We used to do apartment living, it sucked, especially when the neighbours kids started learning instruments.
Walking or... driving?
A 20 min drive is assuming a bit of traffic. It's not a big deal though. We are avid surfers and the kids go to "nippers" (Australian national club that gets kids into life saving and understanding the ocean).
As the kids get older, they will either drive themselves or they will get the bus to the beach if they want to hang out with their mates. The driving age here is 17 (that's when you can drive yourself). It's a semi rural area so driving or buses (good quality buses) are the norm.
When we liveed in Sydney, we used to live right next to the beach but the droves of people that come to visit ruin it a little. Where we live now, we don't get too many people coming this way other than locals which is awesome.
I mean, isn't a play room and a computer game room and even a music room just overlapping ?
The second living room has darkened walls and tints on the windows. It has a project bolted to the ceiling and a screen that rolls down for movies, smash and mario kart (my kids are still young enough to think Nintendo are the only computer games :-)
I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up.
> free events for kids, concerts just for babies,
more details?
> parks
My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have enough free space to play those kind of sports. Not to mention the walking parks and playgrounds in the suburbs are usually way bigger and less crowded.
> swimming pools
Suburbs have these too and one of my friends growing up even had their own backyard pool where we would play sharks and minnows, use the pool basketball hoop to play 21, or use the diving board. Playing the former 2 are much harder in a packed city pool then a suburban pool due to crowds, let alone a private backyard one.
> little league, soccer league, skate parks,
Had all these in the suburbs when i grew up and again, those require a lot of space which is in short supply in the city so there's almost always more available options to do these in the suburbs.
This is your problem. In a city you don't need to put yourself and your family in a deadly metallic stress machine to get places. And as a result you will feel happier and more connected.
Even in a city I am sometimes very shocked at what we put ourselves through to use a car. People constantly honking and flicking each other off with various insults and me on the sidewalk wishing they'd all calm down. (And when I used to drive too much, I was angry like them, and weighed substantially more.)
It's difficult to go anywhere without putting yourself in a "deadly metallic stress machine", whether it be a car, plane, train, boat, etc. I suppose if you have that much fear of transportation, living somewhere with ample options within walking distance is best.
Stressfulness is much more subjective. To me, city train systems are higher stress for me than the majority of the driving I do. Granted, I rarely drive in heavy traffic, which is more stressful. Since I don't encounter that while driving, I find subways more stressful since 1) I have to plan around their schedule 2) their schedules are always subject to delays 3) I have to be around strangers in close quarters and 4) you expose yourself to a higher risk of being victim to a crime
However, I have no problems riding the NYC Subway, Chicago's L, etc. when I visiting there.
There are also other ways to avoid miles besides living in a city. For example, I have a remote job, so I don't have a daily commute.
Different people have different needs, enjoy different things, and enjoy living different ways.
A packed 4-5-6 line on a sweltering summer late afternoon can be a bit of a metallic stress machine. Not deadly, at least.
I don't want to use the word virtue signaling because it's become a politically loaded term and I don't want to use it that way but your comment is just virtue signaling to the anti-car crowd.
Do you have children? I ask, because the frequency of attending these and all the other public institutions skyrockets when you have kids.
Before I had kids, it had been literally decades since I stepped foot into a public library. After we had kids, we go all the time. Same with museums, parks, pools, everything.
I’d bet that most towns and suburbs with 10,000 inhabitants have 2-4 of those, or more :-)
Well, the vast majority of families could never afford to raise a child in NYC or any other 'dense urban' area, so the decision is mostly made automatically.
You're missing qualifiers like "in the United States in recent times."
Your preconceived notions of what suburban living is like are just as inaccurate as the perceptions of city life of the person you responded to.
There were "woods" between the endless maze of houses, but all of them were just parts of other people's property. And who was I going to play with in them, except for my one nearby friend?
I ended up just playing a lot of video games.
For all that urban centers are supposedly "hostile places" (according to the GP), I look at the adults and children I know in cities and I see mostly fit, healthy, active people with multiple hobbies and interests. I look at the adults and children I know in suburbs and I see overweight, sedentary people who spend so much of their life commuting between work, school, and home, that they barely have time for more than one day of a week of something fun like an organized sport. The rest is just spent at home watching TV or playing video games.
If I do decide have children, I definitely know what kind of place I want to do it in.
We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway.
We had similar woods. We went out there and built a fort. We camped. We misbehaved. We went to the railroad tracks and put coins on the rails. We hiked a mile to a lake, carrying an inflated raft and fishing or camping gear.
Don't blame the suburb if you chose to play video games. I hear that cities also have video games.
And I bet it was uphill! Both ways!
The "woods" I mentioned were small enough that there was no point away from easy eyesight from some neighbor's living room windows. Sure, we played in them. But there was no actual sense of isolation. There were no train tracks anywhere nearby. There were some tiny lakes, but they were clearly on other people's property.
It's great that you seemed to live in somewhere more rural than me and that was an area you were able to thrive in. Still, if you look at populations of people as a whole I suspect you'll find orders of magnitude more bored and unhealthy kids (who start getting into real trouble) in suburbs than you find in cities where there are actually plenty of opportunities and things to do.
