Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?

Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by closeparen on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @10:30PM (#17140555)

Chicago. Chicago is an honest-to-goodness world city with skyscrapers and trains and everything. A luxury condo in one of them can run you less than be down payment on a rundown shack in a far-flung Bay Area suburb. Unfortunately the tech scene there is mostly in the old-school business IT tradition and in suburban office-park hellscapes.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by DmenshunlAnlsis on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @10:32PM (#17140561)

The winters are also... bracing, to say the very least. If you like feet of snow, it’s great, otherwise maybe not so much. I love to visit, but I wouldn’t last a year.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by closeparen on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @10:51PM (#17140667)

Winter is a tooling problem. The tools are straightforward and Chicago is well-practiced in their use. You put on a coat. The city plows. You drive a 4WD car carefully. It works out.

Compared to paying half your “upper middle class” salary for living conditions that most Americans would identify as poverty (roommates, paper thin walls, 1970s fixtures, no dishwasher, garbage disposal, laundry, or parking, etc) due to game-theoretically intractable politics, it’s nothing.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by thrav on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:25AM (#17141317)

> You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.

That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me. In fact, it’s the exact same reason I can’t live in the south. Y’all have heaters; they have AC. It all still means I’m trapped indoors and miserable much of the year. No thanks.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by mantas on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:23AM (#17141524)

Proper winters are AWESOME. Skiing, winter hiking/camping.. Lots of things to do.

Year-cycle puts a nice rhythm in life. November is time to bring out tea, books, warm socks and reflect the year that is about to pass. Then first signs of spring comes, everybody is out celebrating and there's a deep-rooted feeling that rough time has passed and now you can relax for a bit.

I couldn't live somewhere without proper 4 seasons. I did stay in non-snowy areas for extended period of time more than once and it's just.. sad. On the other hand, it's probably upbringing&culture.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by magnusdeus123 on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:00PM (#17146002)

Moved to Montreal from Vancouver and this is exactly what I noticed. There's something the seeps into the people that live in regions with a proper 4-seasons that doesn't happen elsewhere.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by Kihashi on Thursday May 24, 2018 @10:10AM (#17144104)

> > You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.

> That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me.

Dunno about the GP, but I live in Cleveland and I spend plenty of time outside in the winter. Even here, skiing (downhill and XC), sledding, hiking, camping, and ice fishing are all doable in the winter.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by ghaff on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @11:18PM (#17140814)

If you want to pay at least double (if not triple) digit dollars per year to avoid significant snow, that is of course your choice. But there shouldn't be any expectation that everyone should be be able to do so. (Or that such would even make sense in the aggregate--not everyone can live in California.)

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by closeparen on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @11:23PM (#17140838)

Three times the US population could live in California at Hong Kong density.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by DmenshunlAnlsis on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:26AM (#17141087)

I live in Belgium, so your assumptions really couldn’t fly farther from the mark.

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by stevehawk on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:29PM (#17147427)

That's changing. My wife made me go to a restaurant in the western part of Chicago and i remember looking around at all of the names/types of stores and saying "something about this feels Silicon Valley like pretentiousn..." and the advertised apartments were expensive as hell by most people's standards..

Sure enough Google and some other big dotcoms were building or moving into the area. I want to say the Morgan area?

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Re:Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by closeparen on Thursday May 24, 2018 @09:35PM (#17149969)

Pretentious shopping is not a new phenomenon: see the Magnificent Mile. But yes, there is a tech cluster starting to appear in the West Loop (not to be confused with the much larger poor Hispanic West Side).

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