You know, this is interesting, because I have a different, but I think somewhat related, experience. I am from a pretty comfortable background but I'm a lifelong suburbanite and now live in one of Boston's less tony suburbs. I work in Boston, though, and there is a lot of kind of subterranean contempt for the "townies" who live in these places and their tastes and habits (naturally enough many of them I share and I like my neighbors, making that a little uncomfortable). People blithely say things like "oh, yeah, it's full of white trash over there." And if you tell people in Boston you're visiting from one of these suburbs a lot of them act like you just said you flew in from Idaho, never mind that a ton of people take a train to Boston every single day. People can find a lot of different reasons to be snobs.