Where to live one of these days

[rubymtn]

I would live in: Québec City, Deadwood (or Lead) SD, Carmel-by-the-Sea CA, Rio Arriba County NM, or Perth one of these days.

[rjbman]

my ideal city is a big one with lots of things to do, beautiful parks, superb public transit, and close access to nature. also cheap.

if this exists please tell me. i have been unsuccessful so far at finding something that checks all the boxes.

current shortlist, though:

• Boulder - pros: great access to nature, hiking, [redacted], snowboarding. surprisingly great winters (avg in the 40s it feels like, with tons of snow that melts quick) cons: very white, very expensive, very little to do, little transit
• Chicago - pros: tons of stuff to do, good parks, and transit. pretty cheap as far as big cities go. cons: cold winter, not great on [redacted] or nature
• Seattle - pros: good nature access. decently large city & good transit. cons: expensive
• NYC - idk it's just the epitome of CITY as far as US goes. downside is obviously price & nature (parks are good but i also like being able to [redacted] up mountains or snowboard down them)

will not do: SF. sorry. not spending $200k to live in a tech utopian version of elysium right down to the massive gulf between haves & havenots

[rubymtn]

my ideal city is a big one with lots of things to do, beautiful parks, superb public transit, and close access to nature. also cheap.

if this exists please tell me. i have been unsuccessful so far at finding something that checks all the boxes.

It's not huge but Portland, Maine? I have a really rural instinct so I'm afraid I can't provide as far as big big city. Also I'm originally from a rapidly growing city that's full of Boulder castoffs and I have a weird anti-boulder bias even though I know i'd love it and I currently live in the west. I would always recommend certain places in the South, but I know that's not everyone's cuppa

[AARON]

realistically - missoula, portland (ME), tucson, boise
less so - barcelona, london

[Julio]

for me it's probably bangkok. or thailand in general, really, but i like bangkok as a jumping point to the rest of the country.
has the holy trinity of nice public transportation (not japan levels, but good as far as i'm concerned), walkable infrastructure, and very good, very cheap street food.
also goes without saying that the cost of living is low. which is nice.

unfortunately going through some turmoil out there at the moment, but at this point most everywhere is i feel and i just haven't been able to let thailand go ever since the first time i went out there years ago

edit:
@skunk

true, chiang mai is v nice. i think i'd just like a city base and then the choice to move around is nice. or maybe i'd just make it extreme and stay in nan, which was where i stayed all those years ago (near lao border)

[alex]

Been thinking about Switzerland. I like the multilingualism of German, French and Italian. Cost of living is high, but so are wages for some fields. Breathtaking nature, social healthcare, 8 hour drive to see my family which is doable, warm summers and cold winters.

Ideally I want to get away from the city and live in a smaller community while being able to work fully remote. My girlfriend is a hairdresser which is amazing as she finds work everywhere on the planet. I don't care much about there being 'stuff to do' as long as there is nature around for hiking and camping.

I like living in Germany for the most part but I really miss being in forests and not seeing people everywhere.

[cameron]

portland maine

[CMYK]

Portland ME is chill but as someone who went to school near there I can warn you that it's a lot smaller than you'd think AND the winters are ROUGH. Amazing summers though.

I really like where I live, my partner would like something slightly more urban though. I think the ideal would be a midsized town in the alps, with quick public transport to a major city. Unsure if euroliving is in the cards though.

[deadkitty]

u should move to LA the high desert is like 45 min away and there's also snowy mountains and the beach.

i really hope I can move to new york or somewhere east coast in the next couple years. 100% sun gets boring and so does driving a car everywhere. i want to walk around! i want to wear a coat!!

[funyuns]

taipei probably the mcdonalds corn soup goes hard

[miles]

A place called Tokyo, japan. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Actually I’ll probably do Kanazawa instead.

