Now that I've been here for a couple years I'd be fine with a nearby (within 2km of city center) suburb, but that's only because I'm familiar enough with the city that I don't need to explore it daily. If I had started off living in those burbs I would know the city much less than I do now.

Suburbs aren't a "not the cool, trendy area of a city" thing. They are a driving thing. They are completely different towns, not other neighborhoods in the same city. It doesn't count if you can easily walk the distance every day. Think more like 20km.

I mean, really, Millenium Park in Chicago is almost 2km long. The National Mall in Washington DC is about 3km. Central Park in New York City is over 4km long.

The US is, of course, different and drastically distorted thanks to building everything for cars instead of people. Human scale "cities" aren't 60km across. I'm not even sure they deserve to be called cities, but are rather a new sort of urban-ish agglomeration.

Before moving here I lived in Santa Monica. It was about the best I could do for finding a place where I could walk to anything interesting, and even then we're talking about fairly lengthy walks. When you get around by bike, walking, and public transit your sense of scale changes drastically, and you realize that most US "cities" built since 1920 are sprawling fields of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. That being said, I'm glad I was in Santa Monica where I was at least able to cycle to a reasonable number of things, and not, say, Northridge, or another place where the parking lots are almost as big as Dublin's downtown.

This is an American/Canadian vs Australian (and possibly European) thing.

From speaking to Australians, Downtown is the Central Business District, and everything else is a suburb.

You'll probably have an easier time getting one, but you won't be paying much less. I pay €450 for a decent two-room place in a beautiful part of Kreuzberg, and it doesn't go much lower than that anywhere in Berlin.

Although if people owned the flats, the lower income senior citizens would still move: they would find it expedient to sell their now-expensive flats and put the money to living expenses (or grandchildren or travel or assisted living etc). This is happening in other growing cities around the world.

edit: It seems to me renting (or some other form of "right-of-occupancy" arrangement) is actually the desireable choice for most situations. Investing hundreds of thousands in a single unit of housing is not a good fit for most people's savings/investment plan - you'd want to diversify, and possibly hedge against things going downhill in your neighbourhood. If rent market works well, and taxation and rental terms work out, it's better for everybody to just pay for the apartment's financing and maintenance plus a small profit margin in the form of rent.

People usually buy a house or flat only when they are very good situated and are founding a family. And even then most prefer renting simply because you have to take care of less things (owning a house can be quite time consuming).

Maybe this is just a function of the facts that a city center is an expensive place to raise kids and that few aim at living in another city's suburbs; if you are moving to some suburb of another city you might as well just stay in the suburb of the city you are currently in.

Those are the areas where the interesting stuff is happening that makes moving to the city worthwhile. As for Berlin most of the startup activity and economic growth is happening in that area. In addition to that all the important government institutions are located in that area, too.

Rapid transit is an important factor as well. Inside the S-Bahn-Ring you can get around really fast whereas getting from say Köpenick to the inner city takes quite some time.

I suppose the areas around Manhattan or Greater New York as a whole would show a very similar picture.

Yeah I'd be interested in seeing similar stats for other cities.

Related interesting links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born#Miscellaneous_regi...

http://randomlylondon.com/map-other-english-borough/

If you're interested in non-Germans in Berlin, that's this map:

http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/migranten-in-berlin/

And e.g. Poles don't.

What's interesting here is the influx of new Berliners in areas like Lichtenberg and Marzahn. These were traditionally perceived as DDR remnants and full of neo-nazis.

Also what's happening in Tegeler Forst kiez?

http://www.dw.de/hypezig-the-new-start-up-zone/av-18039297

But for many countries, everybody seems to be trying to get in the capital - which is an awful dynamics.