The secret war between city dwellers and suburban dwellers
 

Man, I don't know how it is where you live. But where I live, there is a cultural war going on between city dwellers and suburban dwellers.

It's completely unreported in any media, and I suspect it may be quite different in different areas. The war is fully on here in the Boston-to-DC corridor.

This war seems to be primarily going on in the middle class.

Many city folks now have a bitter disgust, spilling over into name-calling hatred, of suburb folk. The city people feel they are a stronger race. They're more cultured, more well-rounded, and more fully self-actualized. In turn, they believe any suburbanite is potentially racist, potentially religious extremist, almost certainly an asshole frightened into gun owning and worse. The suburban sprawl has caused new reliance on cars and has destroyed local farms; all the suburbanites are directly responsible for this. A minority of city folk are actually angry when they have to go to the burbs to do business.

Meanwhile, the suburbanites seem completely unaware that there is a war on. They complain about the aspects of the city that they don't like, but they will usually associate themselves with it willingly.

I live 10 miles outside the Philadelphia city border, and so I can't honestly say I'm Philadelphian. But I enjoy the city immensely, follow its sports teams, watch its local news broadcasts, play music in its bars, enjoy it as much as possible. I'd be happy to labeled Philadelphian. I wouldn't correct it.

What's it like where you are? Is there a war on?

Not here. We're all one city basically, surrounded by desert. We may have a war against jackrabbits, scorpions, and illegal aliens, but that's about it.

it's bitter The townies here objects to what the suburbanites have done to their downtown. maybe not quite the same thing, but this blog used to amuse me no end. here are the first two posts from waybackwhen

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/

The urbanites definitely have disdain for the suburbanites around here. Usually it manifests in snide remarks about places close to the city having more "character." I once straight-up told my coworker that if "character" meant her 70-year-old house had an ancient sewer line burst underneath it, while my house is twice as big, cost 2/3rds as much, and has modern pipes made of actual metal instead of layered tar paper... then she was welcome to all the character the city had to offer.

In LA it's "The City" vs "The Valley".

Anything over the hill in the valley is considered straight trash.

We're too far outside the city to count, even suburbanites, but I think I know what you mean. When we're in the city, getting ourselves some culture, we say probably a hundred times "how do people live like this?". Not as a negative personal judgment, but just srsly wondering how the hell they can stand it.

I know there's animosity coming from the other direction though - I get the Chester County Barbie email frequently enough to keep it fresh in my mind...

Funny that the author spelled Berwyn wrong, and didn't even attempt Bryn Mawr...

City dwellers are just jealous that we have free parking.:cool:

Ok, but what if I (used to) live in North Hollywood but worked in .... BEVERLY HILLS? Would I still have been a white trash ho? ;)

I got an email last week that had the same Barbies and descriptions, but the towns/areas were in the Portland OR area. Funny as hell!

As for the City vs. Suburbs issue - they both suck. Rural is the only way to go!

:D

Huh, I thought we were having a cellar civil war. That could be kind of fun.

I just wrote a ton on this and erased it. I made the long story short...

The war is a class war and I believe, stems from the social mores of the academic class.

You forgot one UT: Suburbanites are also obviously- breeders.

I'm caught in the middle and am at war with both of them. I'm well inside the Beltway and can walk easily to a grocery store and a couple restaurants. A couple of parks and bike paths too. I have ready access to public transportation. I also have a decent sized lush back yard and little traffic on my street. I have a driveway I can park in, and if I didn't, I would still be able to park in front of my house with no competition.

I sometimes have to go out into the real suburbs out by the Beltway to run an errand, and I can't stand it. It's just multi-lane drags with shopping plazas and car dealerships and tons of traffic and lots of red lights. It takes half an hour just to get from one place to another out there, and you are drained once you arrive. Every development is designed so all the traffic has to get onto a main road just to get from point A to point B, so all the main strips are horribly overcrowded.

If I have to drive downtown, it's still stressful, because I have to plan my route in advance. Have to figure out which one-way street or diagonal street to take, where I might find a place to park, where I won't get shot (not as bad these days.)

I work downtown, but it's easy to get to on public transportation.

So I dislike them both. Arlington rocks.

Hopefully. ;)

Around here the suburbanites are procreating a monster or three, but in the city they squeeze out 6, 8, 10 little thugs.

That seems to be the plan/fault of the local planning boards. By limiting the number of access points from each development to the rest of the world, they create choke points, partially to limit through traffic on the residential streets. It's for the children, you know. :rolleyes:

As long as everyone remained polite.

Yes. It doesn't matter where you work, only where you plug in your iPhone at night.

Well, where I live, it's like this . . .

ARE there any people actually living in the city? Well, except for scary "projects" type people? Nah, probably not. The city is where people go to work, then they come back to the 'burbs at six or so.

Am I right, Bri?

Same goes for Dayton and Cincinnati, with a few exceptions. I know a little more about Cincy - grew up in a Cincy 'burb. Cincy is divided up into many little towns that surround it and though they're "city" they are also separate cities - I think they are actually independent satellite cities, though they're a ten-minute bus ride from Fountain Square. If you live "downtown" you're either really rich and can afford a riverview condo, or you're dirt poor. Very little in between.

