Terminalcoffee discussion
Random Queries
>
What's a suburb? Would you live in one?
date
newest »
newest »
That's a good point. Some areas in the city now seem like suburbs to me. There are these weird gated communities right in the middle of Chicago, off Diversey, I think, that look like suburbs to me.
Mod
One, because I read this in the Denver Post but there was no attribution to or link to Huff Post. Are they related? Did they both pull the story idea off the wire?
Second, Denver still has strong suburban tendencies, I think. I have friends in the southern suburbs and I think it looks like a miserable way to live. Nothing local, everything chain this or chain that, and every single place must be driven to. I like living in the small town environment, but if we moved I'd vote for the city.
School quality is a big factor, too. If good schools in a city are an easily acquired option, then I imagine that city looks much more attractive to couples considering kids.
I'm more interested in the reversal of "white flight" from the cities, and how that influx of "whiteness" (sorry, I don't mean to sound hostile) will jack up rentals and purchase prices in communities that were once considered "downtrodden."
That's definitely an issue here. The city is attracting young people in droves, but then they get a little older, see the schools, and then leave again. I feel like I've got the best of both worlds with my stand alone house in a green neighborhood in the city, but if I had kids I would hesitate to send them to the local public school.
We're DEFINITELY NOT sending our daughter to a local public school. Call us elitists, but the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system is in complete disarray, and we'd rather pay handsomely for a private education than see our daughter be treated like another statistic in a school system that's failing their students and faculty.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05...
The first is definitely true in my experience. A lot of my students are from the suburbs, and they want to live in the city and teach in the suburbs. Milwaukee's a small city with easy traffic so that's not so hard. But when I was in my twenties in Chicago I can say that virtually my entire "cool" neighborhood was populated by people from other states who moved to Chicago. But that's a little different than the suburbs.
I'm not entirely sure what a suburb is anymore, but I'm comfortable with the assertion that all suburbs are not alike. Some suburbs in Chicago (Cicero comes to mind) are essentially extensions of poor neighborhoods in the city. Others, of course, are quite affluent. Some are so far out I'm not sure they should be called suburbs or nearby towns.
What do you think?