You make a lot of sacrifices living downtown, some you don't notice until living there for a while and it wears on you. It can range from annoying to legitimately toxic to live in certain apartment complexes. After a while you start wishing you had more separation from your neighbor blasting music, your other neighbor's screaming kids, the teenagers smoking weed and leaving trash in the stairwell, the people airbnbing and drinking all day in the pool between kids taking cannonballs, or the homeless encampment outside the door that makes noise, starts fires, and raids the gated garage regularly for bikes, despite the surveillance cameras. Maybe those apartment walls start feeling very tiny and claustrophobic when you have a partner or children in there with you, all working from home. Maybe you wish it didn't take you 15 minutes to walk from your door to the first patch of grass where your dog can piss. Or you wish the bus didn't have to run in city traffic and take an hour and show up late, or that you could park closer than a 10-30 minute walk to your door.
As much as we say how beneficial urban living is, the built urban environment we've crafted is toxic. Apartments are built thinwalled, small and cheap to cater to 22 year olds with an offer from a salary job and no one else. Cars are given the priority over transit, and suburban commuters are given priority over local resident car owners who might have to spend 30+ minutes after work hunting for parking in their neighborhood. The only new parkland you see in the 21st century seem to be a handful of grossly expensive freeway caps, or pocket parks, which pale in comparison to park development in the 19th century. Cities with good parkland are riding on the coattails of their better thinking 19-20th century planners. Schools are underfunded and charters loot the public school purse. Homelessness, crime, and the mental health crisis on our streets are not being addressed at any level of government and there is no signal that these things will be addressed anytime soon, since there has been zero plan of any kind. And on top of it all, few get jobs in cities that make any of this city life actually affordable.
Once you get past the age where living in cheap uber distance of the bars matters, cities can be a legitimate drag due to how they've been designed over the past 100 years.
Damn, you hit the nail on the head. I grew up in a rural area of florida. I competed in a business competition thing in high school that sent me and other classmates to Cincinnati. My first "big city" experience. We were all like, "Whoa!" The first few days. After day four or five, we were all complaining about missing trees. In my 20s, traveled, lived a few big cities, Seattle and Portland being the prominent ones. Yea, outside the cities it's nice. But the city itself, concrete, asphalt, homeless, random assholes just being assholes... it gets boring as you get older. Too much of the actual living experience is peacock posturing. Why live in the downtown to escape to nature through a shitty commute? I find it better to live on the cusp and visit a small city if I need to, escaping everyday into a tree infested woodland a small walk away.
Sure, theres probably a better city planning philosophy that can address this, but the feasibility is probably remote. Not just economically, but by discipline. After 2 or 3 decades, there's barely any of the old guard that gave a shit about the new great plan. They're going to do their own thing for their own prestige or benefits. Shitting on the original plan. That's reality. So we have the system we have. Some want dense urban environments, some dont. Those that do want it, paint and tidy up your own home your own way. I dont care. But dont come to my side and demand I adopt all your ideas because trees are scary and need to be chopped down for a starbucks with apartments.
I like visiting cities but I almost certainly wouldn't want to live in one long-term.
For example, I really like visiting NYC but when I lived in Manhattan one summer as an intern in grad school (admittedly as a poor student and in a considerably different 1980s NYC), I was pretty much non-stop pestering friends in Connecticut and New Jersey to come out and visit on the weekends because the city was totally getting to me.
As much as we say how beneficial urban living is, the built urban environment we've crafted is toxic. Apartments are built thinwalled, small and cheap to cater to 22 year olds with an offer from a salary job and no one else. Cars are given the priority over transit, and suburban commuters are given priority over local resident car owners who might have to spend 30+ minutes after work hunting for parking in their neighborhood. The only new parkland you see in the 21st century seem to be a handful of grossly expensive freeway caps, or pocket parks, which pale in comparison to park development in the 19th century. Cities with good parkland are riding on the coattails of their better thinking 19-20th century planners. Schools are underfunded and charters loot the public school purse. Homelessness, crime, and the mental health crisis on our streets are not being addressed at any level of government and there is no signal that these things will be addressed anytime soon, since there has been zero plan of any kind. And on top of it all, few get jobs in cities that make any of this city life actually affordable.
Once you get past the age where living in cheap uber distance of the bars matters, cities can be a legitimate drag due to how they've been designed over the past 100 years.