According to Dr Francine Watkins, a researcher from Liverpool University who lived in a Home Counties hamlet for three months, villages are havens of gossip, backbiting and social exclusion.
OMFG! If Watkins' groundbreaking results stand up to scrutiny, she deserves a Nobel Prize.
The heartland *does* suck and the people are passive-aggressive and complacent. Everyone knows this.
Okay, I never really got what you all had against Ann Althouse, but this post of hers is one of the dumbest things I have ever read by anyone, ever.
Definitely, anyone annoyed by B. has serious personal problems. She's the Mary Poppins of blogtopia. How could any small town not love her?
That's precisely why I hate midwesterners. Who wants to hang out with Mary fucking Poppins?
Yes, I'd much rather hang out with someone whose hobby is annoying people.
Which I do on the internet, of course, but not on a day-to-day face-to-face basis.
And your evidence that I annoy people daily face-to-face is...?
I thought the author of the article sounded like a walking self-fulfilling prophecy. Fine, they like their knick-knacks better than your avant garde decor. They think you're a little different. Well, no wonder, your whole attitude is how different you are than them. Don't you think they dress funny when they come to the city?
It's like she expected the countryside to be like the movies with the clipclop of little ponies and discovered that people can be just as backbiting in Smallville as they can in Metropolis. This should really only be surprising if you haven't left Metropolis.
Homage to Dick Cheney and the great state of Wyoming.
9: Because all the posters work at a ski resort in Aspen. You didn't know that?
Probably because Ogged wanted people to think of grand tetons every time the commented.
I think, on the whole, they're already a bit on the defensive. Which is a little bit of the problem, and which I don't know that we should be making worse.
And your evidence that I annoy people daily face-to-face is...?
Shucks, I just posted on this very topic on the Degrees of Separation thread, but I will add this: Annoyance at B, which I think we can all agree must be widespread, undoubtedly reflects more poorly on the annoyed than it does on B.
8. In the third act, she is accepted into the local community by marrying the squire, who had disguised himself as the local smithy to woo her.
disguised himself as the local smithy
Gluing all that half-timbering to his forehead was a bitch.
17: Seriously. I think the myth that the heartland is full of good-hearted people who are the salt of the earth (well, short, square, and bad for your health, maybe) needs to be punctured, but the article's just ridiculous. These country people are so horrible! Surely I would not be groped in a bar in the city! No one is ever judgmental in Metropolis.
More cynically, people are basically bastards. They're just bastards about different things depending on where they are.
Unfogged is on Mountain Time because the Mountain Time Zone is better than all the other ones. I mean, come on.
Cala's right; the article's pretty terrible.
22: Whatever it takes to make backwards-ass country folks feel special, that's what we're all about.
It's funny, after having been to New Mexico, I get these very vivid little pictures of the landscape there every time you mention it. It was just so odd looking by my standards -- all those weird little puffy bushes polkadotting all over the place, and the little canyony gullies.
The rocks come in teal. NM is not on our planet.
I didn't say it was a good disguise.
How many people really buy that myth, anyway? People have been puncturing it for a long time -- in this cheery little novel, for example.
all those weird little puffy bushes polkadotting all over the place, and the little canyony gullies
Those would be sagebrush and washes, respectively.
It's funny, after having been to New Mexico, I get these very vivid little pictures of the landscape there every time you mention it. It was just so odd looking by my standards -- all those weird little puffy bushes polkadotting all over the place, and the little canyony gullies.
What? Your place is odd. All that ... green everywhere all the time? Who planted that? Green here! Green there! Grass by the side of the road, with the lovely Queen Ann's Lace? Who planted that? Why so wasteful with the water and the green!
How did she escape the roving balloon enforcers to make it back to the metropolis?
Wait, we weren't talking about The Village?
Those would be sagebrush and washes, respectively.
Arroyos, hombrecito.
28: In my experience, they tend to believe it about themselves. They might not be as fancy as New York, but they're decent and nicer and more honest.
Nobody reads books, Jesus. One of the major papers or mags would have to puncture it. And I agree that the article is bad, but if I had said so, we'd be on comment 235 of "but he grabbed her breast" by now.
Here in my home town they had a charity dinner to buy a new liver for the shiftless town drunk. Pretty nice, no? We don't cotton to outsiders younger than 60, though. Retirees are OK.
You can call it defensiveness, but one true fact about small towns is that there aren't a lot of good reasons to go to them if you don't have business or family there. So outsiders are suspect.
Everyone is part of the town, which you see vividly when a kid is killed in an accident or a war. It affects everyone, even if they didn't know him.
At the same time, the breakup of a marriage creates a ripple effect and a gap too, so people don't want that to happen.
As long as you fit in, there's a lot to like about small town America.
Oh, bullshit, ogged. There is more to this blog than disagreeing with you all kneejerkily. There are also swimming posts.
The thing that kills me is that, because everything you do or say will be remembered for 60 years, people are very cautious. Things I did in 1967 (before you people were born) are fresh in may people's minds, though often inaccurately so.
The possibility of anonymity in city is wonderful. If you screw up, you can just stop going to that particular bar.
38: As long as you fit in, there's a lot to like about cities.
Oh, wait. Here's the corresponding urban myth. We're so much more tolerant! Unless you have kids. Or are fat. Or aren't up on whatever the latest dumbass trend is. You might be wearing Tevas.
What I mean is, fitting in solves most small town problems (unless you're afflicted by boredom). But it doesn't solve big city problems, like the noise, traffic, pollution, etc.
43: Depends what city. And probably which coast.
It doesn't solve the problem of the 'good restaurant' being T.G.I. Fridays. Or the fact that you need a car to get anywhere.
What I mean is, fitting in solves most small town problems (unless you're afflicted by boredom).
Well, yes, in the sense that a lobotomy solves a lot of problems. There are places where you don't want to fit in, and in my experience, small-town America is in that category.
fitting in solves most small town problems
Mmmm, the odor of a hog farm.
It's not that cities have much magic power, it's that there are a lot of different subgroups there, and you can usually find one or two into which you fit. That's harder in smaller places. Of course, I can imagine that it matters less if you have a spouse and kids.
Cities have their own problems. Like Iranians.
I confess a bias here, as I lived in a small town until fourth grade, and absolutely loved it. I probably wouldn't be so keen on it nowadays, though it might yet be good to raise kids there.
Iranians have their own problems, like Indians and The Man.
I will say that, having returned to civilization, I miss having stars at night.
Well, the people in our small town are no more racist or small minded than LB's Swede from the other thread. Provincial, maybe.
Depends on the small town, too. Some places have more hog farms than others.
Bah on it being good to raise kids in teh countryside. It's great for little kids, who can run and explore and make messes, but once they get older it sucks. And it doesn't teach them how to get along with people who are different too well, or how to deal with novelty, or how to eat sushi.
