, which have far more violent crime. But it’s part of my rationale.
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Lessee.
Arts. A large city can support an opera, a symphony, a chorale, several theatres, art galleries, museums, etc. Such cities also support many artists who are not affiliated with or shown by the above.
Other cultural stuff. A large city usually has a large zoo, amusement parks, movie theaters (San Francisco has 20 or 30), tourist destinations, street fairs, street life, coffee shops, bars, strip joints, bookstores, and more. They have so many of some of these things that there’s a choice – if you just want used books, or just business books, or just school textbooks, or just builder’s handbooks and building codes, you’ll find stores devoted to these.
Neighborhoods. Cities support density, and density supports neighborhood stores and shops within walking distance. Many people in New York and San Francisco have never owned a car or learned to drive, because everything is right there. If it’s not, you take a train.
Other stuff. Department store chains often put flagship stores in large cities – Nordstrom, Macy’s, Saks, etc. have huge stores in SF; smaller cities get little mall versions. The bigger the store, the more stuff you can find.
Places are open later at night; I get culture shock when I visit places where the stores close at five, the restaurants at six, and the liquor store(s) at nine. Same for closing on Sundays.
Indianapolis is a pretty big city, and I think you’ll find that there’s live music, comedy, art, and night life there that you can’t find in a town of 65k. If you don’t like that stuff, well, maybe you aren’t missing anything.
Let me add a few more notes to this other than the obvious:
Medical care. Harborview Hospital in Seattle was (or so I was told as of a few years ago) the only level 1 trauma center for a radius of a few states. Many serious auto accident victims, burn victims, heart and neuro patients, and other patients with high-end specialty care needs are driven, flown, or emergency-airlifted into Harborview. Even at helicopter speeds, flying above all the traffic, a rural patient may still spend 30 minutes to an hour in the air before he can get to proper treatment. The only transplant centers are in Seattle as well; transplant patients may have to charter a private plane all the way from Montana in order to make it to transplant surgery in time.
Transit. Major cities have a higher population density and a greater tax base so it’s far easier for them to run functioning bus systems. For a city dweller who takes advantage of them, this saves a lot of money on gas and oil and tires and other wear and tear on his personal vehicle, compared to a minimum of monthly expense for a bus pass.
Competition. There is only one major free-standing bookstore in my home town, a Barnes & Noble. It’s all the way on the other side of town and if they don’t have it, nobody else in town will. (There are a couple of bookseller storefronts in the mall, but their size and selection is limited.) Of course, there are a large number of used bookstores, but they obviously won’t have new titles that I’ve been waiting for. If B&N doesn’t have it, my alternatives are to wait for them to special-order it, buy it online and wait for it to arrive, or drive to a bigger city.
Anonymity. So you don’t keep running into the same people at the same hangouts at the same time. So you can meet new people you may never have seen before. Some people think this is a great disadvantage because you’re surrounded by unfamiliar faces; some like it because you have a better chance to meet people or find a new girlfriend/boyfriend. Since I’m single, never been married or divorced, I say it’s a good thing. I’m more likely to be near someone I like, and less likely to run into old exes.
News. Local news is likely to be far richer and more robust in a big city. You get traffic reports (and traffic, sadly), local weather reports, local television coverage of important events, and so on. Olympia is rarely ever mentioned in Seattle news broadcasts for traffic, weather or news, and we wouldn’t be at all if we weren’t the state capitol with a tiny (weather-and-temperature-monitoring) airport. And it goes both ways: Olympia’s local news can’t compete with the big cities so it’s aggressively provincial. On the day that Saddam Hussein was captured, for instance, the headline above the fold in the daily Olympian was “K-9 Dog Retires.” If we ever capture Osama in Laden, the Olympian’s headline will be something like “Farmer Finds Mutant Clam.”
I’d say public transport.
I don’t live in a REALLY big city but we have such wonderful things like the zoo, opera, colleges and universities (most small towns don’t have those things of course though a few have them nearby), sports, opera, concerts, more diverse bars (rather than the corner dive which is downtown) etc etc…
basically everything others said. But the big thing for me is public transport. I don’t drive. I WANT to drive but I cannot afford lessons, nor a car and all it entails. In fact when my learners ran out I couldn’t afford a new one and I figured why bother as I couldn’t get anyone I know to teach me how to drive.
But it only costs me $2 to get from here to anywhere within the city limits. It may take me a little bit (depending where I go) but I’ll get there. I don’t have to walk across the city, I don’t have to pay a cab, I can just go and wait for someone to drive me for cheap. It’s a lot easier than paying a cab to drive me and quicker than walking (which, yes I do do when it’s within distance… meaning it won’t take me longer than an hour to walk or I’m not in a hurry).
