and the architecture is nicer, and the sky isnt a different color so?
I like being able to leave my house without immediately encountering lots of people. I like being having an open skyline and seeing the stars at night. It's not as efficient or as good in broad terms, but I selfishly like it. I like not hearing a street right outside my house. It's nicer.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I observed, during one of my midnight drives some years ago, that it never really gets dark in a big city like this one. Even in the middle of the night, there's electric lights from almost everywhere, and it gives the sky this weird hazy glow...
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
As much as I dislike people I do prefer to be in well-populated places when I'm out in public
Because I'd much rather be able to just blend into the crowd than to be noticed at all
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Like, some people prefer to go to Kroger overnight, when there's only a few other shoppers
But I never liked that very much because I feel like all eyes are on me, all clerks have to ask me if I need help, etc
Whereas if I'm going during the day there's enough other people around that I can just be a nobody and I like that
have y'all considered that some of you are country people and some are city people
I grew up in a city and now live in what I politely describe as "the sticks", there's nothing around for miles and there's no jobs, it's boring as shit.
Plus the woods aren't even nice because they're overhunted the fuck out of so nothing actually lives there except for insects and spiders and the odd owl.
The only thing I hate about the strip malls around here is that they're all owned by some of the most transparently noxious property managers ever and people constantly get put out of business by extortionate leases and poorly-kept buildings.
At any given time, about 2/3 of the strip mall properties in my hometown are completely empty and bordering on urban blight. They were full as recently as 10 years ago.
Well, it's not like you can't find hardship in a city. They're significantly more expensive to live in and poorly managed ones can botch reaping any of the benefits urbanization offers (there are cities with bad public transport, which means they're basically endlessly gridlocked, for an easy example.) But like...if you're looking for a social life or things to do that aren't necessarily connected to nature, you're endlessly more likely to find it in a city than anywhere else.
As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I remember when I was younger and I thought everything was really cramped together in cities. Like, think of little me, wanting to run around houses because all that grown-up conversation really held little interest to me. Seeing a condo/apartment/flat was like "this is so boring" (unless it had a fellow child or game system of course).
And it's nigh-impossible to find parking in a city easily. Heaven help you if you don't know how to parallel-park, in many cases.
Cities aren't the most glorious of places, certainly.
But now that I've grown up -- compared to my younger self, at least -- I realized a few things. And also compared living in a city to suburbs.
As I said, I grew up in the suburbs. Now, if you're in the suburbs, your home does indeed feel more comfortable and spacious. It might even have a nice view, or a backyard for grilling, or such.
But as I grew up, I began to realize a few problems with suburban living:
First you need a car to get anywhere. If you are below driving age, you are entirely dependent on school and/or your parents to socialize with anyone other than your neighbors, and most likely there aren't that many children in your neighborhood. And especially for the more recent planned communities, which have tons of houses in a cluster with very few exits/entrances into the cluster, you have to walk VERY far, through many twisted small roads, just to get outside. In some cases you might save time by climbing over the wall separating the community from the larger road right outside it.
When I lived in Connecticut, I had to walk half an hour just to get to the drugstore, or to my pollling place when I needed to vote. Maybe an hour to get the nearest supermarket.
When I lived in Florida, I didn't even venture outside the community on my own on foot, but I can tell you I lived in southwestern Broward County, with its many planned communities and windy roads, and you can measure path lengths yourself.
Now, sure, if you have a car, that solves all these problems. But: * cars cost upwards of several thousand dollars apiece * they constantly use gas, and gas is not cheap, and it was still a waste even when it was cheap. oh, and then there's the emission of carbon dioxide and various air pollutants. * they also require lots of maintenance. and if you want to avoid some maintenance issues and theft chance, storage. * it's easier to cause severe damage crashing cars into things than to cause severe damage crashing people into things. (people just don't crash themselves as often, y'know?)