City raised kids are the worst. We need some sort of Maoist program for them.
it doesn't teach them how to get along with people who are different too well
Sure it does. Who are the people who are most different from you, and presumably, from your kid? Small town white people, that's who. Anyway, not all small towns are so homogeneous.
I grew up in small towns and the countryside, and it didn't suck. Helps to have a city not too far away, sure, but city living can suck plenty too.
Most small towns are pretty homogeneous. And you forget that we spent the last three years of PK's life living in a small white town. And that some of PK's very own relatives are small town white people. So there.
My future in-laws are a bunch of rednecks (so is shivbunny) and when I visit, yes, the old farmer's wife down the way gives me lots of homemade jam. They beam with pride: "Bet you don't get fresh bread and homemade jam back East." I smile. Surely not, the smile implies. "Do all you Americans think we live in igloos?"
My future father-in-law, to shivbunny: Your girl looks American. Shivbunny blinks. Well, she has a narrow face, like the girls on CSI.
"Provincial" is a good word for most small towns. Most of the people, were they transplanted to a big city, would do just fine. It's that their experiences of ways of not being in Smallville is very limited, so whatever they believe pretty much comes off the TV. Hence my mother being convinced that you can't walk in New York what with all the terrorists knocking builidings over and then stealing your wallet.
43: Or like some band that sucks or used to be good before they sold out.
Allow me to introduce a tangential observation: your cities may open doors to larger worlds and your small towns may nurture, or vice versa, but your small cities will nearly kill you with the ineluctable power of their suckitude. They have all the problems of cities (poor people, pollution, corrupt public officials, shoddy schools and libraries) and none of the advantages (new people, interesting jobs, university hospitals).
OTOH, to be fair, New Yorkers are often terribly provincial. "There's no place like New York!" Yeah, yeah, I like where I live too.
Small towns and the countryside have poor people too. In fact, I think they have more of 'em, as a proportion of population, than cities.
64: I believe that there's been a study to the effect that small cities and exurbs are the real core of the right wing. Fargo and St. Cloud here are Republican, Minnespolis sent a black Muslim to Congress.
Duluth actually still has relics of the old Left. That particular area is pretty far left for the middle of nowhere.
Emerson, are you in city or a small town? Because I'm taking the other side.
In my experience, New Yorkers are the most provincial people in America.
69: How wide is your experience?
Arroyos, hombrecito.
Around here, at least, arroyos are great big concrete things. The terminology is likely different in the rural areas LB's talking about, though.
Y'know what cities have that small towns don't? Jews. I think I'd be highly uncomfortable living in a very small town, if only because I've been lucky enough in my life never to be the only Jew anywhere.
70: Pretty wide, I'd say. Despite my youth.
I admit that my experience of the Midwest and South is pretty limited.
I think I'd be highly uncomfortable living in a very small town, if only because I've been lucky enough in my life never to be the only Jew anywhere.
This is interesting, because I've always like that only-Jew-in-town feeling, which I have experienced a lot of.
Kind of boring to have a pogrom with only one Jew.
The most rustic and conservative area around here has a Chinese pastor's wife (Lutheran). The kid I saw looks Chinese. A son of the family went to MIT.
Minnesota makes conscious efforts to keep rural areas from becoming isolated and stupid. The churches here are mostly more cosmopolitan than the people.
68: I'm taking the small town side. I am fully aware of the anti-small-town side, but my own experiences have been almost all good.
I think, on the whole, they're already a bit on the defensive. Which is a little bit of the problem, and which I don't know that we should be making worse.
This is exactly wrong. Civilized people could fix 90% of what is wrong with America if they abandoned the desire to be polite to the yokels and started confonting their bullshit. The creationist, superstitious, fundamentalist, war-mongering, authoritarian-leaning interior of this country understands that the reluctance of decent folk to offend them is a powerful tool for promoting their anti-American agenda.
I get a chuckle every time TL Leech discusses political correctness as though various genuinely oppressed groups are the main beneficiaries of America's culture of grievance.
Fuck the crackers, I say. If they want to reap the fruits of being part of a great civilization, it's time they started contributing.
I am fully aware of the anti-small-town side, but my own experiences have been almost all good.
I think "John Emerson" is actually a pseudonym for Garrison Keillor.
It's true that rural areas are generally more homogeneous than cities, but they're not necessarily whiter. In the Southwest, at least, many rural areas are overwhelmingly Hispanic. And then there are the Indian reservations.
Depends what city. And probably which coast.
Makes me wonder how you're defining "city," B.
L brings up an interesting point (in my mind anyway). How are people defining small town and small city. I always wonder if people from the large urban areas define those different then someone from the say the Midwest.
One interesting thing about these debates is where suburbs fall. Depending on how people define "city" and "small town," they could qualify as either.
if people from the large urban areas define those different then someone from the say the Midwest.
again...
Teo is right. New Yorkers are unbelievably provincial.
Huh. I don't think a proper suburb can count as a small town.
Gaijin Biker's #3 may have seemed off-topic, but only because he didn't explicitly point out that Althouse lives in Madison, Wis.
Hey, has anybody read The Averaged American? It's all about how polls and surveys became a major force in the U.S. I'm asking because it opens with an extended section on the Lynd study of Muncie, Indiana, which became "Middletown", and how its residents did/did not like the idea that they were stand-ins for "normal Americans" everywhere.
(I have only skimmed it, myself.)
I like smallish cities, especially if they are city-suburbs of a larger city. Providence, for example. And Berkeley, for that matter, though it is both blessed and afflicted by its Berkeleyness. College towns are different from similarly-sized towns or tiny cities with no colleges in them -- and if the college or is of some narrowish genre (say, a Seventh-Day Adventist college or a Super Hippie college) that will make a big difference too.
85: Yeah, there are sizable swaths of the country that don't have much of anything I would consider an actual small town. Sprawl isn't a town. The small towns and medium-sized towns I am actually most familiar with are English (Suffolk), so that skews my perceptions, for sure. Plus I only ever stayed in any of them for a few months at a time, and mainly as a kid.
A bunch of my friends from NYC don't know the difference between Nassau & Suffolk counties (the two counties on Long Island). A couple did not know & would not believe that Brooklyn was actually on Long Island.
I'm very much a city girl, but dude, that article sucks. (And that town is lovely--English small towns have it all over North American ones, aesthetically speaking).
In order to win public esteem in Verrières, the essential is never to adopt, though you build ever so many walls, any design brought from Italy by those masons who in springtime come through the passes of the Jura on their way to Paris. Such an innovation would give the rash builder an undying reputation for wrongheadedness, and he would be ruined forever in those circles of solid and conservative citizens who grant respectability in Franche-Comté.
The influence of the solid citizen there is, in fact, one of the most irksome kinds of despotism imaginable. Because of this wretched word, life in a small town is unbearable for anyone who has lived in that great republic we call Paris. The tyranny of opinion (and what an opinion!) is just as stupid in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
my own experiences have been almost all good.