In a small town I felt… stuck. Like I couldn’t get out to do much. Having public transit helps that.
I live in New York City. Here’s what I see as advantages:
There’s stuff to do all the time. I can go to movies, theater, museums, galleries, and so forth. I can get a bagel at 4:00 AM. I can travel almost anywhere within the five boroughs via public transit in less than 90 minutes to get there.
Diversity. All cities, but especially New York, are home to diverse populations of immigrants and little sub-cultures. All these people open restaurants, and consequently there is an infinite variety of food to eat. Within walking distance of my apartment, there are two Indian restaurants, one Pakistani (they do not fight with each other), one fake Chinese, one real Chinese, two fast food joints, a sushi place, two diners, an Italian place and a Greek place. And that’s just my neighborhood.
Everything is close. Almost all of my shopping can be done within walking distance from my apartment. There’s a grocery store, a pharmacy, a hardware store, a post office, UPS place, a housewares store, an electronics store, and a bunch of others. And that’s just my neighborhood.
Every once in a while, something really odd or interesting is going on outside. Like the local crazy guy running around with no pants.
I don’t have a car or a driver’s license, and all the various and sundry annoyances that go with them. (This is admittedly a limitation when I want to travel.)
People out in the sticks think I’m a tough guy.
I would add some things for Toronto , above what Rick mentioned, and will be compatible across all major citys at least in North America.
The town I live in , has 100 k and is pretty diverse for its size ,but that does not include that there is a small social base to work with.
You go out with a girl, it does not work , all the girls will know of it, where as Toronto you can pretty much shift your social base from say the theatre district down on spadina , to the college district or go up to Missaugua.
Your neighbors know about as much about you ,as you want them to, not everything cause its a small town. The same paper in a small town that gleefully describes your perfect son on the foot ball team, will also gleefully mention that he got busted for DWI.
Bottom line is that you can have a more private life in a big city ,than you can in a small town.
Declan
I too live in NYC. An important blessing of city life that has been semi-alluded to by friedo, Rick Jay (“diversity”) and Fish (“anonymity”) is a quality I will (sadly) call **“refuge.” **
Huge slices of our population are treated like (and/or feel like) misfits in the relatively provincial places where they were born. They can be ethnic “oddities,” like my Japanese friend who tells me he gets stared at outside most big cities, sexual “nonconformists,” like homosexuals, or just plain different-minded folks. As John Rocker can tell you, we’ll take 'em all and usually not bat an eye. Cities can provide – literally – lifesaving sanctuary for the individuals that other communities will not tolerate.
I saw stunning example of this attitude on a magazine show segment a couple of years ago. It was about a very modest but bright girl who went away from her smallish hometown to attend college. Upon returning she struggled to fit back in among her neighbors and even her family. Going away to college had made her, in local eyes, too uppity. There was a local expression that was quoted often: “You musn’t rise above your raisin’ [raising].” This appalled me! I would never want to live in a place where you wouldn’t want your children to excell as much as they possibly could.
I would have to say that the diversity of everything and anything not created by Mother Nature is the greatest thing about living in a big city. It doesn’t matter what you are looking for, you can usually find it.
Didn’t the country mouse ask his cousin the same exact question?
It’s just different strokes as far as I’m concerned. I have spent many an hour extolling the advantages of city living to non-urban friends and family to no avail.
Well, jehovah68, I agree. Most of the advantages here could be turned into disadvantages if one were so inclined.
Hand in hand with the notion of competition is urban sprawl: the same ugly strip of fast-food restaurants, auto dealerships, nail salons, pawn shops, and gas stations, replicated fiftyfold across the city like a malignant tesselation metastasizing from one neighborhood to another. Who needs seven Burger Kings when one would do?
Along with excellent medical care, one gets the inevitable noise pollution of descending helicopters and screaming ambulance sirens, and misses the friendly familiarity of a family doctor who has known you and your mother and your grandfather, because he treats them all.
Interurban transit comes at a price of noisy buses, riding on an ill-maintained coach with perfect strangers, some of whom are unwashed, unkempt, unmannered, and possibly insane. 
City transit is also not a substitute for having a car, so any cost borne by the traveler for a bus pass is in addition to such necessary expenses as car insurance and paying your landlord for the privilege of having a parking space.