Do the city dwellers - those who live in nearby "cities" - think less of suburban dwellers? Of course. In the Cincy area, every little neighborhood thinks less of every other little neighborhood. Especially east vs. west.

Adelaide. 144 suburbs, in search of a city.

Here, all the city dwellars are trying to become surburban dwellars.

They have recently figured out that you get sooo much more house for your dollars, the schools are less feral, and the community is generally a whole lot nicer.

Problem is, as the city spreads out, us surburban lovers have to move further and further out.

I'm assuming there is a lot of that here in parts of Minneapolis since we have a very large douchy liberal elitist population but I try to stay away from them so I don't hear much of it personally.

Although, even though I hate the "elitist city-dweller" stereotype, I do not believe the suburban lifestyle is sustainable and it will have to change in the next few decades or cease to exist. I will not judge anyone initially or think of them of lesser Minneapolisians (?) from being from the suburbs but I do find many to be complete idiots (that is also true in the city to be fair).

I would never say I or anyone I know is having a war against the suburbs but some of us do find that the suburban lifestyle will create big problems in the future.

Here we have an Indians versus cowboys war. It worked on the Saturday afternoon matinee and it works for us (we're easily amused here in the middle of nowhere). Indians are lazy drunks. Cowboys only last 8 seconds. Last Sunday a neighbor warned me about an Indian who hangs out in our neighborhood. Dude never bothered me, but she was frothing at the mouth - at Church no less. Onward Christian soldiers. I've spent time with Indians who don't like white people at all. Can't trust white people because they'll steal anything that's not tied down. :headshake

douchy liberal elitest population? What are those--the women?

Actually, I doubt most liberal elitests douche. Only uneducated people douche, 'cause it's bad for you.

Yeah, 'cause we educated people never do anything that's bad for us.

sure we do. but we know better.

I live more like 3 miles from Phila Int Airport. IMHO, You're not suburban, you're rural. To me, the war is between urban/suburban and rural.

what about semen depository liberal elitists?

:bolt:

I thought they came from Chicago!

:bolt::bolt::bolt:

Well I can use "tool" if you prefer but I personally enjoy the use of excessive adjectives. And I usually reserve "tool" for frat boys and wannabe frat boys anyways.

It already has in many cities. I say I live in the suburbs, but I doubt it would conform to what some people in other large cities would consider the suburbs. I have a neighborhood grocery store--not in walking distance, but less than 2 miles--and both office complexes and major retail centers are less than 5 miles in multiple directions. My husband does technically commute in the general direction of downtown, but his job is still only halfway between us and it, and there are tons of tech companies much closer. Anyway, we basically never have cause to drive into the city proper. So I guess we might classify more as urban sprawl, I don't know.

How about for sporting events, concerts, the opera, quality dining, etc.?

Damn, girl, I'd have loved to read the full post.

I don't think our suburbs are the same as yours. They just aren't that far from the towns they surround.

Sporting events: Our city has a hockey team and a minor league baseball team--both of which have home fields way up north in the suburbs where I live. :) There is also college sports, I suppose, except they're so crowded we'd basically have to park a few blocks from our house anyway. That's what the TV is for.

Concerts: Not counting the children's music concert I took the kids to (which was technically downtown, but in another city,) I haven't been to a concert since 1999.

The opera: You jest, but I did actually go to an opera once. It was interesting for the first two hours, but I dozed off during the second two.

Quality dining: Again, the quality dining here is spread all over. Our three favorite restaurants are all out here by us (and were before we lived out here.) Not that we get to enjoy them very often, but hey. Downtown restaurants are mostly classy lunch places for the business crowd, and bars.

We've had a rebirth here in St. Louis, with a lot of people starting to move downtown and rebuilding shitty neighborhoods. Of course, there are other neighborhoods that used to be nice and are now going to hell. There has always been animosity between the city and the burbs here, especially given that the City of St. Louis is separate from St. Louis County.

Minus college and my 6-year sojourn out east, I've lived in the City of St. Louis. I love it, and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I don't like urban sprawl and the cookie cutter-ness of some of the burbs. Having said that, I have no beef with people that enjoy suburban living...if that's what you like, awesome. And it's not like the City doesn't have its issues, namely with the public schools.

And they seem to have more facilities locally. I can't think of any town where it's more than a mile to the local convenience store - or somewhere that sells foil anyway.

Then again, we live on a smaller scale - I suppose if you take London as the city and the rest of the country as the suburbs :lol: then you might just see the war. Much of the country north of the Watford Gap has hostile feelings towards London. I only learned this when I moved to Leicester - previously I thought everyone was rather proud of our capital city. Turns out some people have never visited, never want to, resent the fact that tourists think it's the only city in England, that it gets the biggest news coverage, the most funding, the most attention blah blah blah.

After a while I could see their point (the coverage of the London mayoral elections just doesn't seem as relevant once you get to Barnsley) but I'm still a transplanted Londoner, so I've never been able to feel it properly.