That is exactly why I am taking the anti-small town side. Would they rob us of our poet of No Relationships, and so consign us to matching and mating? They would. The smug, unfeeling bastards.
Garrison Keillor is, in fact coming to my home town in August. To all intents and purposes I live exactly in Lake Wobegon.
Small towns and the cuntry tend to be conservative, but I'm convinced that the real weight of the Limbaugh constituency is exurban, suburban, and small-cityish. Actual rural people are only 10% of the population or so.
I'd put the rural-urban cutoff somewhere around 20,000 people 50,000 would be way too high. I suppose that you could devise a "non-urban" category for people who don't live in megalopolises, e.g. in Omaha or Macon.
In my experience, New Yorkers are the most provincial people in America.
You should visit Portland. Our provincialism beats their provincialism.
93: I have interpreted Madame Bovary as a small-town American girl who fantasizes about suave, elegant princes with mustaches.
Portland is exactly like New York, except smaller.
And exactly like Fargo, except bigger.
From the New York and LA perspective, what size of city is Chicago or Washington? I like those -- second cities? Whatever you would call them -- a lot. But I'm pretty sure I'd hate, say, Phoenix.
I think how y'all are defining "city," "small city," "suburb," etc., is important here. (Especially CJB, what's your idea of urban and/or Midwestern such that someone from e.g. Chicago or St. Louis wouldn't be both?) Because it seems to me that you're defining "urban" based on what you perceive as its advantages (diversity, public transportation, whatever), and then arguing from there that urban is superior.
I don't think that it's entirely representative of English country life. She described it as a horsey place. The kind of village she's describing is in an incredibly expensive area. I've been in the Cotswolds in an overly-twee area, and you get nasty looks from people for not conforming. I only really know the Southwest of England, and I haven't had that experience.
I think that a similar story could be written by someone about some of the old towns turned suburbs around here. Concord, MA has a lovely town center, but West Concord is just a suburb. A lot of the people--people who would never bother to read Throeau or Emerson--are insufferable about how important their town.
I could totally imagine someone who wanted to get away from the city, to go for long walks etc. who found out that she hated it, because there are a lot of Republicans who drive SUVs. There are also some interesting peopel there, but in a lot of ways, it's a prettified image of country. (The last guy with a farm split it up and sold it for millions. There really aren't poor people there. Rural Maine and parts of New Hampshire are very different.)
According to Wikipedia,
NYC: City population 8,143,198; metro pop. 18,818,536
LA: City pop. 4,018,080; metro pop. 12,923,548
Chicago: City pop. 2,873,790; metro pop. 9,505,748
Atlanta: City pop. 483,108; metro pop. 5,138,223
SF: City pop. 744,041; metro pop. 4,180,027
Would Boston even register? Boston itself is tiny. Even the urban core is actually Cambridge/Boston. Brooklien kind of shades into being the burbs, but parts of it are kind of urban.
SF: City pop. 744,041; metro pop. 4,180,027
I wonder how long until it's known as the San Jose metropolitan area. In any case, many of the South Bay "suburbs" are extremely diverse.
If you start defining your terms, you take all the damn fun out of hating. Size is one way to measure cityness, but cosmopolitanism might be more important. Boston is more of a city, to my way of thinking, than Indianapolis.
There are 25 US metropolitan areas with populations more than 2 million. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Portland OR, Pittsburgh, and Denver are the five smallest. Close to half the US population lives in these 25 areas (about 130 million).
105 is why us heartlanders think coastal urbanites are assholes. Minneapolis IS TOO urban dammit!
Teo, most arroyos are not lined with concrete. Back in my day, that was even true in Albuquerque.
Boston M. A. is #11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_metropolitan_area
Charlottesville used to be, according to Frommer's, the #1 place to live in the US. We've since slipped to #17, due largely to rising housing costs. But my rent for the coming year is $270/month, and I can bike or take free public transportation just about anywhere in "downtown." Hop in a car, and in twenty minutes I could be on top of a mountain, at a vineyard, or at a swimming hole.
You should all just move here. Except don't, lest the housing costs to rise further with your influx.
Huh, that wikipedia page implies that San Jose gets its own measure.
Minneapolis IS TOO urban dammit!
Minneapolis is a hidden jewel, young L. Seriously, way better than Indy.
I should shut about about Indianapolis, since I've never been there. But I grew up in Illinois, and I'm pretty sure Indiana is 100% fucking wasteland.
Everyone should really live in Pittsburgh. It's a great city that still thinks it has more people than it does.
99, 105: I'm not sure if it's cosmopolitanism or pedestrian friendliness, but Chicago and NY and Boston are all the same type of thing. DC is a different thing.
NY, Chicago, and Boston, you can walk for hours and you're in one neighborhood to an entirely different neighborhood and you never leave a real streetfront with retail and sidewalks. DC, every time I've tried to walk anyplace I find myself navigating through block after block after block of the back side of institutional buildings -- I can't picture wandering around DC without a destination.
On the provincialism front, of course we're provincial. Everyone else in the country turns the TV on and has their horizons broadened by seeing the fascinating far off big city. We turn the TV on and see NY, where we live already.
The primary census statistical area list looks a bit different than the metropolitan statistical area list.
There are 97 SMAs bigger than 500,000 people. I'd say that none of them are rural. There are 381 bigger than 100,000 people. I really couldn't call them rural either.
Whatever the problem with this country is, it's not country people. There just aren't very many.
The problem with your escapade in 117, LB, is that DC's neighborhoods are broken up by either giant institutional office buildings or horrible urban blight. You could walk from Silver Spring down 16th Street through the U St. corridor to Howard University if you wanted, but if you didn't know what you were doing you'd get mugged or accosted by a lobbyist, which I believe was one of the obstacles faced in the Odyssey. DC isn't as clustered as Boston or NYC.
83 is responding to a comment I didn't make. Not that I'm not proud to be the resident person-who-makes-comments-that-must-be-challenged.
I *think* Seattle's population is under 2 mil, but I'd classify it as a city. And you can't *quite* make "cosmopolitan" your measure of city-ness; there are plenty of central valley (small) cities under 500,000 that have tons and tons of immigrants.
Does 121 imply that tons and tons of immigrants are sufficient for city-ness?
I actually live in Fargo, ND so my idea of small town is if I stand at one end of main street I can see all the way to the other side of town. I am not sure if Fargo itself ranks as a small city or a large town. NYC has ten times the number of people as then entire state of ND so I assume that tends to skew ones view point on size.
It implies that you can have cosmopolitan non-cities.
On the NBC news tonight, Brian Williams kicked off a segment saying, roughly, "Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg: three presidential contenders, all from New York. Let's see what they think about that… in America."
120: That's the thing that makes DC, I'm not going to say not a real city, but not the same thing NY and Boston and Chicago are. San Francisco is like NY, and from a short visit I'd say Cinncinati is too. I don't know LA at all, or really any other American cities. (I was in Indianapolis once for a wedding, and it was spooky. All these big wide flat streets with hardly any cars on them.