The benefits of what I call anonymity are a blessing to some because it makes it easier for them to enjoy life without being shadowed by the same familiar and unwanted faces: ex-girlfriends, ex-husbands, the bully from one’s school days, the pastor who presided at a funeral you’d rather not remember, and so on. But it is also a blessing to people who want the anonymity to steal purses, burglarize houses, assault women, cheat on one’s spouse, and the other legal and social crimes which one finds so much more difficult to get away with in a small town.
So the trick is to decide whether the benefit outweighs the price one pays. I want to move back to the big city when I get my feet under me, so I do think it’s worth it.
Are you ready to settle down to one address for the next 20 years?
(this is in response to your condo/sfd Q, as well as this)
I suspect you are not really sure, and are looking at options. Good on you.
Me:
Born in city, economic refugee with family to small (but insufferably proud) hick town (your neck of the woods, btw). Attended big-name university (OK, Purdue), lived in Naptown for a couple of years, now in SF.
And loving it.
(Note: despite it’s size, indpls is NOT a big city - it was (when I was there) an overgrown midwest town (with a race track) - the place did not have the feel of a real city - there was a place for everyone, everyone ('cept for a few uppity types) knew their place, and that was that).
If you have any degree of wanderlust, TRY moving to different regions - Try living in a house vs. an apartment/flat.
When you KNOW the answers to the questions you are asking, THEN you will be ready to move into your (long-term) home.
Absolutely! If you like food and especially if you enjoy eating different kinds of ethnic food, big cities are a lot of fun.
I have never lived in a small city… but from what I have heard… small cities can be oppressive. Everyone knows what you do and who you date. Morality and the hypocrisy it carries hangs heavily on people. Of course small towns have an air of familiarity and closeness… but just like family comforts it also oppresses sometimes.
Wesley Big cities aren’t just about multiplying the number of commercial establishments proportionally. Big Cities can offer variety and exotic things that smaller markets can’t support. Cultural offers are better too.
Now if you just want to raise a bunch of kids, you hate culture and movies. Just want a quiet life and die old, healthy and bored. Stay away from cities. To each his own… cities are generally bad for your health and for restful existence.
I’ve lived in both. Currently, I live in Atlanta, which is a semi-major city. I HATE small towns. Here’s what I like about big cities:
People. There are ALL kinds of people. I run into people from the UK, people from Africa, people from India, people from all over the world every day. I got sick of the homogeneity of small towns real fast.
Outlook. Quite a few of the small towns I’ve lived in/been to have a certain outlook on life shared amongst the population. If you don’t buy into their mindset, you’re some kinda weirdo. There’s a certain “Can’t rise above your raisin’!,” an acceptance of medocrity attitude in tons of these places and I, personally, hate that. And yes, because I’ve been to college, I’m “uppity” and “cocky.”
Operating Hours. I still have it ingrained that everything shuts down at like…5, because I lived in a small town that shut down after dark. It’s pretty damn handy to be able to run out at midnight and pick something up.
Lifestyle choices. If I want to go into the city and club all night, I can. If I want to live in a decent apartment, hang out in the burbs, and go into the city for major stuff, I can. If I want to live like a bohemian college student, I can.
And No One Will Care! This is not like some towns I’ve lived in, where everything is everyone else’s business. Hell, I don’t even know if I happen to HAVE neighbors, though I know the people somewhere below me occasionally cook something that smells like baking wet dog.
I’m not real sure what to call this, but in some of the small towns I’ve lived in, there are people who’ve lived there their whole life and have never gone more than, like, 30 miles outside the town, and are firmly convinced they live in the best place on earth. Insularity?
And sometimes this insularity seeps into their worldview, their politics, their outlook on the world, and it just runs me nuts to deal with someone who can’t see past the nose on their on face, metaphorically speaking, much less a whole town full of em.
Stuff to do! I’ve got football, baseball, hockey, probably soccer, if I cared about it. I’ve got all kinds of theaters, including my favorite, the Fabulous Fox, which is the coolest place in the world to catch a show. All kinds of concerts, restaurants from strange and different lands, shows to see, stores to check out. If I want to get out of town, there’s cheap flights leaving numerous times a day from my major airport. If I want to take some classes, I have quite a few colleges to choose from. If I want to do something outdoors, there’s a couple National Recreation Areas/Parks about 20 minutes from my house and more within an hour’s drive. I’ve got a bunch of movie theaters close by, so my chances of catching something when I want to see it are good, and we get quite a few indy/offbeat/limited releases a year.
Career opportunities. Bottom line: the more businesses, the better my chance of getting a job somewhere.
