I think a large percentage of people live in cities for reasons other than work, whether they know it or not. I think a lot of them idealize living in small cities/rural areas because of space and lower cost of living, but they never actually tried it. I could probably save a lot of money by moving out of NYC, but I'd rather live in a place that gives me access to museums, restaurants, experiences, etc rather than saving money and going to the same 5-10 places over and over.
Or access to arguably more important infrastructure: I live within walking distance of a major hospital, 2 grocery stores, my family doctor & dentist, all our schools and at least half my children's activities. a rural or even more suburban home would definitely mean longer trips by car for all those things.
honest question / thought - I wonder what the time difference is between you getting to the hospital in an emergency (heart attack / stroke) vs myself in my rural scenario. Your walking distance isn't going to matter at that point but traffic will. Or do the hospitals have a sort of emergency foot patrol than can be dispatched to you?
(I'm sure that sounds goofy, but it's a serious question/thought. I've never lived in an area that could be dubbed 'urban')
Most major cities will have multiple hospitals coordinating amongst a grid and EMT/fire stations that are localized as well. Depending on traffic you should be at the hospital in under 15. The hospitals may have specialties (head trauma, pediatrics, etc) that are in different city hospitals. These may not be available at all in smaller hospitals.
When I used to visit the countryside 1 hospital would serve an entire county or more. And if you couldn't be driven it was an expensive helicopter ride.
But, you have to take into account the differences in affordability across the city, especially in NYC.
Are people going to want to live in Tudor City if they only have to go to work 1-2x per week? Or do you get a bigger space in Brooklyn or Queens since the commute matters less.
NYC will always have desirable qualities, it always has, but if you look at the desirability of different areas of the city they have changed significantly over time, and could shift to include more distant areas that still have convenient access to the city (Newark, Poughkeepsie, etc.).
This is not what the post to which you're replying is advocating, quite the opposite. People in big cities get far more exposure to "the world" than outside of these centers, mostly because the world comes to them every day.
That may be true, but the world's definitely not coming to whatever small town you'd live in in Upstate NY moreso. Living in a city doesn't mean you never leave it any more than living in the country does.
Do you have any evidence of this? Almost everyone I know who travels to "see the world" lives in a major city, and almost everyone I know who lives in a smaller town hasn't even left the country in their lives.
There's something to be said for the sadness of not having the money to travel the world, but that doesn't seem particularly better for people out of cities in my experience.
>Almost everyone I know who travels to "see the world" lives in a major city, and almost everyone I know who lives in a smaller town hasn't even left the country in their lives.
And probably most of the people I know live in smaller towns outside of (many quite a way outside of) major cities or in/near smaller cities and many travel a great deal.
Yea, not to say it's not the case. We're both trading anecdotes here. I'm sure there's probably statistics for it though.
My assumption would be that the amount to which someone travels is fairly correlated to their income, adjusted for local cost of living? I'm not sure where that would be higher though.
There's a big difference between in major cities and near major cities. Certainly, not all that long ago, wealthier people mostly lived in suburbs though that's probably not as generally true today for coastal cities in particular. I tend to know more older people who mostly don't live in urban cores.
And importantly non-stop flights to more than a handful of destinations from those airports. Living near a major airport rather than a small regional airport can significantly cut the total travel time and cost even with the added inconveniences of large airports.
For me it's more about the time savings. If you live a short Uber from a major airport, you can hop from your doorstep to most of the continent in a half-day, then enjoy the second half of your day at your destination.
But if you're a 45 minute drive from a smaller airport, you've got to spend time dealing with parking, then padded layovers, and often by the time you get to your destination you're kinda wiped, so you end up burning a whole day of PTO just to move from point A to point B. Long-weekend trips aren't even really viable.
> No, generally airports associated with cities are not in the cities. SFO isn't even in San Francisco county.
Not being in the County of San Francisco is not a different or more significant fact than not being in the City of San Francisco, they are not merely geographically coextensive but the same entity, the City and County of San Francisco; which has a mayor as it's executive (like other CA cities) but, instead of a City Council, a Board of Supervisors (like other CA counties) as it's legislature.
