7 ms·

Smaller cities and towns are fantastic, both in terms of community and cost. Remote work incentives like this seem like a great way to draw people to less popul

Smaller cities and towns are fantastic, both in terms of community and cost. Remote work incentives like this seem like a great way to draw people to less populated areas. Honestly, I think that a lot of folks who feel stressed and cramped in metro areas like SF, Seattle, NYC, etc. might really enjoy living in a small town. But a lot of states in the Midwest still present serious cultural barriers to many such people. Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent. Communities are usually less secular, with religion playing a huge part in peoples' social lives; sometimes it's almost a prerequisite to "joining the community". Pot can get you serious jail time. Raising well-adjusted kids can be harder because of how insular suburban areas are. And so on. It's not like that everywhere, and most people are kind and empathetic at heart, but definitely spend some time in an area before you consider taking a stipend to move there. Places like Central Washington, upstate New York, and Eastern Colorado are hidden gems, but having spent a bit of time in Tulsa and speaking as someone with a slight countercultural bent, you would have to pay me a lot more than $10k to move there.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
I wouldn't mind living in a smaller city (though honestly Tulsa ain't that small), but yes there's the cultural issues you bring up, and other problems as well. For example, the US has generally awful land use/transportation setups even in progressive major cities, and in smaller/less progressive ones, it goes from generally awful to extra terrible. Walking for transportation is unpleasant and near-useless, biking is uncomfortable and dangerous, and public transportation is sparse, slow, and unreliable. Housing options are usually either a single-family home in a super low density area that exacerbates the above, or an apartment in a very ugly large complex in a neighborhood with terrible schools. Obviously generalizing here, but that's what you see most of the time. To demonstrate that I'm not using these superlatives for no reason: I can't find stats for Tulsa, but Oklahoma City's combined mode share for commuters who use walking, biking, or public transit is a massive 2.2 percent, and Tulsa's is probably similar. I find that people are pretty rational when it comes to day to day transportation choices; if that few people are doing something other than driving, there's a very good reason for it. Right now I live in the outskirts of Munich in a backyard duplex (there's a 6-unit complex up front), a type of housing option that largely doesn't even exist in the states. Plenty of people around here drive, but there's also a few different grocery options within easy walking distance (and a ton within easy biking distance), public transit is fairly dense and reliable (extremely dense and reliable by US standards), all three of those things feel safe even with kids. And Munich isn't some weird outlier in Germany, the other cities I've visited have felt quite similar overall. I wish US cities could stop being such a dumpster fire when it comes to land use and transportation, but there's so much cultural momentum there.
- tomdell 7y ago
  I would argue that smaller metros in America have a much more diverse housing stock than what you say here - while there are certainly plenty of houses in far-flung, low-density neighborhoods and ugly apartments in massive complexes, there are also typically more appealing urban neighborhoods in the main city (and often in the larger suburbs) with a good mix of businesses, community buildings, transit, small apartment buildings, townhouses and single-family homes all intermingling. Though these neighborhoods are often desirable as a result and it can take some waiting for an appropriate listing to go for sale, rentals are usually in high supply.
  - jpindar 7y ago
    In New England, what we call tripledeckers - three story buildings, usually with three or six apartments - are very common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house)
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Yes, New England is the biggest exception there, especially streetcar suburbs.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Well, that's not what I've seen. Townhomes and smaller (non-hideous[1]) apartment complexes -- missing middle housing -- certainly exist, but they're fairly uncommon. They make up a very small percentage of what housing stock is available. [1] To explain what I mean by this, here in Germany it's very common to have smaller, say 8-12 unit apartment complexes that are not surrounded by a small sea of asphalt for parking; the parking is completely underground, so up front you have just maybe a small strip of greenery. And then they actually have a good-sized shared backyard, and the building itself doesn't look like it's trying its best to ape Soviet-era brutalist apartment blocks.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The urban core of most American cities are pretty hollowed out and artificial in my experience. It's changing slightly, but I encourage you to see some of these mid western cities that don't get much limelight yourself. Have a night out in Cleveland, Ohio, as I've done several times. All will seem pretty standard, you go to a bar on a street with four other similar bars, then you realize that these four bars are the only places with people in them in the entire downtown area. You leave the bars and walk a block and you can hear your footsteps and thoughts echo off of the empty blocks. You might be lucky to see another soul on foot. There is just a lack of life in a lot of American urban cores, and that's not a feeling but a fact backed with population data. Cleveland in the 1950s had nearly 900k people living in the city. Today it's a bit over 350k people living in the city, a large portion of it is literally hollow (or demolished and converted to surface parking lots) due to large swaths of the population moving to new suburban developments in the 1950s, and a lack of immigration back into the urban core. The overall metro population of Cleveland has been pretty stable, if declining, but the city itself only appears as a city from 9am to 5pm, and during the odd sports game, as a result. Restaurants and stores might only be open for weekday lunch because there isn't foot traffic otherwise. This isn't true in every city, however. For instance, Los Angeles experienced a similar white flight effect with the development of their surburban neighborhoods, however in the wake of this population shift, immigration continued to occur and the population continued to rise at double digit rates every decade. Now, the former neighborhood of the Los Angeles elite of the 1920s, Westlake, is a thriving community of central american immigrants and the densest part of the entire city. The same cannot be said about the Cleveland analog, millionaires row on Euclid Ave, which used to count Rockefeller and Carnegie among their storied residents.
thedance 7y ago
"Serious cultural barriers" undersells it. They're out there in Tulsa right now trying to figure out how many black people are buried in unmarked mass graves resulting from the deadliest race riot in American history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/03/tulsa-mass-graves-excavation/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/03/tulsa-mass...
- mrkurt 7y ago
  There’s a lot to dislike about Tulsa, but the entire country is culpable for those kinds of problems. The biggest cities in the US _still_ systemically oppress black people.
- mythrwy 7y ago
  That was in 1921. The people who did that are long dead and so probably are their children. Should we skip California because Native Americans were killed in the 1880s?
  - thedance 7y ago
    There's a pretty big difference in the institutionalization of racism between the two states. At this very moment there are statues of Confederate soldiers on the grounds of government institutions. If you're black and you have to go to trial in Bryant County, you have to walk past a 12-foot-tall statue of "our gallant Confederate soldiers". That's state-sponsored terrorism against black Americans. By the way, Oklahoma was not even a belligerent in the American Civil War, because it did not exist until 1907. All of its institutional racism was simply imported.