Furthermore, if your grocery store or mall or local hangout or favorite restaurant is a 10 minute walk away instead of being a 10 minute drive away, you'll be getting 20 minutes more exercise and 20 minutes less sitting in a chair stressing over traffic patterns.
As for the benefit of suburbia -- having more space: Well, I guess you get to enjoy having more space. But you also have to maintain that space -- that means lawnmowing (or paying for landscaping services), cleaning (both the exterior and interior), insuring everything (if necessary), and paying the costs of owning (or worse yet, mortgaging) all that property as well as property taxes.
Furthermore, having more space really incentivizes accumulating more _stuff_. This effect is most noticeable when you ever have to move and then suddenly realize just how much furniture and other possessions you own. (Well, furniture itself is just the most glaring obvious category.) It really just makes oneself feel less...portable, for a lack of a better word, being "tied down" by so many of one's many possessions. Not to mention this furthers the whole "culture of consumption".
And suburbia really likes to have separate houses. And separate buildings for everything, for commercial purposes. In many ways it's almost like an attempt at re-creating frontier and/or wealthy lifestyles but do a little bit of it for everyone. There are a few benefits to this -- such as it being harder for fires and disease to spread -- but on a day to day basis, such accommodations use heating and cooling systems and various other resources much less efficiently.
And it's not like living in suburbia really spreads things out all that much when people want to gather -- people still gather in droves at locations used for common purposes. For example, schools, office buidings, government buildings, churches, etc.. Now, cars are bigger than people, so it comes as no surprise that vehicle traffic jams are physically bigger than people traffic jams.... Public transit? No, nah, every family in the neighborhood going to church on Sunday will get into their own cars and drive them even if they're all going from the same first general location to the same second general location. School buses are pretty much the only exception to this.
Living in suburbia can be pretty isolating if you don't have motor transportation of some sort. You have your house, your hard, your neighbors, and if you are lucky enough to live near a shopping center, maybe a supermarket and a couple restaurants and other shops. In this day and age, we're lucky to have the internet, but...yeah, that's about it. Your meatspace socializing is very limited, if you don't have a job/school or a car. (And you'll need a job to get a car, but you'll need a car to get a job...) Contrast with a reasonably dense city, where, even without public transit, you have more business venues and socializing opportunities and other resources within walking distance.
Now, if you want a connection to nature...well, I guess there are some more upscale suburbs or smaller towns that have houses spaced a bit further apart, with half-acre lots and backing up to the woods. But those aren't options in many places. Instead, what do you get? Rows of closesly-spaced houses, built on quarter-acre lots that run right up to the walls of the houses next to them. Your frontyard is a patch of grass that never grows right except your community association will fine you if it looks a little shitty but you're not allowed to just pull out the grass and have rock garden. Your backyard is a small patio, and some more grass that never grows right either except thankfully no one can see back there, except maybe all the neighbors that surround you, from their second-story master-bedroom windows. Meanwhile, to get to nature, you have to...well, there's that nearby park with a pond, but it's not like it's that much bigger than a city park, to be honest, and half the time people are playing catch or walking their dogs or something. If you want to enjoy some nature-watching and trail-hiking, drive half an hour to some other place, 15-20 miles away, just to get out of your car, and walk far away...only to retread that same ground in order to get back to your car.
Remember that location I told you about? Southwestern Broward County? Yeah, try to find me some nice nature in that horrible grid of compressed twisted intestines-like residential roads. Okay, fine, there are small (artificial) bodies of water dotting the place, all lined with neatly mowed lawns and odd tall palm trees that look like they're gonna blow over whenever the next hurricane arrives.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure those tall palm trees are that tall in order to tower above the canopy of tropical/sub-tropical forest, where they occur naturally. If you drive like a couple hours southwest onto the Tamiami Trail as it crosses the Everglades, you'll get to see exactly that. But you'll have to buy a car first. Go get a job.
i think maybe American suburbs are less pedestrian-friendly than over here. They always looked pretty to me on TV but living there might be a different thing entirely.
i'm accustomed to it taking me at least a 20 minute walk to get anywhere i want to go, and i see nothing wrong with this. i did enjoy the convenience of living closer to the shops when i was at uni, admittedly.