I don't begrudge anyone their living circumstances. There are positives and negatives in any situation, and those living there weigh them up according to their priorities.

Just so long as people visiting the cities at the same time as me obey the laws. The law of the land (natch) and Cherry's Law of Perpetual Motion aka Don't Get In My Way. Sorry, but if you step out of a shop doorway and stop, deciding to have your conversation about where you are going next right in front of me, that is a declaration of war. I might glare. Or purse my lips. And if I consider you a repeat offender I might even tut! Deal with it.

Hahaha...I say "scuse me." They are not worth the effort of a full-blown well-enunciated "Excuse me please." :p

If I am feeling aggressive or angry I tend to become very, very precise with my language.

Fighting talk for me is "I beg your pardon?" said in an aggressive tone of voice. I think that's quite common. "Excuse me!" is similar. "'scuse me" is very friendly.

You got me. I smile when I say 'scuse me' too. :)

Irritation might get a "pardon me." Why am I asking to be pardoned? I've done nothing wrong. :lol:

I wear sneakers that make a loud squeaking noise when scuffed along concrete pavement, and especially in smooth indoor floors. Timed just right it can give a dopey walker a bit of a start. If that doesn't work, my bag might accidentally bang into them as I swerve past. Who, me? What? Oh, terribly sorry!
One day I am gonna shoulder-charge on of these dumb suckers. Keep your bloody wits about you when walking in a crowded public place!

[/rant]

What really, really winds me up beyond reason and sense, is fucking students who mill about corridors walking slowly, five abreast, completely unaware or uncaring of the the fact that others are trying to get to a lecture. There are certain times of day when it seems the entire campus is hurrying to get to a lecture hall. It's a big campus, and there's a five minute leeway built in to the timetable to get between classes. Ha! it can quite easily take three times that long to move between lecture halls, and that's if the way is clear and you're only moving within one faculty (poor joint honours students can find themselves with a 25 minute trek).

But hey...their class finished and they're done for the day, so why would they give a shit huh?

Yeah, seriously, if I'm in a rotten mood all bets are off towards the rude.

The whole city/suburban thing is foreign to me. I grew up right outside a town of about 25,000: the whole town is kind of like a suburb, with a center. I went to a rural HS, so there was the whole "city folk" vs "country folk" but not in a serious way. It's not like we were ALL slopping the hogs and driving tractors. However, the Future Farmers of America had a tractor day where they drove their tractors to school. We told our "city" boys to drive by on that day because we really DID drive tractors to school every day. That, and our farmer boys could have kicked the shit out of the townies any day of the week, what with all that hay-baling and hard work! ;)

Living right outside of town I had the best of both worlds, and friends on each "side."

eta: @ Dana...my previous user title was "Ambling along, what's that like?" and I was referring to students in the hallway too! Then again, I'm not sure I've ever ambled in my life. :)

I don't do ambling. I'm a fast walker, always have been :P

Oh, me too. I remember back in HS, my friends saying "why are you walking so fast?" I'd say "why get there slow when you can get there fast?"

disclaimer: no, this does not apply to everything. :rolleyes:

It isn't about 'getting there fast' it's about walking fast. I dunno. that's just how i am comfortable walking.

I have the "gotta go gotta go...people to meet, places to go..." thing going on. I do try to slow down every now and then. Smell the roses, you know. Even with an office job, I am up out of my seat a lot. It drives me crazy to stay in one spot for very long. Have to keep moving. I'm not sure I even relax when I sleep.

(holds up hand) I'm slow! I'm a slow walker!

uh . . . what are we talking about?

I agree. I walk at my pace, therefore my issues are about getting there at my pace. It's about 3mph faster than average. I am a very considerate pedestrian - honestly. I move over in advance to let prams and groups through. I move over when I see somone with four carrier bags coming up. I step into the road when if I think I'm the one taking up the room. But DAMNIT! Can I have some of the same consideration in return?!

Sorry.

As a slow walker, I will overtake you. I mean, I will burn past you - whooooosh! What I ask from you is that you walk in a straight line. I accept a reasonable meander, but mostly straight, please. Because I am overtaking you - at speed. I don't want to weave all over the pavement (mall, whatever) in order to get past you. Have some peripheral awareness and I will LOVE you. Really - when people move aside (even when it's not necessary) I get a warm glow all day.

Oops. Does this issue rile me?
No. Of course not.

I've been there. He's definitely Suburban. Rural is a couple of miles away from Chez Toad.

It seems that the location of companies are highly dependent on the type of business too. From what I've seen, all engineering companies and most large business headquarters are located on the outskirts of cities or in suburbs, which make sense since most employees will live in the suburbs.

There was also very large speculation about urban renewal (what sycamore was talking about) but that has seemed to slow since the recession and I'm curious to see if it will start up again when it ends.

I don't think it was the recession, I think it was the bursting of the real estate bubble that stifled it.

We have bigger arguments about which suburban dwellers location is better than the others. We already know that urban dwelling sucks. Some people like to be densely packed in with other people like cattle. Others not so much.

Correct. My fault.