The largest city in my Congressional district (Moorhead, a suburb of Fargo) has 28,000 people.
Hi, CJB. I've been telling people that in ND you can buy a livable house for $10,000 or so. Don't make a liar out of me.
125: We're not happy about it.
As a New Yorker, I say city has nothing to do with size, it's density and sidewalks. It has to be big enough that you can wander around without accidentally wandering out of it, but anything that big can be a city if it has sidewalks and streetfront retail.
127: NYC is a thing to itself, and a fantastic thing at that. (It's just possible Chicago is similar, but I've not spent any time there worth mentioning.) SF is more like DC (or, better, maybe Boston) than NYC, and LA--from my limited experience--is basically Bladerunner-in-waiting.
Is there really some perspective according to which Seattle (or Boston, or Portland) isn't a city? I'd put places such as Burlington, VT and Portland, ME toward the upper limit of small cities, and they still sprawl for miles.
City politics in DC are also really weird, because so many of the young professionals who live there choose not to vote there. "DC is so democratic; my vote doesn't count." Well, maybe not for President, but for mayor it does.
City politics is tiny. I have friends who got active and got on the DC "State" democratic Committee just by showing up to enough meetings. In Boston it would take a very long time or a lot of money to get involved in anything.
Wards in Boston are tiny little places, and ward committtees do very little. In DC, you get an entire council person.
I love DC, but it's a very gossipy place, and local government is all about being popular and who your friends are.
Timbot lives in Timbotia (rhymes with Nova Scotia), an abandoned oil rig in the Caribbean.
Having spent some time in SF and DC and visited NY, the only way SF is more like DC than NY is that no one is "from" either place. SF is also pretty damn small as cities go, especially once you consider the multiple almost completely disjoint populations within it.
SF/Berkeley are similar to Boston/Cambridge except that the weather in the Bay Are is so much nicer. The suburbs of the Bay Area are *really* different from their Massachusetts' equivalents.
138: Standpipe lives always already everywhere.
139: Them's the two I was thinking of.
Manhattan/Brooklyn&Queens, too. There's something basically right about organizing a city with a downtown across the water from a slighly less dense residential area.
God, LB and her New York boosterism. Hell on Earth, I tell you!
128: I don't know that a town of 100,000 can have suburbs per say. I also think $10,000 would be a little cheap for Fargo, but I bet there are places in ND where that is true.
I also require validation of Atlanta, Ogged, before I am mollified. Urban and Real America (tm).
I'm happy here. If none of the rest of you come and clog up Times Square, I'm just as happy. And I like cities generally. NY, good; Boston, good; Chicago, good. I'm sure there's another ten or so American cities at least I'd be happy in, and if I had better language skills, dozens more overseas.
The way to find the bargains is to drive around looking for abandoned houses. Realtors do not handle $20,000 homes.
You're just too fucking nice, LB. Hate on something, wouldja?
I also require validation of Atlanta, Ogged, before I am mollified.
What I've seen of Atlanta was ok; some very pretty areas. If there's a city center, I missed it. Plus: hot.
John, it says that house was built in 1000. And it has one bathroom for four bedrooms. What?
Whatever the problem with this country is, it's not country people. There just aren't very many.
The problem isn't with the number of them. The problem is with the influence of them. Check out the composition of the Sentate and the Electoral College if you don't believe me.
And it has one bathroom for four bedrooms
My coming-year's housing arrangement features one bathroom for four people. But two of them are married, so they probably don't have sex and thus don't need to shower as often.
The place I'm currently living has one bathroom for four persons.
People in ND are more continent than you and your kinky friends, Ogged. You'd have to give up the golden showers.
PF: yeah, its true of the "square states" in the middle. But even they aren't truly rural. At least half the people in ND live in SMAs bigger than 50,000.
There are four persons living in my present dwelling, which is a bathroom.
There are four bathrooms on my person. Right. This. Very. Minute.
I can't picture wandering around DC without a destination.
JF Kennedy was right about DC's charm and its efficiency, but even in its oppressive heat, I try to get out every day and walk around without a destination. On a long lunch, I can get to the Lincoln Memorial, and on a really long lunch, I can hit the Jefferson Memorial.
Yesterday, I photographed some bearded, hatted Jews (Hasidic Jews, I think) picketing against Zionism and the Jewish State in Lafayette Park in front of the White House.
I'm not a DC partisan at all - I think I'd prefer New York, Boston, LA, or even my hometown of Cleveland. And San Francisco is simply the best place I've ever been or even heard of. But DC really is a very nice place to wander aimlessly.
Atlanta has some nice neighborhoods, but a lot of it is traffic + provincial. Awful combination.
I don't understand LB's problem with walking in DC. I can walk from my house to Chevy Chase, or to Georgetown, or anywhere in between (the zoo, say) and it will have seemed a city all the way. Now if I'm going to cross Rock Creek, I'll have to pick a bridge, but then if I go east either from Georgetown or Cleveland Park (into Adams Morgan) it won't have become some kind of institutional hell.
I've been in DC very little but my times there have mostly involved walking. This is true both of the times I went there in college to march on the White House, and the time I went there last year and strolled around a lot.
Plus: hot.
I'm as far south as I will ever be willing to live, for that very reason.
Looking at the Primary Census list, the smallest place anyone here would accept as non-rural is the Madison,WI, area, pop 600,000. But it's a college town. Above Madison, New Orleans and Honolulu might be acceptable for multicultural reasons. At 2 million, Portland OR, #26, might be the smallest place anyone here would want to live in.
If you say that anyone living in a PC unit smaller than 2 million is rurla, the US is indeed ruled by hicks.
There was a neighborhood across the bay called Brooklyn for a while in the 19th century but it got consolidated into Oakland. There were also some attempts to set up a NY-style borough system around the turn of the century but they fell through. And the process of building the skyscrapers after 1960 in SF was frequently referred to as Manhattanization. But that's just history stuff.
It's not true that Chicago doesn't have zones of warehousey nothingness. It absolutely does. You just have to go in the right directions (often this means not along the CTA lines).
163: ND, on the average, is not at all hot, but it does reach 100+ in the summer. ND weather is a good lesson in how not to aggregate.
I don't understand LB's problem with walking in DC.
I find DC very walkable, but it's true that if you start off in, say, Capital Hill or, I don't know, Brentwood, and head off in the right direction, you can find yourself in the midst of auto parts nothingness. North Capital and Rhode Island Ave, say, both have some of that kind of nothingnesses going on.
Crossing the country recently, the coolest place I went through was Los Angeles.
Before ogged got all sentimental about rural America, he wrote this:
I would dearly love for a reporter to spend some time in the American "heartland" and say that it sucks and the people are close-minded and petty.
But this has been done. Back when journalists used to know what to do with freedom of the press, H.L. Mencken wrote things like this about William Jennings Bryan:
"Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards."
I still want someone to do it, because I think it would be salutary. We need contemporary bile.