standardUser 7y ago
I can't get over the cultural issues. Life's too short to spend my time around people who are devoutly religious or think Trump is great for America. Let alone the backwards attitudes on sexuality and gender. Maybe if I was married I could imagine it for a short time. But as a single guy I don't think I'd find the dating pool I'm looking for in a place like Tulsa. And I sure as hell would not raise children in that kind of community.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  We need to be able to live alongside and get along with people who think differently than us, or we'll just keep getting more polarized.
  - asdff 7y ago
    There's holding a different opinion based on reasoning and analysis, and holding a different opinion due to bigotry and hate. Putting the latter on the same pedestal as the former is what has polarized this country more than anything.
  - standardUser 7y ago
    I want to be polarized... away from people who believe in Sunday school stories over science or who reject people because of their gender, sexuality, race or nationality.
- non-entity 7y ago
  You're being downvoted but I kinda agree with at least parts of your post. I live in a smaller city in the southeast (and have lived in similar such cities my whole life) with a little over 100k with around 500k in the metro and and probably a large number of people I see on Tinder are looking to find someone to marry. Mind you in in my early 20s.
fossuser 7y ago
I'd have a hard time moving back to a smaller city type place because of the negatives you describe, but also because I think it's like putting a handicap on development (not a great place to raise kids). I grew up in a nice suburb outside Buffalo in upstate New York and I had a pleasant childhood there, but it's a desert of ideas and a hard place to get exposure to smart people learning/doing things. Not impossible, but much harder. The bay area is on the other extreme end in terms of opportunity and being able to learn from people. I think you grow faster when you have more interaction with smart people, and in a place where there is a lot of growth there are a lot of opportunities for that. Though there are risks to any ideological bubble (and SF tends to have cultural issues that can lean similarly extreme to a small town) - that seems generally contained. There's still a lot more opportunity to learn from people building things here, and growing up here it'd be easier to learn more, faster. It's also nice not having to waste time on things like religious discussions, the bar of interesting is generally set higher because there's already pretty good consensus. When the base-line is more of a rational/scientific world view you can tackle more interesting problems (and conversation). Housing is extremely cheap where I grew up, but it's not worth the trade-off. Another benefit of being in an intellectual and economic hub is that there's a feedback loop that continues to attract more people all the time. This also means your kids are more likely to stick around (everyone I was friends with that went on to do interesting things left Buffalo). Though if local communities continue to refuse to build housing this may become less true over time.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > Another benefit of being in an intellectual and economic hub is that there's a feedback loop that continues to attract more people all the time. I get what you mean, but hoo boy, as a bay area native, this most certainly has not happened there. Almost everyone I knew growing up that doesn't work in tech themselves now has long since left (as well as a fair number who do work in tech, like me). What you're saying is accurate, but if the area chooses to fight its own growth, like what the bay area has done, it makes it much harder for people to stick around.
  - fossuser 7y ago
datashow 7y ago
"Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent". "prevalent"? Like how? I think you are making up. Still exist? Definitely yes. Prevalent? No way. Unless you have a very different kind sense of "prevalent". Actually people in small towns in general are much nicer than big cities and usually they don't care about your skin color or whatever. And they in general appreciate "a slight countercultural bent", unless you have a different sense of "slight".
- jkmcf 7y ago
  Sadly, "prevalent" represents a range degrees. From "universal" to "widespread" to "frequent" to "common". I'm not sure I would normally consider all of these to be reference the same word. My usual interpretation of prevalent would be common or frequent, and in this case I interpreted it as "it's still pretty common, but with less public downsides". The thing about small towns is the people are generally really nice to you, but not so much when referring to a group that includes you. One data point: a man who loved talking to people regardless of color or persuasion. But, he'd talk about a group of them with much negativity. Blame it all on FOX News? reference: Apple's integration with Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
- stevula 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I witnessed a lot of racism in small town Oklahoma, including a black family being threatened to leave town. I saw no LGBT people who felt safe to be out.
- thedance 7y ago
  I think you're going pretty easy on Oklahoma, perhaps just because you like it for other reasons. Oklahoma would put people in prison for consensual same-sex relations as recently as 2003. The law remans but the US Supreme Court struck it down. Ask yourself if a state with a statute against "detestable and abominable crimes against nature" has a prevalent anti-LGBT attitude or not. There are people alive today who survived a white-against-black race riot that killed hundreds in Tulsa. There are people alive today who were imprisoned and threatened with sterilization for being gay. There are followers of Islam alive today who needed police protection after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building instantly became an anti-muslim witch hunt. Oklahoma is objectively one of the most backwards places in America. It might be better than it was, due largely to federal preemption of their theocratic laws, but it's still incrediby intolerant.
pfdietz 7y ago
As you allude to there, a small city that is very LGBTQ friendly is Ithaca, NY, where I live. I recently read that a tourism survey here found that 20% of the visitors are in that classification, some four times the national average.
- asdff 7y ago
  If it weren't for housing Ithaca College and Cornell, Ithaca would not be nearly so progressive and more akin to other upstate ny towns.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Well, sure. If Ithaca wasn't what it is, it would be something else. :)
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  I grew up in Ithaca, and it's not like a lot of Update NY. It's got multiple colleges, including Cornell, a global-tier research University. Meanwhile the rest of upstate is a lot poorer. Great for a college student -- cheap housing and good local booze. Hanging out on the Ithaca Commons was great, and the gaming stores (like Magic Cards, D&D) were awesome.
tic_tac 7y ago
It's a bit of a tired trope that we always have to mention "racism, etc" when taking about things like small towns, as if it's an established fact when it's really more a prejudiced assumption about how people from small towns or certain parts of the country feel. If someone is an upstanding member of the community and fits in with cultural norms, they will usually get by fine regardless of skin color. Of course sometimes this is not the case, but it is no more so than in cities where people of different races often self segregate into distinct communities and there is often latent racial tension. For those who have had bad experiences in small towns or communities, it's dangerous to generalize personal experiences to vast regions or large groups. That just perpetuates bias and prejudice.
fred_is_fred 7y ago
Eastern Colorado? You mean the desolate prairie? I can't even imagine what city you are talking about. Other than cities like Greeley, civilization essentially ends at I-25.
tomcam 7y ago
> Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent. Prevalent? Citation needed.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

