The bohemian suburbs

[chipotle]

I've been thinking about the difference between "urban," "rural" and "suburban" living recently.

I have friends who've lived in rural places (usually farms), and friends who'd like to move to rural places. Around here the place to be is in or by the mountains. tugrik likes New Almaden; my friend Dave aspires to the mountain town of Boulder Creek. And myself, I've long pictured a cabin on a secluded, wooded lot, where nights are defined by black skies, wind rustling tree branches and the occasional distant coyote bark.

My own experience has been 100% suburbia. It's been rare for me to live in a place where I couldn't walk to a store, but it's been rare for it to be anything more than a convenience store. Some places have been a little more rural, like where my mother lives in Ridge Manor (when she moved there, you had to drive to the convenience store); some places have been a little more urban, like the place I live now. From here I could walk to a strip mall with a McDonald's, a taqueria, a Starbucks and a drugstore.

Other than cargoweasel, I haven't heard people talk about the virtues of urban living. Half the people seem to think "the city" is only a nice place to visit, and the other half don't even agree with that. It's crowded and noisy and grimy. It's crime-ridden. It's expensive. You know the drill.

Suburbs, of course, are what our parents and their parents created when they fled cities: a place quiet enough to feel rural, yet not far removed from the metro area. Of course, this creates an ever-expanding "commerce belt" around the city which is eerily uniform no matter where you are in the country. When you move in, your closest business will be a gas station. In three years, there's a second-tier fast food place like a Subway. In four, there's a grocery store anchoring a little strip mall. And in ten years, maybe less, your subdivision's main entrance is on a busy road with three lanes in each direction and you have a Red Lobster and an Olive Garden and a Target and a Home Depot and a Best Buy, and the papers are abuzz with the mention of the big mall that Westfield will break ground on next month. You've hit the big time. You're getting a Cheesecake Factory.

Of course, you can't walk to any of them, except the convenience store.

Now what? Do you embrace chain-store cosmopolitanism? Do you try to find a place on the new edge, taking another hit in your commuting time? (Of course, by now there are offices in the commerce belt.) Do you move some place really rural, betting it's too far away from, well, anywhere to become a bedroom community? Great, if you find a way to keep an income.

Or do you consider going the other way?

I like the idea of that cabin and the dark sky and the sounds of wildlife. But I like the idea of having a few dozen different stores, restaurants and cafés in a four-block radius. When I want to get out and go to a place for rejuvenating my spirit, I may go to the woods, but I'm no outdoorsman -- I'm going to drive somewhere and park and watch the stars for a while. When I want to actually work on writing, I'm more likely to go to the neighborhood coffee shop. And when I get home from work and think about searching for a jazz club, or just browsing for a new restaurant, where could I go?

I'd drive into the city. Except that when I get home, I probably won't.

Musings like this will inevitably make people ask if I'm planning to move anytime soon. I'm not. I like my housemates tugrik and revar, I like this location, and, yes, I like the rent share. (In an area as expensive as Silicon Valley, that always counts, particularly when you don't actually have a stable income.) But I won't pretend I don't think about living alone again. And I wonder about downtown San Jose apartments, particularly lofts. Yeah, "aspiring writer in a city loft" is a cliché, but that's okay. It's a cliché I think I like.

So what's your experience been like with rural, suburban or urban living? Have you been in a city and loved it or hated it? Have you lived in the middle of nowhere and appreciated it? Does suburbia take more knocks than it deserves?

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding?! I adore the city! I guess technically I'm actually living in the northern suburbs of Boston right now, but I flee at every opportunity right into the heart of downtown Boston or Cambridge. I love that I can spend all day walking aimlessly with Postrodent and never see one big box store. I love that I can no longer count the number of non-chain ethnic restaurants within a ten-block radius on my hands and feet. For all its many, many flaws, I love mass transit and would never live anywhere that lacked it. I mean, sure the city is expensive and supposedly crime-ridden -- knock wood, but I've never personally seen anything worse than a traffic violation -- but it's noisy, crowded, and grimy! I love it.

When I was a kid growing up in a northeast Ohio town of 25,000, I had totally naive, romantic notions about what it was like to live in a city. I thought they'd be high-rises and skyscrapers from border to border. The idea of living -- or even driving -- in one was literally unfathomable.

Maybe I like city living because I can sit in the Porter Exchange mall, eating Japanese diner food and reading the local alternaweekly, and think, "Wow. I may not be much of a success by most standards, but I'm living in a city." I'm at least surviving, in one of the most expensive places in the country, which is more than be said for all my classmates who never made it out of my hick hometown. I'm seeing things they may never even know about. And most importantly, if I really want to, I can get Dim Sum at 1 a.m. on a Thursday. Can't help feeling good about that.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I've lived in a semi-rural suburban area once, but it followed the exact pattern you described. I've lived in suburbia, of course, but also lived in downtown San Jose for the better part of a year once. While no San Francisco, I could literally walk next store to a convience store. Not even twenty feet.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing, something that warrants further contemplation. On one hand, I really like urban, city life. I enjoyed living within walking distance of a downtown area. There's a lot of life. Constant concrete got a little tiring, but no more so than the uniformity of suburbs. Space was a bit cramped, as I was in a studio at the time. I one day look forward to living in SF proper, even if just for a few years, to see if it's everything I hope it'll be.

