The average employee returning to the office spends $561 per month–that's the average two-person household’s grocery bill in the U.S. for the entire month.
Your suburb sounds way nicer than the one I grew up in. It was like a 45 minute walk to the “main Street”, with no sidewalks for most of it. A guy got hit by a car and killed at the intersection closest to the house when I was living there, too. Visiting any friends without a car impractical and/or “walk along the highway” dangerous.
A friend of mine lived in Beacon, NY for a year. It was kind of nice to visit. Walkable main street, restaurants and shops. Lots of space and nature. I don’t think I’d want to live there full time though. Like it’s cool that they have a Thai restaurant, but they have A Thai restaurant. There’s like 20 that deliver to me here, and a handful I can walk to.
If anything honestly living in a city is actually factually unhealthy, people weren’t meant to be around that many people, not to mention the pollution. Being a good amount of space away from any other people is the best feeling tbh.
This is interesting and I wonder how much is just individual. I get sad in the suburbs when there’s not a lot of people around. It feels lonely. The crowds here feel like a comfortable blanket. I like knowing that if I wreck my bike people will be there to help (that happened to me once, memorably)
I don’t know about pollution. That probably varies a lot by specifics. My parents lived in a suburb really close to a highway, so that probably wasn’t good for our air. New York I think is pretty good air quality because of its location and mass transit, where like Houston or LA I think have much worse smog problems.
That’s just American suburbs, honestly. Many if not most subdvisions are designed to be pedestrian-hostile with the specific intent of excluding – shall we say – a certain class of person who doesn’t have access to a car, and are thrown up wherever a builder managed to snag a contiguous chunk of greenfield site vaguely near a major city rather than being planned and positioned to for convenience to mass transit and amenities.
Heck, I live in a old streetcar suburb, that’s basically in the city proper, and while it’s only a ten minute walk to the nearest grocery store, I don’t walk it because a) it’s a fucking Walmart and I’m not giving them any of my money if I can help it and b) it’d require me to walk along two busy stroads, one way while lugging sacks of groceries. I’d prefer not to get mowed down by somebody coming off the highway who’s not paying attention at the crosswalk if I can help it.
It must be area dependent in the US then, because I’ve lived in suburbs or small towns most of my life - the rest was spent on military bases overseas when I was a kid. The previous poster’s description of “no sidewalks” left me wondering just how far away from the city this suburb was. I mean, I could see specific subdivisions, I guess, but if it’s a true suburb of a major metropolitan area, I guess I always think of those as being thoroughly developed.
That’s been my experience, anyway. Not with public transport or anything, certainly, but fully paved and all that.
For reference, I live in a suburb of a midwestern city right now.
Wikipedia describes it as a suburb. It’s within 40 miles of Manhattan. It might have been a little less than 40 minutes walking to parts of main Street. I checked on Google maps and asked it how long to walk from my parents house to the town library, which was pretty central.
Your suburb sounds way nicer than the one I grew up in. It was like a 45 minute walk to the “main Street”, with no sidewalks for most of it. A guy got hit by a car and killed at the intersection closest to the house when I was living there, too. Visiting any friends without a car impractical and/or “walk along the highway” dangerous.
A friend of mine lived in Beacon, NY for a year. It was kind of nice to visit. Walkable main street, restaurants and shops. Lots of space and nature. I don’t think I’d want to live there full time though. Like it’s cool that they have a Thai restaurant, but they have A Thai restaurant. There’s like 20 that deliver to me here, and a handful I can walk to.
This is interesting and I wonder how much is just individual. I get sad in the suburbs when there’s not a lot of people around. It feels lonely. The crowds here feel like a comfortable blanket. I like knowing that if I wreck my bike people will be there to help (that happened to me once, memorably)
I don’t know about pollution. That probably varies a lot by specifics. My parents lived in a suburb really close to a highway, so that probably wasn’t good for our air. New York I think is pretty good air quality because of its location and mass transit, where like Houston or LA I think have much worse smog problems.
It doesn’t sound like you grew up in the suburbs, man. It sounds like you grew up in a fairly small town.
That’s just American suburbs, honestly. Many if not most subdvisions are designed to be pedestrian-hostile with the specific intent of excluding – shall we say – a certain class of person who doesn’t have access to a car, and are thrown up wherever a builder managed to snag a contiguous chunk of greenfield site vaguely near a major city rather than being planned and positioned to for convenience to mass transit and amenities.
Heck, I live in a old streetcar suburb, that’s basically in the city proper, and while it’s only a ten minute walk to the nearest grocery store, I don’t walk it because a) it’s a fucking Walmart and I’m not giving them any of my money if I can help it and b) it’d require me to walk along two busy stroads, one way while lugging sacks of groceries. I’d prefer not to get mowed down by somebody coming off the highway who’s not paying attention at the crosswalk if I can help it.
It must be area dependent in the US then, because I’ve lived in suburbs or small towns most of my life - the rest was spent on military bases overseas when I was a kid. The previous poster’s description of “no sidewalks” left me wondering just how far away from the city this suburb was. I mean, I could see specific subdivisions, I guess, but if it’s a true suburb of a major metropolitan area, I guess I always think of those as being thoroughly developed.
That’s been my experience, anyway. Not with public transport or anything, certainly, but fully paved and all that.
For reference, I live in a suburb of a midwestern city right now.
Wikipedia describes it as a suburb. It’s within 40 miles of Manhattan. It might have been a little less than 40 minutes walking to parts of main Street. I checked on Google maps and asked it how long to walk from my parents house to the town library, which was pretty central.