I wouldn't mind living in a smaller city (though honestly Tulsa ain't that small), but yes there's the cultural issues you bring up, and other problems as well. For example, the US has generally awful land use/transportation setups even in progressive major cities, and in smaller/less progressive ones, it goes from generally awful to extra terrible. Walking for transportation is unpleasant and near-useless, biking is uncomfortable and dangerous, and public transportation is sparse, slow, and unreliable. Housing options are usually either a single-family home in a super low density area that exacerbates the above, or an apartment in a very ugly large complex in a neighborhood with terrible schools. Obviously generalizing here, but that's what you see most of the time. To demonstrate that I'm not using these superlatives for no reason: I can't find stats for Tulsa, but Oklahoma City's combined mode share for commuters who use walking, biking, or public transit is a massive 2.2 percent, and Tulsa's is probably similar. I find that people are pretty rational when it comes to day to day transportation choices; if that few people are doing something other than driving, there's a very good reason for it. Right now I live in the outskirts of Munich in a backyard duplex (there's a 6-unit complex up front), a type of housing option that largely doesn't even exist in the states. Plenty of people around here drive, but there's also a few different grocery options within easy walking distance (and a ton within easy biking distance), public transit is fairly dense and reliable (extremely dense and reliable by US standards), all three of those things feel safe even with kids. And Munich isn't some weird outlier in Germany, the other cities I've visited have felt quite similar overall. I wish US cities could stop being such a dumpster fire when it comes to land use and transportation, but there's so much cultural momentum there.

