Young and Urban or Comfortable and Suburban

So I'm looking for an apartment again. I like the area I'm in but there's not much going on and when I do something I have to drive there which gets old fast especially when I go out to the bars. I'm looking to move somewhere a bit trendier but there's always a tradeoff. If I move somewhere trendier I'll pay more for a crappier apartment without reserved parking (which is a big deal since I drive a truck). I'm a bit torn.

What are your guys preferences? Have you lived somewhere trendy and lived to regret it, or did you move to the burbs and ended up feeling like you were in American Beauty.

Focus Where do you live now? Is it trendy, blue collar, etc? Why do you live there?

UnFocus If you could live in a different neighborhood what would it be like, why would you want to be there?

 

I live similarly to Bewildered. Quiet neighborhood, you can hear the kids riding their bikes and playing, short walk to the schools, tennis courts around the corner. Big back yard. Stupid neighbor but...whatever. Generally, during the day when Husband is at work and I'm at home, the house is damn near baby napping comfortably quiet. It's fantastic.
We're 7 minutes from three grocery stores, 10 minutes from Target, there's a dive bar 2.5 miles away, and real 'night life' is anywhere from 4 to 15 miles away, depending on direction. That's pretty perfect.

I don't like living in the trendy, uptown areas. There are too many people and too much noise. Ultimately I think Husband and I would like to be 20-30 minutes from people and things. We both love big skies and stars and grass.

 

I live in a suburb of Portland. It's pretty nice; traffic is good, I live ten minutes from work, and there are a lot of stores in the area as well. The bars are pretty shitty, but downtown Portland is only about 30 minutes away, and it is excellent.

The apartment I live in is less desirable; there's a fair number of sketchy people here. I'm perfectly fine with it, as I keep to myself, but it's still kind of annoying to know that all of your neighbors are nutballs.

 

I grew up in the suburbs, and have lived a bunch of places since. Probably my favourite was in the student ghetto of Toronto. It wasn't a particularly trendy place, but being right downtown and with access to the subway is something I miss. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, unfortunately. Since then I've lived in a shitty part of Ottawa (walking distance to work), briefly in a small town in Germany with probably more cows than people, and now in a shitty small town in Ontario (for work, obvs). I mean, Germany was nice as well, but I'm not sure how I'd have fared long-term as it could be rather socially isolating at times.

If I could, I'd live in a downtown neighbourhood where I didn't need a car. Just the sheer level of things to do and places to go, access to good food, nobody wearing camouflage... yup. I could deal with that.

 

Focus: I live a little way up the hill from the CBD, essentially 10-20 minutes walk away from everything in what is quite a compact city. Most of the inner city suburbs consist of big Victorian era houses which are now either flash expensive places, or cut into student flats. There are a few council apartment buildings in the area, but most people are either comfortably middle class, well off or uni students.

I walk to work in the city each day, it's about ten minutes away. I have a car but I only really use it for visiting my parents, going to the supermarket or heading to a suburban sports ground. I'm basically paying for location to live here, it's a good sized place, close to everything and has off street parking, but like every other old house in this city it's freezing cold and can get damp. I've seen my breath in the kitchen more than a few times, and had steaming pee on cold mornings.

UnFocus: We're probably moving to London next year, and that's more than 20 times larger. The plan is to come back to Wellington eventually and settle down in the suburbs, but if it doesn't work out that way I won't be too bothered.

 

I live in a pretty upscale and "trendy" neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. I've always paid for location because I like to be in the heart of everything but I was originally brought to this neighborhood by a 4 BR townhouse I rented for 3 friends that was shockingly cheap (though it quickly escalated). I would be no more than 15 min from work if I didn't work in kind of an awkward location due to the river and Chicago's public transit is lacking.

I love the restaurant and nightlife options but I'm kind of ADD when it comes to bars so I like to neighborhood hop so that's not super deciding of a factor, and the crowd is a bit more yuppy than I prefer to run with, but overall no complaints. My friends and acquaintances also love my neighborhood bar/going out wise, so thats a plus when people want to come down and I don't have to go anywhere really.

ALT FOCUS: As mentioned, I'd like to be somewhere a little more edgy/up and coming. More people with tattoos and less tucked in button downs at bars. But the best hoods for that, with a still more "nice" set of housing options either have no 1 BRs for the most part, or would add a solid 20-30 min to my commute. So I make concessions to still live in the "nicer" high rise like I do and just travel for bar related stuff.

 

Fuckin' tunie.

 

Focus:I live in Crown Heights and I love it. It's in the process of gentrifying so I get the benefit of both scenarios. I pay $200-$500 less a month in rent than pretty much everyone I know, everything else is on the less expensive side, and it's a quieter more neighborhood-y feel than, say, Williamsburg. But there are so many restaurants and bars and other cool little places opening up all the time. I live on a street that was designed by Olmsted (who designed Central and Prospect Park) so it has this lovely tree-lined promenade that makes me feel like I'm in Paris. The transportation options are awesome, and I'm just a short walk from Prospect Park, Brooklyn Museum, the central library, farmer's market, and nearby neighborhoods that have been gentrified for a lot longer and therefore have a shitton of restaurants and stores and things to do. However, if there's one complaint, it feels like it takes me 40 minutes to get ANYWHERE. I work in Times Square and have a 40 minute commute, but then it also seems to take 40 minutes just to get somewhere else in Brooklyn. Also, everyone whines when they come to visit because it takes them a while.