Re: culture of consumption, i live in a house full of clutter and i never attributed that to location, but now you've got me wondering. i don't enjoy throwing things out though.
i kinda resent when people talk about "how boring it is in the sticks" etc. to me it always felt insulting, but i guess it depends what you're used to.
i think maybe American suburbs are less pedestrian-friendly than over here. They always looked pretty to me on TV but living there might be a different thing entirely.
i'm accustomed to it taking me at least a 20 minute walk to get anywhere i want to go, and i see nothing wrong with this. i did enjoy the convenience of living closer to the shops when i was at uni, admittedly.
Re: culture of consumption, i live in a house full of clutter and i never attributed that to location, but now you've got me wondering. i don't enjoy throwing things out though.
i kinda resent when people talk about "how boring it is in the sticks" etc. to me it always felt insulting, but i guess it depends what you're used to.
Well I also live in the sticks.
I mean it depends on what kind of person you are, some people like the peace and quiet. I very much do not.
fair enough. i remember a lot of my classmates back at school also thought it was boring around here, so i guess it's not about what you're used to.
i don't know what i'd even do with myself in a city, once the initial novelty wore off. clubs exhaust me, they're not pleasant, they're loud and stuffy and full of eyes. there are museums but they cost money.
i will say our woods were overhunted like, centuries ago, and if you see a deer or a fox in the woods here that's something exciting and cool, not something you expect. that's not what it's about though, there's not "nothing", it's about walking among the trees and just enjoying the greenery and the cool air and the smell of the leaves and the birdsong
you're making sense and i know i won't change your mind and shouldn't try
but i worry that when people build on green spaces, a lot of people can't see how horrible that is, how monstrous, how they are ruining something that's to be treasured
No urban sprawl is like a real problem. I'm not going to disagree with you there.
I'm not talking about new suburbs though I'm talking about cities proper. I grew up in Catasaqua which is technically its own town but is mostly the outskirts of Allentown, a decently large city.
i think maybe American suburbs are less pedestrian-friendly than over here. They always looked pretty to me on TV but living there might be a different thing entirely.
i'm accustomed to it taking me at least a 20 minute walk to get anywhere i want to go, and i see nothing wrong with this. i did enjoy the convenience of living closer to the shops when i was at uni, admittedly.
re pedestrian-friendliness
Well, my impression of North American suburbia has been that it's either "McMansions" with long windy roads to insulate them from any semblance of their surroundings or tightly-packed single-family homes fractally-linked by unnecessarily winding roads to (once again) insulate them from any semblance of their surroundings.
There are older neighborhoods that are laid out like city street grids, but they just don't build those anymore for some reason. (For example, compare the older Hollywood, Florida and the more recently developed Pembroke Pines, Florida, in aerial photographs on Google Maps.)
i don't know what i'd even do with myself in a city, once the initial novelty wore off. clubs exhaust me, they're not pleasant, they're loud and stuffy and full of eyes. there are museums but they cost money.
I certainly wouldn't live in a city for the novelty.
If anything, I see living in suburbia as more of a "novelty" -- in the sense of being a pleasurable arrangement that is unfortunately rather unsustainable in the long run, both financially and environmentally.
Granted, maybe I'm also more okay with living in a city because I spend far too much of my time sitting in front of a computer, so it's not like I'm actually able to enjoy the expanse of a nice big house with vaulted ceilings and huge rooms. I certainly LOVE those features.
It's just that... 1. I can't really afford them. But even if I could... 2. they'd be really lonely for me by myself. Or even for me in a family of three.