tomdell 7y ago
I would argue that smaller metros in America have a much more diverse housing stock than what you say here - while there are certainly plenty of houses in far-flung, low-density neighborhoods and ugly apartments in massive complexes, there are also typically more appealing urban neighborhoods in the main city (and often in the larger suburbs) with a good mix of businesses, community buildings, transit, small apartment buildings, townhouses and single-family homes all intermingling. Though these neighborhoods are often desirable as a result and it can take some waiting for an appropriate listing to go for sale, rentals are usually in high supply.
- jpindar 7y ago
  In New England, what we call tripledeckers - three story buildings, usually with three or six apartments - are very common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house)
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Yes, New England is the biggest exception there, especially streetcar suburbs.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Well, that's not what I've seen. Townhomes and smaller (non-hideous[1]) apartment complexes -- missing middle housing -- certainly exist, but they're fairly uncommon. They make up a very small percentage of what housing stock is available. [1] To explain what I mean by this, here in Germany it's very common to have smaller, say 8-12 unit apartment complexes that are not surrounded by a small sea of asphalt for parking; the parking is completely underground, so up front you have just maybe a small strip of greenery. And then they actually have a good-sized shared backyard, and the building itself doesn't look like it's trying its best to ape Soviet-era brutalist apartment blocks.
- asdff 7y ago
  The urban core of most American cities are pretty hollowed out and artificial in my experience. It's changing slightly, but I encourage you to see some of these mid western cities that don't get much limelight yourself. Have a night out in Cleveland, Ohio, as I've done several times. All will seem pretty standard, you go to a bar on a street with four other similar bars, then you realize that these four bars are the only places with people in them in the entire downtown area. You leave the bars and walk a block and you can hear your footsteps and thoughts echo off of the empty blocks. You might be lucky to see another soul on foot. There is just a lack of life in a lot of American urban cores, and that's not a feeling but a fact backed with population data. Cleveland in the 1950s had nearly 900k people living in the city. Today it's a bit over 350k people living in the city, a large portion of it is literally hollow (or demolished and converted to surface parking lots) due to large swaths of the population moving to new suburban developments in the 1950s, and a lack of immigration back into the urban core. The overall metro population of Cleveland has been pretty stable, if declining, but the city itself only appears as a city from 9am to 5pm, and during the odd sports game, as a result. Restaurants and stores might only be open for weekday lunch because there isn't foot traffic otherwise. This isn't true in every city, however. For instance, Los Angeles experienced a similar white flight effect with the development of their surburban neighborhoods, however in the wake of this population shift, immigration continued to occur and the population continued to rise at double digit rates every decade. Now, the former neighborhood of the Los Angeles elite of the 1920s, Westlake, is a thriving community of central american immigrants and the densest part of the entire city. The same cannot be said about the Cleveland analog, millionaires row on Euclid Ave, which used to count Rockefeller and Carnegie among their storied residents.

