Comment of the Day: New York Is the Suburbs
Today we once again waded into the ever raging debate of whether or not the suburbs suck. All you New York-dwelling cityphiles came out hot-to-trot on city living, but one commenter suggests that you don't even know where you live.
There's nothing inherently wrong with suburban living and it can actually be pretty colorful depending on what specific metro area its attached to. The immediate suburbs of NYC are actually quite nice and a whole lot more organic than most of the tract housing you'd find out west and down south due to the history of when they came to be (a hundred years ago vs. post Interstate Highway Act).
No, the only thing wrong with the suburbs is they're incredibly inefficient from an energy usage standpoint, the preponderance of cars and lacking public infrastructure being key here.
Everything else is just hand wringing by (overwhelmingly white) kids who over the last 10 years moved into the city like the birds of capistrano, displacing all the locals due to minority removal..I mean gentrification.. and then hating on where they came from.
"Oh but there's no culture up there"
"Oh but its so boring"
Yeah bud, so are you, I don't care how many fusion restaurants you frequent or yelp reviews you put up.
They have no idea what places like NYC were back in the bad old days and why it gained the mystique that it did...and truthfully they've turned a good portion of it into a weird mish mash of suburbia filtered through some sort of fantastic idea on what they thought NYC was while growing up in said suburbia.
Not all of this town has been subjected to this, because not all of NYC is cool and, not surprisingly, most of uncool NYC also happens to be the most authentic carrier of that NYC mystique that drew these people here in the first place.
But we don't go to 'those' places where 'those' people live. There's no reason to.
Yeah.
Boring.
[Photo via Getty]