11 ms·

Cities' attractiveness feels u-shaped Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to bars/restaurants/clubs Middle aged folks hate it because they're so

• spiderfarmer 2y ago
  Exactly this. I grew up on a farm, was a student in the city, started a family in the countryside and I want to retire in a city, as long as it’s close to my children.
  • tomcam 2y ago
    Did you… did you, ah, raise spiders on the family farm?
    • AlbertCory 2y ago
      Is that a Thing? I'm so behind /s
      • tomcam 2y ago
        Well, check out their username
        • AlbertCory 2y ago
          oops. right.
        • jacobr1 2y ago
          I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd read it! It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.
          • TylerE 2y ago
            I don't skip commentor names intentionally, but HN makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.
    • spiderfarmer 2y ago
      My first ever online project was creating a spider (bot) so that has been my username ever since.
• bluGill 2y ago
  Middle ages folks hate it because they are most likely to have kids and cities (in the US) tend to be kid hostile. What I'm calling city below is probably better described as downtown - most cities extend out farther and have areas that are nothing like what follows - but are also nothing like what you described as what people move to the city for. Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play. Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there). Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows). Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids. Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment. Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.
  • jacobolus 2y ago
    Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially for kids from age ~9–18. Everything is walkable or can be reached by transit, many more amenities and activities are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them, and there are a wider variety of other kids around with many niche interests. Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful while suburbs are often boring and repressive.
• ghaff 2y ago
  It's very variable. There's also a lot of inertia once people are established in the suburbs/exurbs. I know some examples but I don't actually know a ton of cases of people moving into the city upon retirement.
• dfxm12 2y ago
  For another couple data points - my middle aged friends with kids who moved to my city did so for much of the same reason as you suggest the younger and older folks do. There's just more services for their kids: clubs, day care, pediatrics, playgrounds, sports teams, museums, etc. I have a few middle aged friends who moved away from my city, but they moved to bigger cities (Chicago, NYC) for work.
  • curiousllama 2y ago
    Curious, if you ever see this - where in the city did they move? Like an inner suburb/outer ring of the city? Into a block of townhouses/condos? Near family/friends? I'm curious how folks who happily live in the city with kids approach it
• silisili 2y ago
  Don't forget access to doctors and hospitals. I browse city-data at times out of boredom, and it's a major concern for retired people considering relocating anywhere.
  • AlbertCory 2y ago
    In fact I know a retired guy who moved to Maui, and then moved back. The principal reason was the saying they have, "If you have a pain, get on a plane." You might get served in Honolulu. Quite often you're flying to the mainland, though. That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could want.
    • bobthepanda 2y ago
      For people aging and not in the best of health, declining vision/response times makes driving riskier, and there is often a preference for homes without stairs as well, which might very well be a condo with an elevator. Then there’s also common area maintenance in condos vs. the manual labor of lawn care, pool care, etc.
    • hparadiz 2y ago
      I lived in Maui for a year and it was always in the back of my mind that my link to civilization was basically one road. And my apartment was just north of Lahaina. That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or a balcony staring out into the ocean. The doctors couldn't really do anything other than misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late. I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical issue.
      • AlbertCory 2y ago
        I told this guy I had rotator cuff surgery. One week wait for an MRI, and three for the surgery. He said the MRI would have been a 4-week wait in Hawaii. But it's a choice, for sure. There are lots of medical time wasters that are not life-threatening.
      • 2y ago
• thatfrenchguy 2y ago
  I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get 1500-2500sqft to yourself.
  • trgn 2y ago
    turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks neighborhoods.
    • KerrAvon 2y ago
      genuinely curious which century you mean?
      • cheschire 2y ago
        This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
        • kccqzy 2y ago
          That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.
          • moate 2y ago
            Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?) I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
          • 2y ago
• FuckButtons 2y ago
  Idk about your second point, it’s only because I live in the city that I have time to enjoy it, after work and kids commuting to and from the city is too much of a time sink and there’s fuck all to do everywhere else in the bay.
• dheera 2y ago
  I'm young, like cities, but dislike SF. The main reasons are - crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night - lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither) - rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects - not clean - Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.
  • throwaway2037 2y ago
    In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF -- about the same level of grime in my experience.
    • hylaride 2y ago
      There’s different meanings to “cleanliness”. A bit of grime is fine. Drug paraphernalia, human feces, and tons of homelessness is another matter.
      • dheera 2y ago
        Yeah exactly. Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in. I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.
    • dheera 2y ago
      No. The public transit there hardly goes anywhere in reasonable time. It takes a good 40 minutes just to get across it. Many times I've walked faster to my destination than the public transit estimates. The Muni trolleys get stuck at intersections and red lights and don't move faster than cars. The BART only goes down 1 smelly street. I'd spend 2 hours round trip (1 hour each way) just to buy a vegetable from the nearest Ranch 99. That's not city life. Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars on the surface. They actually save time from driving.
• stanleykm 2y ago
  im probably an outlier but i love being able to walk to work as a middle aged city dweller.
• pmontra 2y ago
  In my experience everybody grown up outside a big city and especially in the countryside, look at big cities and say "no no, it's a mess, I'll never live there." That's independent from the age. Of course they go there for concerts, theaters, museums, maybe hospitals. People grown up in a big city tend to have the opposite reaction, ranging from "it's like being dead" to "there is nothing to do", which of course is false: there are different kind of activities. People that like sports usually will feel better outside a city.
• ricardobayes 2y ago
  That's so true.
• galdosdi 2y ago
  You know what sucks? A ton of families-with-kids would love to stay in the city, if only the schools-- especially high schools-- were on par with what can be found for similar price in the suburbs. There is no physical reason it should be like this; in fact, just the opposite. Cities may have the density to support more bars, but they also have the density to support more varied after school kids' activities and cultural attractions, etc (and the ability to let middle and high school aged kids walk themselves to school and other places rather than becoming a chauffeur) But the failing schools push many parents out against their own and their own childrens' preferences. This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's really not that different to how a lot of third world cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and there's no real net savings for society, it's just money left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.