thedance 7y ago

"Serious cultural barriers" undersells it. They're out there in Tulsa right now trying to figure out how many black people are buried in unmarked mass graves resulting from the deadliest race riot in American history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/03/tulsa-mass-graves-excavation/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/03/tulsa-mass...

mrkurt 7y ago
There’s a lot to dislike about Tulsa, but the entire country is culpable for those kinds of problems. The biggest cities in the US _still_ systemically oppress black people.
mythrwy 7y ago
That was in 1921. The people who did that are long dead and so probably are their children. Should we skip California because Native Americans were killed in the 1880s?
- thedance 7y ago
  There's a pretty big difference in the institutionalization of racism between the two states. At this very moment there are statues of Confederate soldiers on the grounds of government institutions. If you're black and you have to go to trial in Bryant County, you have to walk past a 12-foot-tall statue of "our gallant Confederate soldiers". That's state-sponsored terrorism against black Americans. By the way, Oklahoma was not even a belligerent in the American Civil War, because it did not exist until 1907. All of its institutional racism was simply imported.

standardUser 7y ago

I can't get over the cultural issues. Life's too short to spend my time around people who are devoutly religious or think Trump is great for America. Let alone the backwards attitudes on sexuality and gender. Maybe if I was married I could imagine it for a short time. But as a single guy I don't think I'd find the dating pool I'm looking for in a place like Tulsa. And I sure as hell would not raise children in that kind of community.

mwcampbell 7y ago
We need to be able to live alongside and get along with people who think differently than us, or we'll just keep getting more polarized.
- asdff 7y ago
  There's holding a different opinion based on reasoning and analysis, and holding a different opinion due to bigotry and hate. Putting the latter on the same pedestal as the former is what has polarized this country more than anything.
- standardUser 7y ago
  I want to be polarized... away from people who believe in Sunday school stories over science or who reject people because of their gender, sexuality, race or nationality.
non-entity 7y ago
You're being downvoted but I kinda agree with at least parts of your post. I live in a smaller city in the southeast (and have lived in similar such cities my whole life) with a little over 100k with around 500k in the metro and and probably a large number of people I see on Tinder are looking to find someone to marry. Mind you in in my early 20s.

fossuser 7y ago

I'd have a hard time moving back to a smaller city type place because of the negatives you describe, but also because I think it's like putting a handicap on development (not a great place to raise kids). I grew up in a nice suburb outside Buffalo in upstate New York and I had a pleasant childhood there, but it's a desert of ideas and a hard place to get exposure to smart people learning/doing things. Not impossible, but much harder. The bay area is on the other extreme end in terms of opportunity and being able to learn from people. I think you grow faster when you have more interaction with smart people, and in a place where there is a lot of growth there are a lot of opportunities for that. Though there are risks to any ideological bubble (and SF tends to have cultural issues that can lean similarly extreme to a small town) - that seems generally contained. There's still a lot more opportunity to learn from people building things here, and growing up here it'd be easier to learn more, faster. It's also nice not having to waste time on things like religious discussions, the bar of interesting is generally set higher because there's already pretty good consensus. When the base-line is more of a rational/scientific world view you can tackle more interesting problems (and conversation). Housing is extremely cheap where I grew up, but it's not worth the trade-off. Another benefit of being in an intellectual and economic hub is that there's a feedback loop that continues to attract more people all the time. This also means your kids are more likely to stick around (everyone I was friends with that went on to do interesting things left Buffalo). Though if local communities continue to refuse to build housing this may become less true over time.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
> Another benefit of being in an intellectual and economic hub is that there's a feedback loop that continues to attract more people all the time. I get what you mean, but hoo boy, as a bay area native, this most certainly has not happened there. Almost everyone I knew growing up that doesn't work in tech themselves now has long since left (as well as a fair number who do work in tech, like me). What you're saying is accurate, but if the area chooses to fight its own growth, like what the bay area has done, it makes it much harder for people to stick around.
- fossuser 7y ago

