October 14, 2004

• Ottawa is a great place to live...
• Oh man that's a lot of text. All I have to say is: Mars ain't a place to raise a kid. In fact, it's cold as hell.
• Well, fuy, I'm not the man they think I am at home.
• I live in small town America. There are your average red-necks and Bible thumpers,your average trailer trash, your average snobs who put on airs, and your average working class citizens doing what they can to raise their families living here. The kids in town ride their bikes, play together and for the most part are well behaved. Most people know each others name. (Except for me, I am a bit of a loner) Folks are friendly here, if a bit nosey. Most are willing to help a neighbor in trouble. The public school system is good in my opinion, and with the proper funding would probably be great. The air is cleaner than a lot of the country, the water is better than most places I have lived. The cost of living is reasonable. Yet, it is rural America, so not a utopia by your criteria. Although, I wouldn't consider this place a utopia, it is better than some places I have had to live in. Perhaps there is no utopia.
• I'm a huge fan of Ithaca, NY. Affordable houses, good schools, (plus an Ivy League University with the 2nd largest library system in the US,) great food, plenty of cultural institutions, (that whole university thing again,) and plenty of liberal progressives. If I didn't have to work in NYC I'd move back up there in a heartbeat. Side note: the origin of the phrase "wrong side of the tracks" comes from the age of locomotives. Typically, the wind would blow the smoke from the trains in the same direction, making the down-wind area the "wrong side" of the tracks. /derail Ha ha! Get it? Derail???! OK, I'm done.
• Everyone's definition of utopia is different, but for me so far, nothing beats Toronto. This had not become clear to me until I moved to Vancouver recently; the sorts of extremes you see here aren't nearly so evident in Toronto. For example, there's no real "bad part of town" in Toronto, especially as you get closer to downtown. There doesn't seem to be as much of a clear divide between affluenzas and ghettos either; there are a couple of upscale neighbourhoods to be sure, but definitely nothing to rival the cognitive dissonance of having affluent tourists set a foot wrong out of the ornate tourist trap that is Gastown into the near-abandoned area near Main and Hastings. Arguably Toronto has been in decline for the past couple of years (many will tell you it's because we don't have enough power or money, or both) but it's still one of the most vibrant cities in Canada. It's got a decent nightlife, a sufficient critical mass of people from all walks of life, a public transit system that works, and a genuine interest in civic affairs and making sure the city continues to work for its citizens. I think it's the emphasis on civic affairs I miss the most—when I read articles on the latest argument over Dundas Square, or on how the mayor is pleased McGuinty finally caved and gave Toronto the power to levy taxes, I think about how there's next to no discussion on what goes on in Vancouver. Add it all up, and you have one of the finer places to live, work and play. Caveat: I have not had to pay property taxes or rent on anything in Toronto. I may also be suffering from suburban envy, seeing as how I only spent my high school career downtown and always lived just outside of the city limits.
• My friend bought a cookie-cutter $130K home in a brand new Rowlett (Dallas) subdivision; his wife broke her ankle walking around the neighborhood and screamed for 10 minutes and nobody even glanced outside. No offense intended to anyone, but that's a Texas thing.