On the other hand, a small part of me wants to move into a small hodunk town on the edge of the Sierras, close to the wilderness. Maybe when I get older.

Right now, I don't mind the suburbs. It's quiet, there's enough room on a backyard and deck for a gathering of folks for barbeques, and the cost is okay for this area. Enough to get me by while I'm in school and on a budget.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Mass transit is still one of those largely mythical concepts to me, I'm afraid. When I was in college in Sarasota, Florida, I did get to ride the bus every once in a while --the college sat right on a county line, and was a terminus point for both county bus systems. Which both ran... hourly. About twelve hours a day. Here in Santa Clara County, the mass transit systems seem much, much better, yet they somehow manage to elude any semblance of usefulness for me based on where I live and where I need to get to.

This is something that might, paradoxically, change if I moved to downtown San Jose. All of the transit hubs would be right there. :)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the suburbs, either -- but they're not particularly inspiring. My apartment in Brandon was probably the best place I've lived away from home, but that was a combination of some good design decisions on the part of the apartment complex's builders and a great management team. I doubt I'd want to move back into a big suburban apartment complex again unless it was run by a comparably-clued company.

I suppose I've just grown restless with suburbia over the years. :) I want to get out of the middle ground and try one of the extremes, either real small town life like Ukiah or a city of sufficiently interesting size, like San Jose or San Francisco. SF is probably one of a handful of "world class" metropolitan areas in the United States, but from what I've seen of San Jose it does pretty well. And, it has occurred to me that some of the "small town" areas that have attracted me -- like Ukiah and even the Willow Glen area of San Jose -- attract me because they have, well, walkable downtowns. Not the 24-hour "you can find it here somewhere" feeling of a true city, certainly, but nonetheless the kind of place where you're within strolling distance of multiple stores, restaurants and cafes.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely in the 'rural suburban' camp, though more accurate would probably be 'rural in the shadow of a city'. I'm a bit of a hermit at heart, unfortunately; I don't shrivel in cities, per se, but I start to twitch in them in unhealthy ways, or at least such is my impression. Suburbia, while it has a peculiar sort of postmodern charm all its own, definitely has the soullessness that is its stereotype.

Ideally -- well, ideally for me -- I'd like to live somewhere that offers several acres of wooded land, somewhere where I might *have* neighbors but I'm not necessarily constantly reminded of them. Unfortunately, I have a few pretty powerful quirks that really want me to live within striking distance of a city; I might not want to live right upstairs from that wonderful market or right down the street from that great new hip-hop club, but I'd like to be able to head over to them at least once or twice a week, which means (more or less) a 30-40 mile radius of the city center.

Fortunately, most urban areas have something like this. If I were looking long-term at the SF Bay it'd probably be someplace like Boulder Creek or Fulton; up here it might be Snoqualmie/North Bend or Maple Valley. These are the towns that might sneak up towards 'suburban' eventually, but are liable to still have some fairly rural touches to them, for reasons of simple economics and geography -- nobody is going to be putting a Best Buy off of Highway 35 any time soon.

I suppose a lot of this comes down to upbringing; I spent my formative years in Wisconsin (briefly) and then upstate NY, the latter basically in the middle of nowhere surrounded by green mountains and some water, so green mountains and water are what I expect from the land around me; likewise, I grew up in a highly rural environment so I expect some measure of rurality -- I've just gotten used to the amenities of the city. I could go on and on about this, but it's late and I'm babbling, so I'll stop now; maybe later I'll try and journal up something about this topic, as it's one I've given quite a bit of thought to. Thank you for raising it!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly interested in your thoughts on the subject. I grew up in suburbs, really -- in Sarasota, Florida, it was a very nice old neighborhood, and in Spring Hill (about 40 miles north of Tampa) it was just the kind of archetypal cookie-cutter subdivision you'd expect it to be with a name like "Spring Hill." (Over the years, the homes there have become more upscale, but we were in a section of small, stark block homes.)

The kind of small town that's not too far from a city you're describing would be the other area I'd be interested in. As I said to Higgins in another comment, though, I suspect I'd want to be close to a walkable downtown -- just in that circumstance, it'd be a walkable downtown like Boulder Creek's rather than San Jose's. (I'm not entirely sure how I'd reconcile the "be slightly removed from people" idea and "be near a walkable downtown." Perhaps a mile or two out of a small town is removed enough.)