datashow 7y ago

"Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent". "prevalent"? Like how? I think you are making up. Still exist? Definitely yes. Prevalent? No way. Unless you have a very different kind sense of "prevalent". Actually people in small towns in general are much nicer than big cities and usually they don't care about your skin color or whatever. And they in general appreciate "a slight countercultural bent", unless you have a different sense of "slight".

jkmcf 7y ago
Sadly, "prevalent" represents a range degrees. From "universal" to "widespread" to "frequent" to "common". I'm not sure I would normally consider all of these to be reference the same word. My usual interpretation of prevalent would be common or frequent, and in this case I interpreted it as "it's still pretty common, but with less public downsides". The thing about small towns is the people are generally really nice to you, but not so much when referring to a group that includes you. One data point: a man who loved talking to people regardless of color or persuasion. But, he'd talk about a group of them with much negativity. Blame it all on FOX News? reference: Apple's integration with Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
stevula 7y ago
Anecdotally, I witnessed a lot of racism in small town Oklahoma, including a black family being threatened to leave town. I saw no LGBT people who felt safe to be out.
thedance 7y ago
I think you're going pretty easy on Oklahoma, perhaps just because you like it for other reasons. Oklahoma would put people in prison for consensual same-sex relations as recently as 2003. The law remans but the US Supreme Court struck it down. Ask yourself if a state with a statute against "detestable and abominable crimes against nature" has a prevalent anti-LGBT attitude or not. There are people alive today who survived a white-against-black race riot that killed hundreds in Tulsa. There are people alive today who were imprisoned and threatened with sterilization for being gay. There are followers of Islam alive today who needed police protection after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building instantly became an anti-muslim witch hunt. Oklahoma is objectively one of the most backwards places in America. It might be better than it was, due largely to federal preemption of their theocratic laws, but it's still incrediby intolerant.

pfdietz 7y ago

As you allude to there, a small city that is very LGBTQ friendly is Ithaca, NY, where I live. I recently read that a tourism survey here found that 20% of the visitors are in that classification, some four times the national average.

asdff 7y ago
If it weren't for housing Ithaca College and Cornell, Ithaca would not be nearly so progressive and more akin to other upstate ny towns.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Well, sure. If Ithaca wasn't what it is, it would be something else. :)
blaser-waffle 7y ago
I grew up in Ithaca, and it's not like a lot of Update NY. It's got multiple colleges, including Cornell, a global-tier research University. Meanwhile the rest of upstate is a lot poorer. Great for a college student -- cheap housing and good local booze. Hanging out on the Ithaca Commons was great, and the gaming stores (like Magic Cards, D&D) were awesome.

tic_tac 7y ago

It's a bit of a tired trope that we always have to mention "racism, etc" when taking about things like small towns, as if it's an established fact when it's really more a prejudiced assumption about how people from small towns or certain parts of the country feel. If someone is an upstanding member of the community and fits in with cultural norms, they will usually get by fine regardless of skin color. Of course sometimes this is not the case, but it is no more so than in cities where people of different races often self segregate into distinct communities and there is often latent racial tension. For those who have had bad experiences in small towns or communities, it's dangerous to generalize personal experiences to vast regions or large groups. That just perpetuates bias and prejudice.

fred_is_fred 7y ago

Eastern Colorado? You mean the desolate prairie? I can't even imagine what city you are talking about. Other than cities like Greeley, civilization essentially ends at I-25.

tomcam 7y ago

> Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent. Prevalent? Citation needed.