Hai! Im in ur placez. Bylin' ur contemporaneiteez.
Folks, there's a difference between a city (place where lots of people live) and urban development (dense, walkable, etc.). They don't always go together.
Oh, I totally know what LB means about D.C.:
--The buildings around the mall in D.C. (once you get out past the Smithsonian) are not pedestrian friendly at all. Big granite institutional buildings that take up the better part of a block, and no damn place to get a bite to eat. A distinct lack of ground level retail.
--Part of that is that these are gov't buildings with metal detectors at the entrance & interior cafeterias. But part of it is the height restriction. Giant office buildings can't go up, so they have to go OUT--which results both in more boring monolithic architecture ("every building here looks like a parking garage", I remember saying when I first visited) & a far less dense & walkable central business district than New York or Chicago.
--The high rises get pushed to certain suburbs, like Arlington. But, they got built after our architecture took a turn for the worse; and they are surrounded by parking lots and sprawl rather than sidewalks; and they are deserted and creepy at night even in perfectly safe areas.
--A lot of the city is just plain unsafe. There are also areas that are fine during the day but weirdly empty at night.
--There are nice, safe, pretty walkable residential areas that are about the density of Brooklyn, Boston, & Chicago neighborhoods. But, as far as I can tell, there aren't that many of them, & some of them aren't even convenient to the Metro.
A bracing hit of contemporary bile.
Also, the diagonal streets I guess keep traffic moving, but they result in a grid that feels to a New Yorker like it was designed for cars and not pedestrians--all the blocks feel too long, & you're always stuck waiting for some light to change. (In my case this is worsened by the fact that not only do I not remember which state-named-avenue is which, but they also somehow always seem to lead me to confuse which direction are the lettered streets & which are the numbered ones. But I'm pretty sure that's just idiocy on my part & not so much D.C.'s fault. It does go to show how idiot-proof most of Manhattan & Chicago are, though).
Chicago's diagonal streets don't bother me the same way for some reason (though the intersections where three streets come together are damn annoying).
DC feels like it was designed to be seen from the air (which it sort of was). It's walkable, but not very. And it seems institutional because it is; it was built to house government office buildings, and they dominate the landscape to an unpleasant degree. Plus all the stuff Katherine said in 175.
Los Angeles is all right. Someday we'll have a meetup and discuss.
Also, I'm with Megan and teo. I'm jealous of my friends that just have sagebrush in their yards. I've always had a longterm plan to join them by just not watering my grass, but move too often for it to work.
Haven't there been a couple of LA meetups?
181: Some of our neighbors have really nice xeriscaped yards. I should take some pictures.
Ooh, xeriscaping. Everyone out West: grow agave. Make tequila. Send it east. We'll have a meet-up and blog all about it
So basically, plant stuff that works with the amount of rain you have?
Pretty much. You generally still have to water, but not as much.
Ridiculous opinions follow.
Boston is a real city, but crap. The city itself certainly qualifies for cityhood, but only by virtue of its density. Low quality ethnic food (would it kill anyone to open up a decent taqueria?), no real local music scene, and the public transport is shoddy at best. Outside the city (Boston/cambridge/dorchester etc) things degenerate quickly. You get nasty sprawl (natick, rt. 9) and enclaves of privilege (weston, concord). And Mass folk are racist and no mistake: never in a blue state have I seen such ethnic division by town lines. MA has its good points: the Sox and Pats give us a communal joy I've not experienced since the '89 A's, and I almost come every time I enter a public library, but as a city, compared to NY or SF Boston comes up pretty short.
Hello from 30 years in DFW. I don't even know what a city is anymore.
Not just malls & strip malls and minimalls, at least in the blue collar to upper middle class areas I walk around there are corner shops and restaurants. I have no sense of a center or centers to any of the dozens of suburban cities I cruise around. Each city has neighborhoods and industrial parks and recreation areas. DFW has grown unevenly, with vast patches of undeveloped forest and field surrounded by development.
DFW is huge and spread out and unplanned. I like it, but there is no city here. 10 million people, but no city.
Wow. Now I feel lucky to live in New England.
188: the ethnic food's not bad. Just the Mexican food.
Boston and Chicago could learn from each other food-wise. Chicago has better cheap-o places & better fancy places but is sometimes thin in the middle range, which is exactly what Boston was best at. Chicago's Mexican food is so much better it's ridiculous, but the Asian food is worse (though Chinatown itself I think is better in Chicago).
The green line is ludicrous. I also don't know why they can't come up with more than 12 street names (does every town need its own Harvard Street, Beacon St., Cambridge Street, Brookline Street, & Essex St? Really?). But I was happier there, I miss it.
The greatest town in New England is Bennington, VT.
108: While I realize most arroyos are not concrete, they are still man-made, and probably not what LB was referring to. I'm actually not quite sure what she was referring to, as washes are really more characteristic of the Colorado Plateau than the Sangre de Cristos; maybe she just meant the way the rivers look.
The LA meetups have been smallish, and it's been a while. Maybe *some* people up north oughta be as willing to travel as their southern neighbors.
McManus lives in David Foster Wallace?
Portland, OR is a minor-league city by and large, but food, music scene, public transport, urban planning -- all excellent. My sympathies, bob, DFW is among the ghastliest places I've ever been.
Re: arroyos -- since when are arroyos not the same thing as washes? Except these Arroyos, of course.
192: The street name logic is as follows: Cambridge St. goes to Cambridge, Boston St. goes to Boston. Commerce demands that every town have a road into Boston, so you get innumerable Boston Sts. The real problem starts when you get outside the city where town lines are small, so Bedford Rd changes into Concord St when you cross the city line.
Re: ethnic food: Perhaps I was unnecessarily harsh. Portuguese and Italian places are certainly more than decent here. But the problem goes beyond the absence of Mexicans: New Englanders are fundamentally conservative. My (50odd year old) mom cannot get a dish served even moderately spicy. Waiters here have been conditioned such that they equate delivering a middle aged woman a spicy meal with a zero tip. When I go out with my folks, I order the spicy food,explicitly asking for maximum heat, and then switch with my mom. Actual dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders would never do such a thing. People would talk.
Suddenly I feel compelled to defend Boston (or at least Cambridge), but I feel like being on mountain time right this minute (to drink beer, yay!) disqualifies me.
When I was in high school I lived in highly rural america, and it was not an accident that every school I seriously considered was in a major city. I have yet to feel like I want to go back, despite the horror of $400k for a 800sf condo in my chosen area.
Also, I hear other cities have street addresses that relate to cross street numbers. At UnfoggeDCon, I realized, once I was there, that 13xx <redacted> St. meant that that it was between 13th and 14th St.. That kind of logic and planning has no place in my world.
since when are arroyos not the same thing as washes?
In Albuquerque, at least, arroyos are artificial drainage ditches (and though this was apparently not always the case, they are now lined with concrete). In rural areas they are smaller and made of dirt, and it now occurs to me that the same word is probably used for natural runoff channels in Spanish-speaking areas, which are called "washes" in the English-speaking areas that I am more familiar with.