The area is half West Indian and half Orthodox Jews so there is amazing Caribbean food AND amazing bagels. I also feel a lot safer than in my last neighborhood, where there was a murder 2 blocks away in every direction within the year and a half I lived there. Also, I love my apartment and my landlord lives in Long Island so I don't think he has much of an idea what's happening with the area so my rent has been increasing each year but only by around $30 a person. (I have 3 roommates.) So I'm hoping it continues that way because I don't want to leave for a long time.

Alt-Focus:When I do leave, I hope it's because I'm a millionaire because my dream neighborhood is anywhere I can own a brownstone.

 

Focus: I live in a modest house in one of the older neighborhoods of St. Paul, about a mile or so directly north of the capitol. It's a working class neighborhood, not the best, but there are always kids playing outside, so it's not really unsafe or anything. I love the location as I'm pretty close to 35E and I94, so it's easy for me to get around the metro area. If I were to move, it would only be into a bigger house in a neighborhood that's only a couple of miles from where I live now.

Before I bought my house I lived in an apartment in downtown Minneapolis, and I really liked that. Work was only a 10 minute bike ride away, and my apartment was right next to 35W & 94, so like now it was easy to get anywhere. The neighborhood wasn't the safest though; a guy in an apartment a few doors down from me got shot in an attempted robbery (I was the only one who called the cops), and a few years after that a guy got killed on a street corner right across from my bedroom window; I'm pretty sure I remember being woken up by the gunshots. My car got broken into, which sucked.

Still, that apartment was better than my previous residence; my Mom's house in Woodbury (a suburb of St. Paul). Woodbury sucks. It's a 20+ minute drive to get to anything not in Woodbury, and the people in Woodbury suck. My car was broken into while I was living there and a bunch of stuff stolen; I knew it was probably just a bunch of neighborhood punk spoiled kids - which the police agreed with - but the neighbors were sure it was "those gangs from St. Paul" because of course none of their perfectly behaved angels would ever do such a thing. Aside from that, people in Woodbury will never wave at you or say hi when you or them are out walking; they just give you a blank look like they don't understand the concept of being neighborly - or they ignore you entirely. My mom started calling Woodbury "Stepford Wivesville" after she tried befriending her next door neighbor. Apparently when my Mom went to introduce herself to the woman she was fretting because her husband lost his job at 3M. Was she fretting because her husband's unemployment might cause their family financial difficulties? Nope, she was fretting because she "always considered myself a 3M wife" and didn't know how that was going to impact her relationship with the other women in the neighborhood whose husbands worked at 3M.

All of that is on top of the absolutely shitty zoning suburbs have. It takes an extra 10 minutes just to get anywhere because God forbid developers laid down their streets according to a grid system. Nope, it's twisty-turny roads that may or may not have an exit on the other side. And then to compound that stupid, they love using the same name for every street in the area; My mom lives on Crestmoor Court, which is off of Crestmoor Drive, past Crestmoor Bay, Crestmoor Circle, and Crestmoor Alcove.

I will never again live in a suburb for as long as I'm alive.

 

Focus: For the past few years I've lived in Northeast Minneapolis, which is a quieter urban area in the middle of the Twin Cites across the river from Downtown. I grew up in a town of about 50,000 in southern MN, moved up to Minneapolis for college in 2007, and ended up staying put in this area. The transition from living in a more rural to urban area took a couple of years for me, but now I love it here. NE has historically been a European immigrant neighborhood and now has a jumbled mix of inhabitants from old people to hipsters to immigrants from everywhere , but is packed full of bars, breweries, restaurants, and has a thriving art scene. There's lots of parks and bikes are welcome and I can easily get around here without hopping in the car, which is nice. It's kinda like Uptown but with parking. You could say it's an old neighborhood in the process of gaining a fresh new face.

Seems like most of the outer-ring suburbs around here suck like that, especially so on the West side in my opinion (i.e. Eden Prairie, Edina, Minnetonka, Wayzata, Plymouth, etc). I had to move just over a month ago and was really worried I'd have to leave Northeast but got lucky and found a spot just two blocks from where I was previously living.

Alt-focus: My girlfriend and I have discussed renting a house together next year and at the moment our plan is to stay here in Northeast, but eventually we'd like to move out of the city where open space and fresh air exists.

 

Focus: I live in a suburbany area, the northern end of North Las Vegas. The housing market crashed here even worse than (possibly) anywhere else, and when people think NLV they tend to think of the part bordering downtown Las Vegas, not this. $90K got me a hell of a lot. Granted, I'm not the only bum that took advantage of the low mortgage and rents around here, and let's just say if I want to see hot women I have to go to the northwest side or Summerlin. Again, I'm not looking down on anyone; I'd still be living here if the housing bubble hadn't burst.

