The Appeal of Urban Living
I'm not sure it's for me, but I wonder if it's for the others here or seems like it would be.
Urban environments feel constrained and unnatural to me. But there seem to be people who love them for some reason.
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advantages of urban living:
* small space means less money, time, and effort spent maintaining it -- cleaning, heating/cooling, securing
* lots more people around, so much easier to find social groups
* generally good walkability and/or availability of public transit
* don't need to maintain a car to get places
* get exercise simply from daily living
* stuff is happening all around you (something i kinda like)
* no exterior maintenance required
* very environmentally friendly -- shared building means less per-capita heating/cooling and transportation and such
disadvantages of urban living:
* high cost of living, especially rent
* condos usually have a condo fee, so even if you own your unit, it's not simply "you own this place and you don't have any more expenses other than food and utilities"
* more complex repairs and improvements due to small spaces
* small spaces
* rules on using one's space (e.g. no pets)
* noise (if you don't like it)
* possible air quality concerns (more dust and other particulate matter)
advantages of older suburbs:
* own your own whole building, and use it as you wish, no rules, just right
* usually no community fees
* can be cheap if it's an old neighborhood with smaller houses
* may have neighborhood grocers and other stores and services (might even be walkable)
* the place has character! often related to the history of the place's development
disadvantages of older suburbs:
* mow your own lawn
* somewhat limited mobility if you don't have a car
* having a car means taking care of your car, as well as wanting to have a garage (which a number of older houses don't)
* older buildings mean more and more frequent repairs (good if you're mechanically and electrically handy; bad otherwise)
advantages of rural living:
* picturesque views (if you have the right locations) at your doorstep or even out your kitchen window
* really clean air
* cheap building, cheap land
* do whatever you want with your land
* you may have mineral extraction rights
disadvantages of rural living:
* may have to maintain your own utilities (e.g. septic sewer system)
* takes forever to get anywhere
* vehicle ownership and maintenance aren't just necessities; they're sometimes literally lifelines
* easy to feel isolated
* mow your own (extremely big) lawn, or alternatively, harvest your own crops. okay you don't actually have to maintain your own land all that well, but what you do would probably depend on what you want to do with it (farming, scenery, using it as staging grounds for events, etc.). and you could even do away with your lawn and make it all rocks if you wanted to.
* jerks want your mineral rights
advantages of cookie-cutter newer suburbs:
* newer buildings built according to modern building codes
* you always know what you get (contemporary interior design style)
* guaranteed to have supermarkets, restaurants, and some other stores nearby
disadvantages of cookie-cutter newer suburbs:
* no sense of individual character; everyone's houses look basically alike
* no sense of community historical character; the community always feels like a generic modern contemporary development, possibly with very superficial "local flavor" elements (e.g. palm trees in south Florida, cacti in the southwestern US).
* community fees (second only to condo fees)
* community rules. can't put up lawn signs. can't paint your house a different color, unless you get approval. can't even remove trees from your frontyard without being required to plant new ones.
* bulidings sometimes cheaply built. and you can't even improve them any way you want; any major improvements have to be approved
* forced to mow your lawn. forced to HAVE a lawn, too -- can't just replace it all with pebbles.
* tons of windy roads. you're getting nowhere without a car. with gated communities, the windy roads thing is even worse. there are literally chokepoints that you have to pass through just to get anywhere. fortunately you're basically guaranteed to have a garage. unfortunately, the car can't fly over the wall in your backyard that separates you from the major thoroughfare just beyond it.
* environmentally unfriendly -- people not packed tightly enough to save money on heating/cooling, and transportation is mostly individualized rather than using public transit.
* may be served by public transit, but served so poorly only the poor people who can't afford cars will use it.
I guess I'm lucky for having ignorable neighbors
* lives of superficial comfort
* no way up or down
* children searching for a meaning in life
Generally if we wanted to go swimming, we had to do it in Charlottesville like we did everything else.
I have heard that a lot of gated communities were marketed to retirees wanting to feel "safe", so I bet a lot of the overbearing rules and strange emphasis on purity are there to assuage fears.
Here in suburban western Broward County, there are a myriad of suburbs created from erasing swampland by digging up some dirt and putting it on other dirt in order to create a patchwork of above-water land and mini-lakes that constitute waterfronts for the purpose of real estate advertisements. These suburbs are typically gated communities (there are practically no non-gated communities in this area, with the exception of ranches), and they have single-family homes and some townhomes, usually tighly packed. Houses range in size from about 1500 to 3000+ square feet in their interiors, and have one or two stories, and a one or two car garage, so they're nothing special from an interior standpoint (aside from not having basements), but what's really notable is that they are TIGHTLY packed. We're talking to the point of having zero lot lines. Your yard, which you're forced to keep orderly, is thankfully at most only about a quarter acre minus the footprint of your house as well as whatever ornamental plants you have on it.
Aside from tightly packed single-family homes, there are townhouses and condos/apartments. The only "mansions" there are tend to be rather unique properties in a certain part of the county that chose to attempt to keep at least some thin veneer of ruralness mainly by owning ranchlands, putting out western-style decorations, and not allowing the development of sidewalks. But those houses are at least unique, though some newer ones are basically McMansions.
If you look at a map of Broward County, and look only at the areas that are developed (i.e. not at the vast marshlands out west), then you see the above sorts of development for roughly the western half of the width of the developed part of the county. This is pretty much all modified former marshland. You get funny remnants of their former identity from names like "Pine Island Road", which is situated around what really was once an island of pine trees amongst marshland, but is now just one of many major thoroughfares in a grid of suburbanized sprawl.
The eastern half of the county, has some older suburbs that date from the 1950s-1960s and are single-family homes, mostly single-level, on reasonably-sized lots, in a full street grid -- not the windy intestine-like systems that characterize newer developments. Go further east and you start to get into denser areas.
Contrast this to Connecticut. In Connecticut, in the suburbs of Hartford, are windy roads that go up and down the many hills in the area. (Ask a Floridian to show you a hill and you might get a small mound of dirt in the local park. Or Mount Trashmore.) Single family homes are roughly the same size as before, but (1) have basements, (2) tend to be of a different variety of layouts (colonials, raised ranches, and split-levels now appear, as opposed to everything being contemporaries), and (3) have far bigger lots -- half acre, 1 acre, 2 acres for a yard, quite common. Also much more wooded.
Also few planned communities with community fees. Aside from some apartments/condos, they tend to be basically smaller (but still separate) houses meant for age 55+ ("active adult") residents. But the most stunning thing about those "55+ condos" is that they're all separate buildings. Don't bother trying to find this sort of comfortably spaced-out arrangement in southeast Florida.
In northern Virginia, I think real estate started out basically similar to that of suburban Connecticut, but then diverged dramatically over the last few decades, as federal-government-related jobs appeared. Home prices -- especially for the standard single-family homes I was describing earlier -- are VERY high. Single-family homes in "normal-looking" neighborhoods have probably been here for a few decades now; new developments are for condos, rising up to five floors without elevators. Slightly older developments are townhouses. Lots of luxury condos, complete with gates and stuff, but stuffed in tiny patches of land. Space is at a premium here, while wealthy arrivals are willing to pay generously for housing. Lots of renting going on too. And with money, of course, there are McMansions, in parts that are still rural.