Now, given that my home is sort of a lonely place where I don't get the socializing of school or work and it's basically just a place for me to keep stuff, store food, prepare food, and attempt to get work done but waste it arguing with people on the internet instead, yeah I guess I don't need that big of a residence. That might change if, say, I get married and have children.
However, it might be more useful to think about one's "home" not just as the small piece of property one rents or legally owns, but as a more comprehensive set of circumstances where one feels "at home". Then one might start to think of the "home" as including things such as one's favorite restaurant and religious gathering-place and classes at school and the community playground, and if those are physically close enough to one's "legal" home and that "legal" home is sufficiently small, these other places might end up becoming used for various activities that someone else with a larger legal home but more distant community features (in terms of accessibility) would do at home.
On another note, where I am right now -- in the suburbs surrounding Washington DC -- home prices are extremely high, due to the rapid population growth of the area, and there's actually quite a fair number of condominiums and townhouses. Association fees can be quite hefty though -- a couple or few hundred USD a month.
i will say our woods were overhunted like, centuries ago, and if you see a deer or a fox in the woods here that's something exciting and cool, not something you expect. that's not what it's about though, there's not "nothing", it's about walking among the trees and just enjoying the greenery and the cool air and the smell of the leaves and the birdsong
I think everyone would love this (barring things like the excess of deer here in Fairfax County, and for some people, even despite that). But to that end I think that more thought should be put into community gardenings and planting native trees in the city and such, and probably interspersing open land and developed land in comfortable ways (such as a lot of small parks), which can certainly make life better than just simply cooping people up in clusters of high-rises.
Glenn you should be an essayist. You have a lot of interesting thoughts and with the amount of time and effort you put into them it ducks that you don't have an audience.
i had a look at both Pembroke Pines and Hollywood, FL. They both looked kind of pretty to me, but i can see how the one is going to be more of a pain to navigate.
And city parks can be lovely, don't get me wrong, in the same way that a garden can be lovely. They can certainly be a pleasant place to spend an hour, or an afternoon.
When i said novelty, well, it'd be novel for me, since i never lived in a big city before.
With the exception of the 2 years or do I lived in WV as a baby, and the 5 years I lived in Palmyra, I've always been a suburban kid, and I'm used to the suburbs' quirks by now, though they still can still be frustrating at times. Navigating crowded parking lots is one of my least favorite things to do.
As for green space, I live in an older neighborhood where the trees have had 45 years to grow, and so we have all kinds of critters in our backyard. We actually found a snake back there yesterday!
I wish I could use public transportation more often, but the buses and trains to DC/Arlington are geared toward early-bird, bankers' hours government workers and not someone who doesn't have to be in until 10-11 AM. Sure, I could use the Metro shuttle, but that's not as fast as the earlier buses.
as a guy from a big city who now lives in a small city w my boyfriend who is from the countryside, i see alll sides of what ppl are getting at here
in a bigger place you can just kinda disappear into the city and be just another person whereas in a smaller place itis a lot easier for ppl to know you and for you to stick out. rly both of these things can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you think of it. sometimes i like that here, a lot of ppl know me, and everyone seems to know each other. sometimes it also annoys the heck out of me
i never thought london seemed particularly big or dirty but then when i moved away for a significant amount of time and came back i saw that incomparison to a lot of other places, well, p much everywhere in the country, it is loud, its dirty, its really fuckin busy. at the same time you really appreciate the sheer amount of stuff to do in a city and the amount of ppl you can meet, when u compare it to somewhere smaller. but at the same time up here in the north i have huge mountains to climb up and beautiful countryside to cycle through and natural things etc etc to do, which i miss doing, when im in the city. but here i miss the music scene and arts scene and general ppl scene of being in london.
i think the best plan is to spend some time in both - a few months or maybe even some years - and decide which u like more. and if like me, you think both have their advantages and disadvantages, then heck, nobody says you have to stay in the same place your whole life!!!
Comments
which is why it's nice to be able to just go for a long walk somewhere quiet where you probably won't run into another human being
somewhere quiet and beautiful and empty except for the birds and the cows and the trees
i'm sorry
Ergo they suck.