I grew up in a city of 75,000, in a house currently worth about $150k (purchased new in 1976 by my parents for $38k and sold in 1993 for $120k), on 2.5 acres. It was about 30% lawn, gardens & sports area and 70% wooded (with a creek, even!). I only had 1-2 good neighborhood friends but I did have a younger brother & sister and we were constantly outside doing something.
I think you need to think about how you define "city" and "suburb" a little more.
There is an international airport. It has seasonal flights to Ottawa, Toronto–Billy Bishop, and Windsor. Those are in Canada.
There is a professional sports team, the USSSA Pride women′s professional fast-pitch softball team. Another is the Brevard County Cocoa Expos, a member of the Women's Premier Soccer League.
There are top-rate museums. One has a Saturn V, a Space Shuttle, a Saturn 1B, the Apollo 14 Command Module, space suits, moon rocks, and related stuff. Another has the Gemini 2 spacecraft and a bunch of missiles. Another has spacesuits and Sigma 7, the fifth manned Mercury spacecraft.
I get that everyone is living the best existence out there, but c’mon people, isn’t it clear that there is no objectively better place, only places with trade offs that appeal to different folks?
I hated that move to the burbs... Nothing to do except getting kicked out of the local mall or Borders. No libraries, no parks, no pools nearby... And no public transport.
When before in the city I could just take public transport and go downtown, meet my friends, go to the library, etc..
Now that I have kids, I live in a city. But it's a quiet neighborhood, and we have a yard -- that I did appreciate from the suburbs ;-)
We don't have any metro lines but have bus and train.
Prices are reasonable because we are on the north face of a large hill and get little sun in the winter, and are not close to the downtown area.
Currently raising two kids in an urban center, and I'm excited for them to have way more opportunities than I had.
There isn't that much within safe walking distance of a suburban home. Especially now that anchor tenants and the attached malls are starting to thin out. Anecdotally when I went to college, the kids from the suburbs definitely drank and did drugs much more heavily, and I suspect it was because that's all there's left to do if you get bored of video games and whatever little is actually at your fingertips.
Suburbs are boring. I grew up in them and much of my family still lives in them. I understand why people live in them — cost and space for raising kids, but they are definitely boring. And most of the people I know that live in them wouldn’t disagree, it’s a necessity driven by cost.
I think a lot of people here think suburbia is some vast wasteland of houses as far as the eye can see. Sure, that exists in some places, but a lot of us live in vary diverse suburbs with mixed residential, retail, commercial, etc.
I also have to say I have not met anyone who lives in my area because it's cheaper :). If anything I could save a few bucks by moving closer to the urban core. Again, I'm sure the cost thing is true somewhere but America is a pretty big place.
In ages past, this had more to do with shopping than entertainment. I suspect that it will become obvious that Amazon has negated this need, partially or wholly. The only they don't sell (mostly) is groceries, which for the large part were and are available locally.
I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while having walking distance to amazing swimming (at least in summer), great nature and mountains within quick drive distance for the weekends, or where traffic jams mean usually at most 1 bottleneck street getting slow a bit twice a day for an hour. Those places are rare but they do exist.
And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).
Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.
But then again, where I grew up is very different from NY. My parents are both from NYC, and my cousins are both raising kids in the NYC area (one in the city, one in the suburbs), but my parents moved to Dallas a few years before I was born, and I grew up in Dallas but still got to visit my family in NY. NYC's strength is also the most aggravating thing about it: everything is in the city. This means that the suburbs are just bedroom communities with nothing to do. Visiting my family in Westchester has always felt like spending time out in the country. Dallas, on the other hand, is distributed and spread out. Except for a teeny tiny urban core, we're all suburb. We have edge cities everywhere instead of concentrating everything on one place. The suburbs where I grew up are also much denser than the suburbs where my cousins grew up, which helps.
One interesting study though is with my cousins in NY. They have three kids each, and both are fairly wealthy (honestly, they make more in a year than I'll ever see in my life). One of them lives in a swanky apartment on the Upper West Side, in walking distance of both Central Park and Lincoln Center. The other lives in a large house in Westchester, not far from where she grew up. I can say that, for my cousin who lives in the city, her kids have access to everything you mentioned, and she and the kids are very happy with where they live. But she's also filthy rich and is able to afford a very large apartment in a prime location. Not many people in Manhattan have that kind of privilege. Before she moved to the suburbs, my other cousin used to live in a teeny tiny two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City. When she had twins, there was pretty much no space for anything, and as soon as she got pregnant with her third kid, she and her husband immediately began looking for a house in the suburbs, and they moved right after she gave birth. It's a giant house with six bedrooms, an expansive basement, and a backyard that won't quit. She told me that while she misses her short commute, it's all worth it to give the kids a perfect environment to grow up in. And the kids certainly have no lack of anything to do: when I visited last year, the kids were all involved in multiple sports leagues and other activities. Everyone is happy with where they live.
Kids used to be able to play in the street in the city.
You have to have all these things, because the children in a city can't just run off on their own and have to be marshalled and entertained at every step. Living in the suburbs I used to just go out every day and play in the woods and hills with my friends and we entertained themselves. Hardly boring!
You have a very narrow definition of the infrastructure required to raise kids. People have been raising families in cities long before suburbs were invented.