I second your experience. 3 kids, NYC. Outside of the building a street with light traffic. The back exit leads to a little park, with a nice slide and sandbox (actually 2). Within 200 meters we have literally everything: school, grocery store, cinema, pharmacy, restaurants, shopping mall, bookstore, caffe, 2 libraries (one public, one privately funded, but open to public), a ballfield, a larger park with a pretty serious playground, some quite impressive gym that has a semi-olympic pool, and where the kids can also take music lessons (piano in our case), etc, etc.

Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.