At any given time, about 2/3 of the strip mall properties in my hometown are completely empty and bordering on urban blight. They were full as recently as 10 years ago.
As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I remember when I was younger and I thought everything was really cramped together in cities. Like, think of little me, wanting to run around houses because all that grown-up conversation really held little interest to me. Seeing a condo/apartment/flat was like "this is so boring" (unless it had a fellow child or game system of course).
And it's nigh-impossible to find parking in a city easily. Heaven help you if you don't know how to parallel-park, in many cases.
Cities aren't the most glorious of places, certainly.
But now that I've grown up -- compared to my younger self, at least -- I realized a few things. And also compared living in a city to suburbs.
As I said, I grew up in the suburbs. Now, if you're in the suburbs, your home does indeed feel more comfortable and spacious. It might even have a nice view, or a backyard for grilling, or such.
But as I grew up, I began to realize a few problems with suburban living:
First you need a car to get anywhere. If you are below driving age, you are entirely dependent on school and/or your parents to socialize with anyone other than your neighbors, and most likely there aren't that many children in your neighborhood. And especially for the more recent planned communities, which have tons of houses in a cluster with very few exits/entrances into the cluster, you have to walk VERY far, through many twisted small roads, just to get outside. In some cases you might save time by climbing over the wall separating the community from the larger road right outside it.
When I lived in Connecticut, I had to walk half an hour just to get to the drugstore, or to my pollling place when I needed to vote. Maybe an hour to get the nearest supermarket.
When I lived in Florida, I didn't even venture outside the community on my own on foot, but I can tell you I lived in southwestern Broward County, with its many planned communities and windy roads, and you can measure path lengths yourself.
Now, sure, if you have a car, that solves all these problems. But:
* cars cost upwards of several thousand dollars apiece
* they constantly use gas, and gas is not cheap, and it was still a waste even when it was cheap. oh, and then there's the emission of carbon dioxide and various air pollutants.
* they also require lots of maintenance. and if you want to avoid some maintenance issues and theft chance, storage.
* it's easier to cause severe damage crashing cars into things than to cause severe damage crashing people into things. (people just don't crash themselves as often, y'know?)
Furthermore, if your grocery store or mall or local hangout or favorite restaurant is a 10 minute walk away instead of being a 10 minute drive away, you'll be getting 20 minutes more exercise and 20 minutes less sitting in a chair stressing over traffic patterns.
As for the benefit of suburbia -- having more space: Well, I guess you get to enjoy having more space. But you also have to maintain that space -- that means lawnmowing (or paying for landscaping services), cleaning (both the exterior and interior), insuring everything (if necessary), and paying the costs of owning (or worse yet, mortgaging) all that property as well as property taxes.
Furthermore, having more space really incentivizes accumulating more _stuff_. This effect is most noticeable when you ever have to move and then suddenly realize just how much furniture and other possessions you own. (Well, furniture itself is just the most glaring obvious category.) It really just makes oneself feel less...portable, for a lack of a better word, being "tied down" by so many of one's many possessions. Not to mention this furthers the whole "culture of consumption".
And suburbia really likes to have separate houses. And separate buildings for everything, for commercial purposes. In many ways it's almost like an attempt at re-creating frontier and/or wealthy lifestyles but do a little bit of it for everyone. There are a few benefits to this -- such as it being harder for fires and disease to spread -- but on a day to day basis, such accommodations use heating and cooling systems and various other resources much less efficiently.
And it's not like living in suburbia really spreads things out all that much when people want to gather -- people still gather in droves at locations used for common purposes. For example, schools, office buidings, government buildings, churches, etc.. Now, cars are bigger than people, so it comes as no surprise that vehicle traffic jams are physically bigger than people traffic jams.... Public transit? No, nah, every family in the neighborhood going to church on Sunday will get into their own cars and drive them even if they're all going from the same first general location to the same second general location. School buses are pretty much the only exception to this.