Unfocus: In Vegas, Summerlin all the way if I could afford it.

 

I live in a semi-detached on the edge of my city, which is comparable in size to Tulsa. Its a decent neighbourhood, I like that there's no night pollution so you get a beautiful sky at night. We'll eventually move as we want a better backyard and pool, but there's no rush. The house needs a little work but no big complaints. I always prefer the suburbs over the city, and ALWAYS owning houses over renting apartments. My dream is a slightly-out-of-town property which are always larger, cheaper, quietter, more private, more picturesque, etc.

 

FOCUS: We have a ranch house in a small town in North Carolina with over 2000 square feet and 3/4 of an acre of land. I love it. Super private with a giant backyard and our neighbors are great. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's on a slope and the front yard is a bitch to cut because it's a pretty big grade, but the privacy trade off makes up for it and the back is relatively level. There is a farm behind the house and once in a while cows will wander over and graze in our yard, or at least they did before we put the fence up to keep the dog in. It's twice the size of the house we had in NY for 2 and a half times less money and 3x less in taxes. The schools are better, the people are better, and our life is better.

UNfocus: If ever I came into a lot of money I would try to find 10+ acres nearby, which I see for sale all the time around here, and have a home built with a very similar layout and get a few horses.

 

I'm fortunate enough to have the best of both worlds, granted I don't exactly live in Metropolis. I live in what was the very first suburb of the city. I've got the space and foliage that I prefer, while still being walkable. We've got a strip that I'm two blocks off of that has 3-4 bars, a few restaurants, and several boutiques. 1/4 mile down the road is the original entertainment district of the city which has some very nice places, but being a college town obviously some places are dumps. Cheap cab ride to the newer (established late 90's I'd say) district near our river. I've got the quiet and tree lines streets of suburbia right in the middle of the city.

 

My husband and I live in a 1400 sq ft townhouse in a really nice city/town outside of Toronto (actually, rated one of 2014's Top 10 Best Cities in Canada to Live). It's not tons of space, and we're currently looking to upgrade to a detached house (mostly because I loathe our one neighbour with every fibre of my being). That said, our current house is in an awesome location - a 5 minute drive to major highways, a 5 minute walk from grocery stores, restaurants, a bunch of shops, a farmer's market, a bunch of pubs, two banks and the best breakfast place in town - but we're sheltered by a ravine that keeps the noise of the buzzing metropolis down to almost nothing.

That said, my husband's favourite part of where we live is that we live on the border of town, so if you drive about a mile north of us, it's all farm country with roadside stands selling fruits and vegetables in the summer time.

All in all, it's a pretty sweet place to live.

 

Focus: A condo in the gayborhood. It's a little trendy, but it's definitely not the trendiest or ritziest part of town. Gay guys are the best neighbors. I highly recommend it. We like it because of the location and neighborhood. It's close to work, downtown, concert venues, parks, and restaurants. Plenty of friends live nearby, and it's safe and clean. I just finished school and started my job, so this wasn't the best time for us to buy a house (especially with the market...people are in bidding wars going well over asking price...over houses they've only seen online). The plan is to stay here for a few years before buying.

UnFocus: If I could live anywhere it'd be a bungalow-style house in the east side of town. It's older and more laid back. There are more appealing options in terms of restaurants and activities. It's like Austin for 30 and 40-somethings without slashing my salary in half or increasing the cost of living just to be able to live in ATX.

 

We live in an area of Atlanta known as Kirkwood which is basically just east of downtown (maybe 3 miles). It's a re-gentrifying area, transitional neighborhood, slightly less ghetto year over year, etc. We really do love it over here, because it's near the city, has a ton of locally owned restaurants, shops and bars, but is still a family neighborhood with trees and parks. I get some of the best parts of the suburbs which is not having a ton of population density without all of the suburban bullshit (e.g. my kids will know what black people look like without a TV). Our house was built in 1927, but has a modern kitchen and added on master bedroom. It's maybe 1,500 square feet with a small yard. If I could pick it up and put it on a bigger lot while fixing some of the crappy reno work that was done we would probably stay in this house forever.

The hard parts are of course the crime - as shown in this year's golf club theft and previous year's lawnmower theft, smashed in car window, etc. However, even suburban Atlanta has a crime problem anymore. Ours just seems to be a little more common and we do still get a murder every year or so. Typically it's drug related, but this years was a mugging gone bad and of course that got the neighborhood in an uproar.

 

I live in a small town, 2011 census population was 12,500. It is the town me and the wife grew up in, and we will probably never leave. I love it here, small town right on the pacific ocean. Anything outdoors you want to do, you can do it. I would never be able to live in a city, I am good at driving in heavy traffic, I just don't like it, and I would hate living in my car to get to and from work. The nearest big city(Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary) is 1500km away, 18hour drive by speed limit. We don't have good airline service so we get screwed for prices. Only downside it that it rains a metric fuck tonne here, average yearly rain fall is 2.6m(100in).