Go ahead, defend Boston, I want to like it, but I don't. For instance, where are all the gay people? Back home I could see gay guys happy with each other. Here, it's a guessing game. Are those guys playfully punching each other because they're flirting, or is it some trustie thing? I don't think I've seen a single openly gay man since I've been here.
Dude, if you think Boston's bad, wait until you see the rest of the country.
198: I don't buy it. A lot of those streets are about three blocks long. And the street that goes from Cambridge to Allston isn't Allstone St., it's Memorial drive. etc.
Are you sure you're not just missing the gay guys in Boston because they wear clothes that gay guys in Manhattan would never be caught in? Fleeces & the like?
Seriously, I've never seen any neighborhood outsie NY where it's quite like the Village or Chelsea as far as obviously gay couples (I've not been to S.F.)--my neighborhood in Chicago is really close to the Pride parade route, & yet you don't see that. But you certainly live in the least homophobic state in the country.
Cambridge was so psyched about gay marriage that it kicked off at midnight. And there's Provincetown, of course.
Ahem... Two or three things about that article from the Daily Mail:
Firstly, cute villages in England are in acute economic crisis because of people like this woman - metro types who fancy the good life are pushing property prices to insane levels and causing serious homelessness among the locals, who, being for the most part very low paid, working seasonally, can't compete. This does not make incomers popular. (This does not excuse the kind of behaviour she encountered, but it offers a context.)
Secondly, there is nothing to do in many English villages except heroin. Rural youth have seen their public transport cut off due to government policies and many of them can't afford to run cars. So they're virtually imprisoned in their no-hope communities, and bad, unfashionable drugs are endemic. She doesn't seem to have noticed, possibly because she doesn't seem to have spoken to anybody under 40.
Thirdly, at the other end of the spectrum, there are actually picturesque villages which make a virtue from their snobbery - not far from the city I live in, there's a place where if you want to buy a house they have a village meeting to decide if you're suitable. The rural rich remain staggeringly rich, whether they're in agribusiness or just retired stockbrokers, and they are trying to turn their villages into gated communities.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for this woman. Except at the remote edges, nowhere in England is less than an hour from a decent sized city. She should stop whining - if she's tired of London, let her go to Bristol.
Except at the remote edges, nowhere in England is less than an hour from a decent sized city.
Assuming "less" s/b "more," that's a hell of a small country you've got there.
I mean, there are parts of the US where it's more than an hour from one small town to the next.
Teo, yes it's a hell of a small country. It fits a 50 million people into 50 thousand square miles. I doubt there is any region if the United States you could compare it to in that sense.
Although, there are still bits of it with an alpine/montane ecology, and other bits where you need to take a night train to get there..
Anyway, the silly bitch from the Mail (the second implies the first, I'm sorry to say - if you work for a paper as awful as that you're responsible for it) seems to have missed that Dr Watkins went to a "Home Counties hamlet".
This means somewhere in the rich belt 50 or so miles around London, so she was in fact in a posh suburb with occasional rich landlords.
Firstly, cute villages in England are in acute economic crisis because of people like this woman - metro types who fancy the good life are pushing property prices to insane levels and causing serious homelessness among the locals, who, being for the most part very low paid, working seasonally, can't compete.
ahhhh, my old friend the rural property prices argument, you have stayed with me my whole life like a favourite teddy bear ...
Cause and effect are being brutally confused here. The economic crisis is not being caused by house prices rising. The problem that the local people have is that their incomes are too low, rather than their houses are too expensive. The levels of house prices in the countryside are not insane; it's the levels of rural incomes that are insane. This matters because every rural community (Wales has been here ...) goes down about a million dead ends of rinky-dink "local preference", "affordable housing" etc etc schemes before they finally come to their senses and realise that you can't make yourself rich by reducing property prices. The only solution is a general economic development program, which includes welcoming incomers.
In related news, the following statements of regional economic policy are not true: "You can't base an entire local economy on tourism", "Holiday houses don't contribute anything to the local economy", "It's impossible to make money out of farming".
(I have also had occasion to comment in the past that "families who have been in the same place for hundreds of years" are in a large part of the bloody problem, but maybe not this time).
[This means somewhere in the rich belt 50 or so miles around London, so she was in fact in a posh suburb with occasional rich landlords]
Oh I don't know, Bedfordshire has some pretty go iawn rural poverty.
other bits where you need to take a night train to get there..
In England, Alex? Scotland, certainly, Wales maybe..
Dsquared, I'm not convinced it actually matters too much which way round you put the cause and effect. Rural house prices (round these parts anyway) tend to parity with the nearest big city (Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester), presumably driven as much as anything by crap planning in said cities. Rural wages are scandalous largely because of the sectors they're concentrated in (apart from agri, it's mainly light industry, which is alway one step up from chattel slavery, even in cities). I'd have thought you'd need to address both sides of the question largely independently.
Oh, and the way to deal with families who have been in the same place for hundreds of years is to enclose their commons, burn their cottages, and ship them to America on seven year indentures. So let's hear any more of this immigration reform nonsense from our colonial cousins.
Yes, but wages are crap in post-industrial towns too. There isn't a special problem of rural incomes over and above the general problem of post-industrial redevelopment (the industry in this case being agriculture). The whole house price issue is a distraction from that problem - imagine if someone had decided that what Widnes needed was really really cheap houses. We learned this one in Wales the hard way.
The big problems in getting rational solutions adopted for rural redevelopment is:
1. They have a case of machismo much worse than even in heavy industry - after 20 years since Thatcher, we are just beginning to convince the inhabitants of swathes of Northern England that the service sector pays its wages in coin of the realm rather than special yukky gay money.
2. There are a load of sentimentalists who won't even countenance any solution which involves young people spending any time not living a hundred yards from their fucking parents. Curiously, this rhetoric is a lot more popular with middle-aged rural pols than with the actual young. I also think it's hardly coincidental that one of the few urban areas where "young local people needing to buy a house in the same parish" is a political issue is Barking & Dagenham, and it's also one of the few urban areas where racial politics has got a foothold.
3. Actually let's get this into the open - country people really don't like foreigners.
3. Actually let's get this into the open - country people (in England, anyway) really don't like foreigners brown people.
I hate being asked to read things from the Daily Mail. I'm not friends with people who read the DM. And I hate the countryside too.
This does not excuse the kind of behaviour she encountered, but it offers a context.
Yes it does. Any bitch who seems like she's going to get my rent raised on me will be groped. It's an ancient custom of ours. Be warned.
Ditto 217 on the Daily Mail.
I have a friend whose job it is to look into this stuff. He works for a certain government department that has tackling this sort of thing -- post-industrial regeneration in northern industrial towns -- as its remit. 215.1 and 215.2 do sort of accord with some of the things he has to say.