[sethm.livejournal.com]

If there is one thing Boston has going for it, it is an excellent transport system (jokes about the Green Line excepted). I lived there for a little over a year, and while I hated the cold and snow of winter, and the constant rudeness and snarling, I loved the public transportation, and the feeling of bustle and life in downtown Boston and nearby Cambridge.

Unofrunately, I was there during the housing crunch, and I was a full-time student, which meant I couldn't afford to be downtown. I lived in the suburbs, in a particularly nasty little forgotten corner of Waltham, behind a liquor store. It was, I think, more crime-ridden than downtown Boston would have been. But at least it was cheap(-ish) :) And the commuter rail ran straight to North Station every morning, which was a blessing.

[sethm.livejournal.com]

My experience is a little muddled and confused. When I was growing up my family moved a total of thirteen times before I graduated from high school, so I've lived practically all over, the only exception being a real inner city downtown experience. But from deeply rural to urban-suburban, I've got it covered.

I've had my fill of rural. It's not all it's cracked up to be. I think a lot of people I know romanticize it, maybe they think of bliss and tranquility and flowers, or maybe they just think "Ah, I get to hide away from people!", but honestly, it's just boring. My parents lived deep in the woods of Connecticut for two of those thirteen houses, the longest stays in one place of any of our moves. When you're in high school and you live so far out in the wilderness that you have to drive a half hour to get to Taco Bell, it does not help your social life. So yeah, I'm done with rural!

Personally, I love suburbia. I think it gets an undeserved rap. I mean come on, it's great. Every convenience imaginable is a ten minute car trip away. And probably there's a small corner shop in walking distance. I think where I live right now is just about perfect -- I'm in a pretty quiet suburban neighborhood which just happens to be walking distance to downtown San Jose. In about fifteen minutes I can be at the corner of First and Santa Clara, or down at the Camera One theater, or anywhere all around the SJSU campus. And when I get home, I'm back in quiet suburbia! Perfect.

[tacit.livejournal.com]

I've lived in rural areas (Nebraska, about seven or eight miles from a town with a population of 242 people--the closest McDonald's was almost an hour away, the closest mall a two and a half hour drive), and I've lived in suburbia, and they both suck.

Rural areas are havens of closed minds, rigid and intolerant social attitudes, and nothing to do. In the town where I grew up, one of the eight people in my middle school was always the perpetual outsider, resented and rejected by the rest of his peers, because his family had only been in the area for two generations, and that made him an "outsider." You can imagine how they felt about a freak like me.

Suburban living is little better; while there's more going on, and there's a greater diversity, a typical subdivision has all the charm and all the culture of a Nike shoe--mass-produced and mass-marketed. The idea of a "neighborhood" in the midst of suburban sprawl is almost an oxymoron; one's "neighborhood" is the houses, 7-11, and local strip mall within walking distance.

A pox on both of them. Give me the big city any day--a place where you can walk for two blocks and find anything you need, a place where you're surrounded by so many people of so many differnt kinds that there's a subculture for you no matter who you are. (You want to hang out with redheaded lesbian S&M chicks who're into Play-Doh and read William Faulkner? You ain't gonna find it in your subdivision, but in a place like New York City, that group meets twice a week at the local pizza shop!)

I've been consumed with the desire to live in a big city for many years. In a lot of ways, Tampa (land of the unplanned suburban sprawl) has been a compromise; Kelly likes small-town living, I'm a city boy, and that's where we ended up. I can't wait to get toBoston--a place where "culture" means more than "the local Disney store" and I can have as much, or as little, contact with people as I want.

City living is where it's at.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

When I think of rural areas I'd voluntarily live in, I don't think of rural areas quite that... stark. Ukiah's a town a few hours north of here that's about 15,000 people and it's the largest town in its county, but you have a mix of the old and new generations there. It's the place where the redheaded lesbian S&M chicks into Play-Doh have gone to form a commune, at least if they're also environmentalists. Ukiah is the home of the country's first 100% organic brewery-pub and has a surprisingly active little downtown area. It's not San Francisco, but by the same token, it ain't rural Nebraska, either.

Having said that, I'm definitely interested in the city side of life. I've poked around a couple relatively interesting apartments in San Jose. While it's no San Francisco, either (even though SF is technically the smaller of the two cities, it's probably one of a handful of world-class metro areas on the continent), it's got a pretty vibrant and large downtown area -- evidently a fairly recent revival, which is still underway in some parts. San Jose strikes me as having the kind of downtown that Tampa wants to have but has never quite pulled off. (I loved the few months that I worked in downtown Tampa, but I think only Ybor is really alive outside of workday hours.)

Seth's defense of the suburbs above is one I understand, but his suburb is still within walking distance of downtown. A little more of a walk, yes, but not a 20-30 minute (let alone 60-120 minute) drive. Most of the suburbs around Tampa are -- pleasantly transparent. Some ugly, some pretty, but very, very few that even try for more than amiable blandness. If I'd stayed in the area I might well have moved to Camden Ybor, the apartment complex that had been built on 8th Avenue just a few years ago.