City, no doubt in my mind.
Being able to walk, bike and take transit instead of having to own a car is important for me. I’m not interested in the additional maintenance involved with owning a house, an apartment suits me a lot better. I also like having good access to plenty of things to do in the form of a great selection of restaurants and being close to international transportation options. Good access to nature without having to drive a car is also important to me.
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I’ll have to check it out sometime, thanks for the recommendation.
Sounds like a city that’s not in North America. But OP didn’t specify.
Always a small town. I like to have a big house and a semblance of nature available. Although I could do with less right wing neighbours.
Philadelphia has Fairmount park, the largest inner city park (not counting Central Park, which was manufactured). You can live in a house right up against it. I imagine other cities have plenty of nature too. And even not next to giant parks, many larger cities have home with large yards and tons of trees
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What’s that? Big city filled with cars, roads and useless pocket greenspaces, but with no small town community or flexibility?
- North American city planners, circa one city construction ago.
Oil industry lobbyists are a bitch, eh?
It wasn’t just them, or the auto manufacture lobbyists that were probably more powerful at the time. There was also the influence of slightly older conspicuous consumption, so suburban lots were designed to look like mini country estates, and generally the re-emphasis of connection with the outdoors and nature that came in the midcentury. Plus, if it’s a totally new neighborhood, you can keep minorities out from the start.
It seems designers thought people in suburbs would, like, be close friends with everyone on the cul-de-sac, and they’d spend all weekend chilling outdoors and having barbecues. Maybe make one giant croquet course all down the street. Instead, you barely know your immediate neighbor’s names, and anyone two doors down is under suspicion of being a violent criminal.
To be fair, they aren’t the first or last designers to fundamentally misunderstand how the public will interact with the infrastructure; that’s still a source of surprises today. I just wish we had changed course as soon as the truth became clear.
I thought we were talking about inner city planning, but yeah, suburbs are the flip side to the same coin.
that includes mini scooters for me, and guys on racing bikes in full spandex gear yelling “cmon!” to people
And if they’re not yelling “c’mon” at you they’ll be yelling “cheater!”. Like bro this isn’t tour de france, I’m just tryna get to work…
Mid-sized stand-alone city. Think 50-200K people.
If I explicitly have to choose between big city or small town, then it comes down to employment options. If that is a non-factor (e.g. remote work) then small town.
For those saying culture or whatever, I’m ok with commuting to a big city once a month or whatever for that stuff. I don’t need cultural attractions for my day-to-day life.
Agreed. You go to a small town and everyone knows your business. Big cities end of up terrible commuting experiences as everything needs a vehicle. Yeah, you get often public transportion, but spend most of the day trying to get anything done as everything gets spread out.
Mid size usually has everything reasonably nearby, public transport and cycling is generally safer/practical.
I prefer a small town that’s geographically close to a larger city and public transit. Sounds weird but I’m actually lucky enough to currently live in such a place. Everybody in my town is super friendly, I’ve not had a single porch pirate incident or other securoty since I moved in over a year ago, even after accidentally leaving the trunk of my car open overnight, plenty of nature, cheap(er) groceries… and then I can hit the subway to hit the rest of civilization.
Yeah small town on a rail line sounds great. Sadly there are very few such places where I live.
Rail for intercity/town transport plus bikes and buses/trams for in town is my dream set up.
I just want to get to places quickly, safely, and without breaking the bank. It doesn’t need to be bullet train for me, or with a quintuple 9 degree of safety and I would pay more in taxes or personal cost to have it. Just something better than the constant growing traffic and distances every year.
I prefer to live in the middle of nowhere(ish) aside from the conservative culture which inevitably comes with it. I also like walkable city areas. I completely hate anything in between.
Suburbia has no redeeming features. ! [email protected]
Size doesn’t really matter to me. Density and accessibility matter to me most.
I would rather live in a community of ~10k that is walkable than a community of 1m+ where I have to drive everywhere. If I can access groceries, dining, and public transportation without ever needing to own a car, I am happy.
I could live in North Bend, Washington, but not Gary, Indiana.
I could live in NYC, but not L.A.
North bend was so cool before it was a bedroom community
It’s all about girth!
This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.
The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.
I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.
The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).
While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.
We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.
For me the important difference between the two isn’t just a zoning problem, it’s a people problem.
Small towns, like the one I grew up in, even ones that are comparatively progressive, are still a nightmare for anyone who doesn’t fit in with the community norm.
Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.
This doesn’t go away with different planning or by fucking cars or whatever the kids are into these days.
Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.
You should read the horror stories from so many of those NYC co-ops. Some would make even the most jackbooted HOA presidents blush.
I don’t really think this is unique to cities of some specific size. I definitely agree that it’s going to be harder to find a perfect fit in a smaller town. But it’s also harder to meet people at all in an anonymous metropolis where you have to work 75 hours a week just to make rent.
If you take away anything from what I have written, it’s that I think this dichotomy is bad. We need a compromise. The lowrise old-world city is what worked for our species for at least 5 millenia – it’s only in the past couple of decades we decided to rethink it and force a schism between the fake rural aesthetic of the suburbs and the productive, efficient downtown – and in so doing we destroyed both city life (by making it ungodly expensive thanks to the immense financial drain the suburbs and lack of continuing infill development represent) and the peaceful countryside life (by putting to death small towns in favor of the interstate highway big box store commercial strip). The only lifestyle that has weathered and still works pretty well in this day and age is the homesteader life, and to say that way of living is not for everyone is definitely an understatement.