He also says that people are always trying to bring jobs to the people instead of people to the jobs. That we ought to accept that small towns that were located where they were for particular industrial purposes (near a defunct coal mine or whatever) are just going to die. And investing millions trying to persuade businesses to locate in the middle of bloody nowhere because some decrepit former industrial slum perched on the edge of a slag-heap is located there is probably not the best use of money.
For people who like what cities have to offer, small towns are always shite-holes anyway. I've been back to the shite-hole in central Scotland I came from a grand total of about twice in the past ten years and I'm happy keeping it that way.
re: 216
No, that's wrong. It's foreigners rather than just brown foreigners. The influx from the former Warsaw pact nations is the current bugbear of choice.
in unrelated news, when your head of research announces that the graduate recruitment program will be targetting graduates from Eastern Europe because they have strong language skills and emerging markets are a priority for the firm, it transpires that you're not meant to ask if we're going to be paying them in cash. It's a bit racist apparently.
I don't think I've seen a single openly gay man since I've been here.
fm, where do you live? Have you ever been to the South End or Jamaica Plain? Though it's true that most of the gay people I know are stodgy married couples, they are decidedly out.
Overall, Boston does sort of suck compared to New York. Not compared to Detroit, though.
Strong language skills? As someone married to a Czech who spends a lot of time there, that wouldn't have been the first thing that'd have sprung to mind.
Unless 'strong language skills' means 'speaks their own language plus acceptable basic English'.
205 -- wait, Mem drive will take me from Cambridge to Allston? So that's what I've been doing wrong...
223 -- Have you been trying to get to Memorial by way of Memorial Drive?
"Charlottesville used to be, according to Frommer's, the #1 place to live in the US. We've since slipped to #17, due largely to rising housing costs. But my rent for the coming year is $270/month, and I can bike or take free public transportation just about anywhere in "downtown." Hop in a car, and in twenty minutes I could be on top of a mountain, at a vineyard, or at a swimming hole."
Stanley speaks the truth.
Except for the part about $270 a month. That is clearly a lie, unless Stanley lives in the dorms at UVa.
270!?!?!?!? Where are you living Stanley? Behind the Waffle House on 5th Street?
I paid close to that back in 1987.
Late to the game. Sigh. Barrelling ahead anyway.
Small towns have massively different personalities, just like families and cities and countries have hugely different personalities. Some are awful and intolerant, others are warm and friendly, others are snotty and intelligent, or whatever.
It's ridiculous to make generalizations about small towns.
I meant:
Small towns have massively different personalities from each other, just like families and cities and countries have hugely different unique personalities.
heebie, don't generalize about my capacity to generalize about small towns.
213: Oh, I was assuming that "England" was being used in its US sense - i.e. most of the former British empire except those areas inhabited by Zulus or Australians.
215: Machismo is a point, but having grown up in teh countryside, I'd point out that rural employment has various forms of nonwage compensation - access to motor vehicles, firearms, and veterinary drugs.
220: Derauqsd, I should warn you that if hypothetically you had a dneirflrig called Sset, there's at least one reading of that joke that would put you on the hook for a pound box of Black Magic and three nights on the sofa.
I just got my realtor's license and will specialize in high-value low-cost houses in the less urban areas of North Dakota. Go against the 100-year trend -- in North Dakota only the strong survive! (Are you strong?) Be part of the America conservatives pretend to want -- the real, almost nonexistent America!
Walt Someguy always overgeneralizes everything, ever, everyday and forever. Just last week he told me that everyone is 5'6" and drives a honda to their factory job in Michigan and loves Heebie. The last part is true.
231:
They come for Heebie, but Geebie drives them away.
tsk, filthy mind Alex.
I was actually offered sex by a prostitute on my way to the Tube this morning! The neighbourhood is going to bloody hell! I pointed out that it was 0615 in the morning and I couldn't even face a cup of tea.
Oh, I was assuming that "England" was being used in its US sense
Now then, lad, why would I do that?
The other point about macho wages is that the people affected weren't bothered that the service industry pounds were gay, but that there were about half as many of them as they'd been used to in the traditional industries. Understandable, if economically naive.
in its US sense
Harrrrrumph.
Heebie is irresistably lovable at first. But as you get to know her better, you learn about her dark side -- but by then it's too late.
At the beginning, she lovingly serves you delicious meat pies. But when she finds someone new, you learn what kind of meat was in those pies. And horrified though you may be, she doesn't leave much time for that.
High-energy, positive thinking people are ready for sex at 6 am.
I expect most of us are ready for sex at 6 am. It's the getting up and going to work instead that kills the mood.
High-energy, positive thinking, successful people don't have to go to work.
According to the Readers Digest, where I live is the worst place in Britain to raise a family. (And you're not doing much better ttaM.) The best places are basically the middle of nowhere.
They did use a rather strange set of criteria though (the RD made up the criteria, then got about 1000 people to rate them, then looked at each of the 408 LA areas and graded them) - nothing about actually having things to do, or public transport, both of which are big considerations for me. And I'd argue that houses are cheap because people don't want to live there, for a reason.
Any bitch who seems like she's going to get my rent raised on me will be groped.
Do you pay rent to your sister, John?
Asilon,
You're just the person I wanted to ask: can you place the title of this post?
And I'd argue that houses are cheap because people don't want to live there, for a reason.
Pay no attention to her. I got $20,000 house for those of you who don't have urination fetishes.
My sister knows better than to raise my rent.
Google never fails:
http://www.coucoucircus.org/series/generique.php?id=10
re: 240
yeah, that RD article got a lot of press attention a while back. It seemed a bit arbitrary.
Tbh, where I live is quite nice, it's outside the ring road. So semi-rural but still within easy travelling distance of town. Insanely expensive though.
Although, to be honest, the area I grew up in Scotland really wouldn't be a terrible place to 'raise a family'. Probably better than here. Assuming you lived in one of the 'bought' schemes, rather than the council parts. You'd want to leave it once you got to 16, obviously.
240: I was born at 408, lived at 399 for a while, then 156, and have now reached the dizzying heights of 50. Next stop, East Dunbartonshire or bust!
re: 247
Well, where I grew up is roughly between no. 1 on that list and no. 77 on that list. Having had a girlfriend from Bishopbriggs (within the area they score as no. 1) I'm pretty amazed they scored it at the top. It's a shit hole.
Well, I've never lived any higher than 194, but then I wouldn't want to live in any of the top 20 for love or money (I might feel differently if I had kids and somebody told me the schools were exceptional). Guess I'm just not the RD demograhic.
I quite liked Asilonville for the couple of years I was there.
re: 249
The schools in central Scotland really are pretty good. And pretty much anywhere in the central belt is only half an hour or so away from either Edinburgh or Glasgow and only half an hour or so away from serious 'countryside', so I suppose in that sense, it's a pretty great area for kids. Plus you could live a lot better on a low income than you can in the SE of England.
Of course, it does have its downsides.