Living in suburbia can be pretty isolating if you don't have motor transportation of some sort. You have your house, your hard, your neighbors, and if you are lucky enough to live near a shopping center, maybe a supermarket and a couple restaurants and other shops. In this day and age, we're lucky to have the internet, but...yeah, that's about it. Your meatspace socializing is very limited, if you don't have a job/school or a car. (And you'll need a job to get a car, but you'll need a car to get a job...) Contrast with a reasonably dense city, where, even without public transit, you have more business venues and socializing opportunities and other resources within walking distance.
Now, if you want a connection to nature...well, I guess there are some more upscale suburbs or smaller towns that have houses spaced a bit further apart, with half-acre lots and backing up to the woods. But those aren't options in many places. Instead, what do you get? Rows of closesly-spaced houses, built on quarter-acre lots that run right up to the walls of the houses next to them. Your frontyard is a patch of grass that never grows right except your community association will fine you if it looks a little shitty but you're not allowed to just pull out the grass and have rock garden. Your backyard is a small patio, and some more grass that never grows right either except thankfully no one can see back there, except maybe all the neighbors that surround you, from their second-story master-bedroom windows. Meanwhile, to get to nature, you have to...well, there's that nearby park with a pond, but it's not like it's that much bigger than a city park, to be honest, and half the time people are playing catch or walking their dogs or something. If you want to enjoy some nature-watching and trail-hiking, drive half an hour to some other place, 15-20 miles away, just to get out of your car, and walk far away...only to retread that same ground in order to get back to your car.
Remember that location I told you about? Southwestern Broward County? Yeah, try to find me some nice nature in that horrible grid of compressed twisted intestines-like residential roads. Okay, fine, there are small (artificial) bodies of water dotting the place, all lined with neatly mowed lawns and odd tall palm trees that look like they're gonna blow over whenever the next hurricane arrives.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure those tall palm trees are that tall in order to tower above the canopy of tropical/sub-tropical forest, where they occur naturally. If you drive like a couple hours southwest onto the Tamiami Trail as it crosses the Everglades, you'll get to see exactly that. But you'll have to buy a car first. Go get a job.
i'm accustomed to it taking me at least a 20 minute walk to get anywhere i want to go, and i see nothing wrong with this. i did enjoy the convenience of living closer to the shops when i was at uni, admittedly.
Re: culture of consumption, i live in a house full of clutter and i never attributed that to location, but now you've got me wondering. i don't enjoy throwing things out though.
i kinda resent when people talk about "how boring it is in the sticks" etc. to me it always felt insulting, but i guess it depends what you're used to.
i don't know what i'd even do with myself in a city, once the initial novelty wore off. clubs exhaust me, they're not pleasant, they're loud and stuffy and full of eyes. there are museums but they cost money.
i will say our woods were overhunted like, centuries ago, and if you see a deer or a fox in the woods here that's something exciting and cool, not something you expect. that's not what it's about though, there's not "nothing", it's about walking among the trees and just enjoying the greenery and the cool air and the smell of the leaves and the birdsong
but i worry that when people build on green spaces, a lot of people can't see how horrible that is, how monstrous, how they are ruining something that's to be treasured
this is stupid and sentimental but it upsets me
i always saw them as less city than the city proper, and therefore not so bad
speaking from ignorance
i really don't
i've been to London and it was overwhelming, magnificent
still scary and oppressive, though. still no horizon.
i guess i mean i can see why someone would want to live there but that someone isn't me
i'm glad in a way that places like that exist but i think living there would kill me
i suck at letting things go
talking about my last post not yours
Well, my impression of North American suburbia has been that it's either "McMansions" with long windy roads to insulate them from any semblance of their surroundings or tightly-packed single-family homes fractally-linked by unnecessarily winding roads to (once again) insulate them from any semblance of their surroundings.