Sometimes I miss Hong Kong so much I can smell it. It’s got a certain smell when you come out of the airport in the summer. Perfect. The most city-like city I’ve even been. But you can also go off to the countryside in less than an hour.

thewisdomoftime
Japanese has very few rivals for hardest language to learn from english

Japanese is easy to speak (especially if you know spanish), but hard read and write.

[judith_pancake]

I really loved living in rural Utah the past few years. Beautiful state with less people than the other pretty parts of the western US and endless public lands to explore. Backpacking without carrying a tent is nice too since it basically never rains. You just need to forget any bar culture (in the rural parts at least) and replace that time with potlucks made with all homegrown food.

[wrong]

i'd love to live in southern or northern vermont

[seesaw]

id love to live in any city that doesn't have protracted periods of -40C weather. so i guess that's most cities

[thewisdomoftime]

For a brief while I thought, and I think a lot of millennial americans think this as well, that urban studies concepts would help me get at what I'd like for a city to hold. I think that project got me only as far as "Minneapolis' mayor is doing a good job of upzoning their suburbs while keeping the great green cover the city already has." But I believe to feel forlorn, you first have to love something; and I don't think forlorn people zone cities. Do we love residential, commercial, manufacturing, and park? Do we love road? (Some people love road.) In NYC we sure don't love residential-- you need a catastrophic, life-ruining amount of money to love residential space and live in NYC. I think NYC loves commercial and park. I don't think I love commercial and park, but I'm partial to residential? I grew up in the suburbs and consciously hated residential.

I haven't been able to post in this thread yet because the little hard thing at the heart of what I think about cities is not where-I've-found-to-go but a belief that the american social field is being held together by the inertial overvaluation of USD, not an agreement about projects/rituals we should do together to release distributions of meaning, completely pasting over something like that people hate where they live (- yes, sorry, I mean me by people, -), replace social meaning with social sympathy, and aren't sure (- still me -) if anyone can resolve that. (Maybe this can't be consciously resolved, or it would have been; maybe any marxist reading this has started drumming on their seat waiting for their turn to speak.) Obviously the point has been beat to death that people stuff the meaning-shaped voids in their lives with spending, I think anyone who does has subconsciously already negotiated an escape specific to them or has fallen into a deeper holding pattern, is not actually one person.

This post is a statement somewhat on the level of "only children have homes," (think I heard that remark as one of a million beautiful ideas in the documentary Patience (After Sebald)) or "barely even children have homes," or "I'm not certain anyone wants anything" (I can only apologize for bringing that up). But I suppose a lot of you have managed to answer the question without changing the thread name to "How to live one of these days," which is impressive.

At any rate, there are cities that pass my average-high test (San Francisco, Minneapolis, Lisbon) and pass my commute test (San Francisco, Brooklyn, most of fortress Europe), but barely even the Nordic countries pass my 2-generation-test. I might just have to put the 2-generation-test to the side until I've learned Han?

Not sure where to live one of these days

[silvaeri]

For a brief while I thought, and I think a lot of millennial americans think this as well, that urban studies concepts would help me get at what I'd like for a city to hold. I think that project got me only as far as "Minneapolis' mayor is doing a good job of upzoning their suburbs while keeping the great green cover the city already has."

As a current minneapolis resident and city lover. i just need to say our mayor jacob frey fucking sucks and is a coward piece of shit and also he has practically 0 power so to give credit to him for the great advocacy work that went into the 2040 plan is a slight to all of the great organizers in this city.


edit: "thank you I'll be less dumb moving forward, it's very easy to read neoliberal rags without being told you are" -- no worries friend! not an attack at you, just wanted to voice hate of our mayor

[Wax]

Do any other non american friends deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to live in certain places in the US, whilst simultaneously being not at all into living in the country that is the US

I would love to live in Maine or Nevada or Arizona, but only a version of them where they have universal healthcare and [redacted] lanes and well funded education and transport infrastructure and generally less aggro income inequality