250: Glad to hear that the rumours of the decline of the Great Scottish Education are exaggerated. Teach me to take fiction at face value.
Apparently this blog needs to go on GMT.
re: 251
Heh.
His latest, 'A Tale Etched...' is pretty much a bang on description of Scottish education in the 70s and 80s [we grew up thirty miles or so apart and went to school at almost the same time].
Oh, and Cala in 116 gets it exactly right.
270!?!?!?!? Where are you living Stanley? Behind the Waffle House on 5th Street?
Meet 153: My coming-year's housing arrangement features one bathroom for four people.
I'd still like to live in an area in which a room in a shared house was $270 a month.
The equivalent room in a shared house is near $700 a month here.
In the US articles like that are ignored by most people, as they reinforce what everyone already knows is the conventional wisdom. (Basically that anywhere that doesn't have public transportation is a great place to raise children because you can afford enough space that your children never have to encounter another living thing)
256: Fuck a brick, that's gone up a bit since my day! £100 a week? How do people eat?
I apologize, the factor I mentioned in 257 is actually secondary to the importance of living in a place where rich people live so that the public schools will be of high quality.
Both factors can be collapsed into the non-novel principle that the best place to raise children is the place where you spend a lot of your income on a house.
Pittsburgh beats San Francisco, neener neener neener.
re: 258
Yeah, it's not easy. Rooms in shared houses here run to about 300 - 350 a month plus bills. A lot of the time they can be more like 400 plus bills.
259: This at least is a shared cultural prejudice between British and American weekend supplement editors. I live in the Brit equivalent of Pittsburgh and love it (see 116). So do all my friends with kids, and none of them take this stuff seriously either.
Is this a situation where a group of roommates is pitching in to rent a house among them, or where a lodger is renting a room from a house's owner? Is there much difference between how much you can expect to pay in the two situations?
I live in the Brit equivalent of Pittsburgh and love it (see 116).
Bradford?
Let me explain that...I saw Justin Sullivan in concert three years ago, and he went on and on about how similar Pittsburgh was to Bradford. I thought he might be pulling our legs, but he seemed like the most sincere person ever, so I went home and researched Bradford, a place I'd never heard of before, and his thesis was quite believable.
re: 263
I don't really know re: the difference. But generally this would be a situation where people would be renting a house or flat from a landlord and then splitting it. However, if someone moves out, it'd be standard to advertise for a new person etc.
Prices tend to be fairly similar though. Houses to rent work out at about 300 - 400 a month per bedroom, plus council tax and bills. So that could end up being quite a bit more than 400 a head once bills are included.
It's no Charlottesville, but my brother pays $300/month for his half of a 2-bedroom apartment in Blacksburg. I'd be jealous, but he essentially lives on a farm.
I admit that my first thought on reading her description of the village as all cloppity clop and stay-at-home wives of businessmen and jam making caused me immediately to think, Well, that's what you get when you live in the English countryside equivalent of Governor's Club.
Katherine's right in 175. Georgetown is quite walkable, although most of the commercial sector is kind of boring. It's not, however, accessible by metro. I think that when the metro was built, the local residents were afraid that hordes of black people from Anacostia would invade their territory. They do have buses.
Property and rental prices in the UK are generally very very high compared to the US though. Or at least that's the sense I get from friends who have lived in both places.
267: They're not dissimilar in many ways and only about 100 miles apart. Bradford was a cloth town back in the day, and Sheffield was originally about cutlery, then heavy steel. Both have declining populations under 500k, highly rated universities and not much clue where they're going economically, though Sheffield is quite a bit bigger.
MattF:
The Roanoke/Blacksburg market is very different from Charlottesville.
You can get a very nice large house in Roanoke for a LOT less than Richmond and Charlottesville.
when the metro was built, the local residents were afraid that hordes of black people from Anacostia would invade their territory.
A common misconception! It's actually because the Potomac river is exceptionally deep near Georgetown, so digging a tunnel to Virginia (as would be required for any stop along the river there) would have been rather difficult. Also, Georgetown is the oldest neighborhood in the city, and the engineers weren't sure the buildings could hold up to having a tunnel dug underneath them. Instead, they stuck it in Foggy Bottom.
"NOVI" in Michigan was named because you took the Number 6 train from Detroit to get there.
Matt F, they could have added an above ground trolley part. I think that's how it works further out on some of the lines.
Bradford Metropolitan Council's schooling system made me. Way to go, RD No.235!
276: Keeping in mind that I know nothing about when the metro was built or how Georgetown looked at the time, and with the nod of agreement that a trolley to Georgetown would be great, it doesn't seem to me like there's any room for it. My memory of it (I haven't wandered around Georgetown in some years) is that it's pretty crowded.
That said, a metro stop in Georgetown would be so convenient that just such a thing was one of the few fictional additions to the landscape in a large online RPG set in DC that I used to help GM. We put ours underneath the Georgetown mall.
So did we establish that Charlottesville is the best place to live?
When I stopped in Charlottesville on my way home, we went out to eat around 8:30 PM and almost every place was closed. Just sayin'.
No. There's no such animal. That's why rich people have multiple homes and jets to fly between them.
281 boggles my mind. Where were you looking, teo?
In Charlottesville, Stanley.
284: I know that, Clowner; I live here. I meant what part of town. There's some stat that gets thrown around that C-ville has more restaurants per-capita than New York City. Not saying it's true, but there's a ton of places to eat—even after 8:30pm.
Some shopping center out on Barracks Road.
274: And given the problems that whatever the local power company had with explosions and flying manhole covers, that sounds like a valid concern.
276: property values are very much higher in Georgetown than in Shady Grove or Rockville. And the walk across the Key Bridge isn't horrible.
286: Oh. That makes sense. Next time go to the downtown (pedestrian) mall or the Corner.
And to will, back in 225: I live in Belmont, a short five-minute walk from downtown. It's a three-bedroom house, about to include two singles and a married couple. The very-busy landlord is reluctant look for new tenants after two uneventful years of me and a now-moved-out roommate living here. $270 is not typical rent for the area; I got lucky.
Yeah, we figured there were probably better options, but we were tired and didn't really want to go into town, so we mostly just deferred to the friend we were staying with.
Stanley, I had missed the part about the roommates.
C-ville is expensive!
It does have a tremendous amount of excellent places to eat.
Have you tried Dr. Ho's (just south of c-ville)? Good pizza.
Dr. Ho's? Nope, I'll have to try it. The other single guy moving in works at Crozet Pizza, also good.
agreed. I'm in Covesville a fair amount (Dr. Ho's) and my sister lives in Crozet.
There are old trolley tracks in parts of Georgetown. No or O, I think.
I'd have to say that anyone who thinks that either Rosslyn or FB are too far from Georgetown to make it accessible oughtn't be complaining about a city not being 'walkable.' The Key Bridge certainly isn't a bad walk, pretty much any time of day/year.
293 pwned by 287, although that picture of my daughter and her boyfriend adds some value.
And that's N or O streets.