Shopping experiences. Yea, to some extent all stores are alike, but most are different. I prefer the Kroger across the street to the 2 Publixes down the block. I prefer the SuperTarget up the road to the Wal-Marts anywhere. If I need a book, I can pick from several Big Chain retailers, or I can hit some of the local used/new bookstores that have awesome atmospheres. I can wander through elegantly clean aisles or I can rummage through packed shelves in a cramped, homey used bookstore. If I need furniture, I can hit some upscale galleries, some thrift stores, some big box retailers, some quirky alternative stores, each of which will have distinctly different stuff.
I dunno, for me, living in a city, you live the life YOU want, whereas a small town makes you live the life everyone else lives.
What’s so great about living in a big city (NYC in my case)?
That’s easy. The Pizza.
Oh, and the multitude of beautiful and smart women of every ethnicity.
The museums.
The free music. The music you have to pay for is good, too, but the music you *don’t * have to pay for is exceptional.
Being able to walk everywhere, including work, or take a bus if I’m bushed.
It’s a “you never step into the same river twice” kind of way of life, I guess.
I moved from the Bronx to quasi-rural New England and don’t miss a whole lot. I do miss diversity of people and cultures and the anonymity of acting however you want with no one batting an eye. I miss having a lot of movies to choose from. I miss really good restaurants; only the really good ones will survive with that kind of competition. I miss really raging parties with unbearably loud music.
At the same time, I feel at home now. I know people will help me if I get into trouble, and I can chat with anyone because we all have the same context we’re dealing with. I’m a much nicer person because I know I will see those people again, and that if I say something negative about someone else, they will turn out to be somehow related to the person I am talking to! I don’t miss waiting for the subway at 2 AM, and still delight in the fact that I can get in my car and go wherever I want whenever I want. I don’t miss the noise, and I never knew there were so many stars. Luckily my “lifestyle” fits into the norm OK up here, or I would be more uncomfortable.
Advantages of living in a big city are accessibility, availability, variety and choice.
I’ve lived in many different areas from the middle of nowhere to large cities, every place has its advantages and disadvantages. It really all boils down to personal taste and interests.
What Rickjay said.
AMEN.
I grew up in a big city (suburb of Los Angeles) and moved to Hooterville (medium-sized Midwestern town) several years ago.
Hooterville isn’t that bad and seems pretty okay and “happening” on the surface. They have malls, big chain stores, an opera (a nice one, as a matter of fact, although the opera house has bad acoustics), and so forth.
Some of the natives here don’t understand what would be so different about Hooterville compared to L.A. “What does L.A. have that we don’t have?”
Well, several things (which RickJay and others have mentioned).
I used to visit Hooterville before I moved out here, and I saw the differences more dramatically (jumping back and forth will do that). The first thing I noticed was that there were no good art stores. Decent, yes, but not good ones. The good ones have so much awesome stuff—stuff that makes you drool. The Hooterville ones (or I should say, the one decent one that I know of) has a fair amount of drool-worthy stuff. Just a fair amount.
Back in L.A. I could find a certain type of oil pastel (there were a few brands to choose from) but in Hooterville, I had to search and search and search and still never did find what I wanted. I finally resorted to mail order, something which I’ve learned to do a lot of here in Hooterville.
I think that some of the people who’ve lived here all their lives don’t know to even miss some of these specialized products, because they’ve never had access to them. (Also, not everyone has weird needs like for specific brands of oil pastels, either.)
There is a certain nosiness amongst some of the people here. Not all—certainly not all, but some. Definitely more than in L.A. I am not sure why, but I’m guessing that the more nosy ones came from even smaller towns where nosiness was a sign of friendliness or just politeness. (Or with some, pettiness.)
I am spoiled by all that L.A. has to offer. L.A. always has stuff going on. Movies being shot, conventions being held, (conventions that interested me, that is), plenty of access to night classes and various forms of continuing education, amusements, (Disneyland, for instance), and so forth. I was also spoiled by L.A. weather, but that’s an L.A. thing and not a big city thing, so it isn’t really relevant to this discussion.
However, one thing I do enjoy about Hooterville is that people are so darned friendly! Not too long after I moved here, I got into a minor scrape with the car. (Nothing too damaging, just scary.) It happened on the freeway; other people saw it as I pulled over. Several other cars pulled over immediately to offer assistance. I could not believe it. That was not something I’d have expected to see in L.A.
Now that I’ve been here in Hooterville for a while, I’ve adjusted. Perhaps it’s wrong of me, but I’ve given up trying to find good art stores here. I have no more expectations and I’ve almost stopped going to local art stores because they depress me. Dick Blick (big mail order art supplier) is my friend. Mail order in general is my friend.