The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC
I prefer areas zoned for agriculture over either of those. My favorite place I’ve lived so far is one where you look out at night and see nothing but inky black outside my windows. I’ll walk 5 miles to the nearest town for that.
I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.
I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.
I would walk 500 miles for a clear, dark night sky.
The older I get the more remote I want to live. I just want a good grocery store, a hardware store, doctor and vet in approx 10 min drive distance and I need something to charge my car nearby. That’s all the „city“ I need. Otherwise I want peace and nature around me.
75% of the water pumped out of America’s rock needs treatment for particulate. You’re going to need food municipal water for a while if you’re in America, and that is gonna limit your range from city hall.
Also. Low-density is the worst configuration for housing on a cost/benefits and land-use perspective. We left the 1950s a long time ago, so, no matter where you live we can’t go back to sprawl and low density.
Bad for your water (and other infrastructure) and bad for the planet. Otherwise, enjoy!
If low density is the worst for housing cost-effectiveness, why is living in large cities so much more expensive?
Because people prefer living there and (in the US) because low density development is given legislative preference
The thing I’ve heard is, think of how when you’re a mile away from each neighbor, it’s your tax dollars paying for the road, sewer, sidewalks, water, electric, gas lines, for a half mile in each direction. Initially and for maintenance and replacements. That’s why a lot of rural areas just don’t have sidewalks or fiber internet or sometimes they’re using well water.
In a city duplex, you’re paying half the utilities for like 20 feet in front of your house.
It just is more efficient to live closer together, the reason cost of living goes up is because everyone wants to live in the city and employers want that supply of workers so they try to get in or close to the city too and it’s a virtuous cycle of concentration. But housing supply being what it is, and all the jobs being nearby, means housing prices go up. Still worth it to most people hence why there’s still demand, but higher than living in a place with fewer jobs and amenities.
Subsidies. Both in form of roads and home ownership incentives being focused on single family homes. The fact that renting is the primary way to live in the city seems detrimental to it being cost effective too.
I find your point about renting compelling, is there anything that could be done to improve the situation?
Housing cooperatives seem good. There have been some successful uses of community land trusts to keep prices in check too.
Better laws surrounding collective loans feels necessary for medium density too high density housing to be bought up by groups tenets. This just an issue at large for community and worker owned coops in my experience. There are some creative crowd funding type bonds out there but its not very responsive and better suited for long term plannings then seizing on need or opportunity.
Lastly there are tenet unions to at least mitigate the rise of rent and unmet obligations by land lords.
I grew up in a small town. I live in a big city. While I can see the allure of smallish towns (20-50k people), I prefer not having to drive several miles to get anywhere. I have three grocery stores and a bar/restaurant/music venue within walking distance. Cities that size also tend to have urban sprawl which I think is ugly af.
The town I grew up in had about 2500 people and you had to drive an hour and a half to get to a town with more than 10k people. People there tend to be very conservative which is odd considering the government is the biggest employer and towns like that take more state funds than they produce.
That’s a planning problem imo, from small towns to metropolises groceries, health clinic, some entertainment can be in walking distance.
Yeah but people in small towns are more likely to believe 15 minute cities is just a cover for 15 minute prisons so planning is a minefield of conspiracy morons.
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My house used to be next to the highway, the sound was so irritating
You don’t dislike the city, you dislike cars. Cars in cities are often people who live outside the city imposing the cost of their life style onto the city.
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This. Fuck cars
City. Around 100k is the comfortable size.
Not like I require the city’s wider array of amenities all that much. I will still be spending 97% of my time at work or at home.
But if I lived in a small town again (born and raised in a town of <8,000), that extra 3% of the time I wanted to go out I’d have to remind myself, “Oh yeah, I live in a dead end town in the middle of nowhere that services none of my personal interests,” and that 3% would rapidly become 0%. I’d live fine with that, but eh. Why take a strict net loss when I can simply not?
The walkabiity and community arguments for small towns are complete non-factors for me, seeing as I go basically nowhere and talk to basically no one. And I’m not persuaded by the cost of living argument for small towns, since lower rent would be almost equally counterbalanced by lower salary opportunities.
Not only does the salary go down in small towns but the number of positions are greatly reduced. All it takes is a layoff and that “cheaper” small town could be too expensive because there are no more positions to fill.
The exception would be high-paid remote work, I guess. But with the reputation that corpos big enough to field those salaries have been recently building, going mask-off with no warning for no reason and asking employees to start filling desks again, I don’t know if I’d risk it.
100k is a big town, not a city.
Having lived in both, I prefer the big city. Aside from numerous reasons already mentioned in this thread, I notice that big city people are more open-minded and more diverse. Being slightly different for whatever reason is more of an issue in a small community.
Big city for sure, I don’t want to need a car and I do want to be able to get groceries 23.40 at a Saturday night. It’s nice to have a group of 500k+ people actively trying to supply for all of the needs and wants I might have.
Small town. Cities are high energy. I like visiting but get worn down by the hustle and bustle.