There are older neighborhoods that are laid out like city street grids, but they just don't build those anymore for some reason. (For example, compare the older Hollywood, Florida and the more recently developed Pembroke Pines, Florida, in aerial photographs on Google Maps.)
I certainly wouldn't live in a city for the novelty.
If anything, I see living in suburbia as more of a "novelty" -- in the sense of being a pleasurable arrangement that is unfortunately rather unsustainable in the long run, both financially and environmentally.
Granted, maybe I'm also more okay with living in a city because I spend far too much of my time sitting in front of a computer, so it's not like I'm actually able to enjoy the expanse of a nice big house with vaulted ceilings and huge rooms. I certainly LOVE those features.
It's just that...
1. I can't really afford them. But even if I could...
2. they'd be really lonely for me by myself. Or even for me in a family of three.
Now, given that my home is sort of a lonely place where I don't get the socializing of school or work and it's basically just a place for me to keep stuff, store food, prepare food, and attempt to get work done but waste it arguing with people on the internet instead, yeah I guess I don't need that big of a residence. That might change if, say, I get married and have children.
However, it might be more useful to think about one's "home" not just as the small piece of property one rents or legally owns, but as a more comprehensive set of circumstances where one feels "at home". Then one might start to think of the "home" as including things such as one's favorite restaurant and religious gathering-place and classes at school and the community playground, and if those are physically close enough to one's "legal" home and that "legal" home is sufficiently small, these other places might end up becoming used for various activities that someone else with a larger legal home but more distant community features (in terms of accessibility) would do at home.
On another note, where I am right now -- in the suburbs surrounding Washington DC -- home prices are extremely high, due to the rapid population growth of the area, and there's actually quite a fair number of condominiums and townhouses. Association fees can be quite hefty though -- a couple or few hundred USD a month.
I think everyone would love this (barring things like the excess of deer here in Fairfax County, and for some people, even despite that). But to that end I think that more thought should be put into community gardenings and planting native trees in the city and such, and probably interspersing open land and developed land in comfortable ways (such as a lot of small parks), which can certainly make life better than just simply cooping people up in clusters of high-rises.
And city parks can be lovely, don't get me wrong, in the same way that a garden can be lovely. They can certainly be a pleasant place to spend an hour, or an afternoon.
When i said novelty, well, it'd be novel for me, since i never lived in a big city before.
i don't want to be in this house forever.
(The other Jane)
They don't even leave behind cool abandoned buildings.
As for green space, I live in an older neighborhood where the trees have had 45 years to grow, and so we have all kinds of critters in our backyard. We actually found a snake back there yesterday!
I wish I could use public transportation more often, but the buses and trains to DC/Arlington are geared toward early-bird, bankers' hours government workers and not someone who doesn't have to be in until 10-11 AM. Sure, I could use the Metro shuttle, but that's not as fast as the earlier buses.
in a bigger place you can just kinda disappear into the city and be just another person whereas in a smaller place itis a lot easier for ppl to know you and for you to stick out. rly both of these things can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you think of it. sometimes i like that here, a lot of ppl know me, and everyone seems to know each other. sometimes it also annoys the heck out of me
i never thought london seemed particularly big or dirty but then when i moved away for a significant amount of time and came back i saw that incomparison to a lot of other places, well, p much everywhere in the country, it is loud, its dirty, its really fuckin busy. at the same time you really appreciate the sheer amount of stuff to do in a city and the amount of ppl you can meet, when u compare it to somewhere smaller. but at the same time up here in the north i have huge mountains to climb up and beautiful countryside to cycle through and natural things etc etc to do, which i miss doing, when im in the city. but here i miss the music scene and arts scene and general ppl scene of being in london.
i think the best plan is to spend some time in both - a few months or maybe even some years - and decide which u like more. and if like me, you think both have their advantages and disadvantages, then heck, nobody says you have to stay in the same place your whole life!!!