If you stay in NYC and have kids, I'll be interested in your perspective then. I lived in NYC for a long time, and now live in the NYC suburbs. All your critici

If you stay in NYC and have kids, I'll be interested in your perspective then. I lived in NYC for a long time, and now live in the NYC suburbs. All your criticisms of suburbs are spot-on, IMO, even here in the NYC metro, but at the same time I don't think living IN the city with kids really would have worked out either. NYC is great because it's a true city, but it's very large, very loud, and still part of the broader American culture where you need to pay for what are arguably essential services such as good schools, physical safety, etc. We don't have a lot of in between options in the US though -- only here on the east coast do we have much urbanism, with NYC being the biggest and most intense by far, but pretty much everything else is suburban or exurban. I suspect this will be different within, say, 150 years, though of course that's a prediction I won't be able to check.