• chrominance - I've rented in Toronto. It's still great. Terrific school system. Are you serious about looking for a place? Because emmigration isn't really practical, so if you are, we'll keep the thread to US places. But if you aren't serious about moving, we can just keep going on about how amazing Toronto is ;)
• In New Zealand, it can better to be at one extreme or the other, as far as schools go; they're divided into "deciles", based predominantly on the incomes of their catchment area (schools are given zones from which they are required to accept pupils; while they can have smart/athletic/etc kids from outside their zone, they must offer an education to any kid in it). High decile schools (generally surrounded by rich neighbourhoods) do well out of parent contributions. Low decile schools get phenominal amounts of top up money for educational initiatives du jour (computers, specialists for learning disabilities). Mid decile schools don't get much of either. The picture - correct or otherwise - I have of the US public school system is that it's such a disaster area, though, that even a not very flash mid-decile school here will look brilliant by comparison. Schools do not have metal detectors. They have functioning, tolerably modern computers, and libraries with books published some time in my lifespan. Actual science is taught, rather than religion masquerading as same. One must also be wary of "good schools." I went to the "best school" in my home town. I would have been much, much better off going to the mediocre one. I know my mix of friends tend to work out the same way. Often "high achiever" schools are bearpits for the kids in them, where favoured students and athletes get the attention and freedom to do whatever they like - mostly crap on the other kids - while the rest are treated as an inconvenient nuisance. I do know that some places around the inner suburbs are sold with Wellington College (a public (not in the English sense) boys-only school with delusions of Etonianism) zoning listed as a benefit. In Wellington, though, desireability is predominantly based around good proximity to the CBD (where most people work...), amount of space (at a premium), and public transport. When I first moved here 10+ years back, there were inner suburbs with a lousy rep (such as Newtown, Mount Cook, and Aro Valley), but that's largely dissapeared; there are a few undesirable addresses in the middle suburbs/cities (Wainuiomata, Porirua) that are neither close enough to be trendy nor far enough away to offer spacious living (Paraparaumu).
• Despite what these people will tell you, Ann Arbor, MI is about as close as I've come to finding the perfect area of the country. Great schools, plenty of variety, a decent nightlife (and not too far away from larger venues), plenty of ethnicity, it's not too big that you have to drive for an hour to get to countryside, and it's not completely overrun with chain stores like other places I've seen. The only problem is that it is ungodly expensive. Not Boulder or Austin expensive, but up there.
• The good side of town is the outside.
• No offense intended to anyone, but that's a Texas thing. No offense taken, but it's a Dallas thing, or more likely a suburban thing, says the native Houstonian. That would not have happened in any neighborhood I lived in, and when my mother had a similar incident in west Houston a couple of months ago, a neighbor helped her. The Heights, the neighborhood I lived in in Houston, is older (my house was built in 1928) and gentrifying. The junior high and high school aren't great, but with the influx of yuppie parents, the elementary schools have started improving a lot, and improvements will move through the system as those kids age. I found the area had a very small-town atmosphere reminiscent of where my parents grew up in east Texas. I had a hardware store at the end of my block, facing on a major street, that reminded my husband of the one his uncle ran when he was a boy. We knew our neighbors on both sides, although we weren't closely acquainted with the folks at the Catholic Church across the street, and the neighborhood people were friendly and the kids didn't hesitate to knock on our door when they tossed a frisbee on our roof by accident. Part of the neighborhood culture is dictated by the architecture: everyone has porch swings. And they use them. We were also 3 miles from downtown, a little further from the museum district, and had close access to two interstate highways (I-10 and I-45). The Heights is expensive by Houston standards, but Houston is a very cheap place to live by national standards. And property values in the Heights are not as inflated as they once were (the woman who just closed a contract to sell her house says ruefully). And rednecks are not an immediate neighborhood problem either. You'll find gun-lovers, but my precinct went heavily Nader in 2000. Houston has its downsides: the weather is hot (but you have AC), no zoning (but you have funky mixed-use neighborhoods because of it, and deed restrictions elsewhere), and it is not a tourist burg by any means. But it's a great place to eat and a greeat place to live, and I expect to eventually move back, quite possibly to the Heights. Yes, I'm homesick. Can you tell?
• Roly's initial comments about the charm of older, established neighborhoods certainly rings true for my current burg. The downtown may be slightly scuzzy at times, but there's life to it. People walk everywhere, hang out on the streets, pay attention to their neighbors. Everyone I know who's spent any significant time in the city center has no fear of the environment and loves the amount of life going on. I've also visited some of the neighborhoods that were the suburban housing developments 20 years ago, still on the edge of the core city, and these have turned into fairly charming neighborhoods themselves, if rather upscale. The new suburbs though, are way, way out there, and everyone who longs to live out there simultaneously complains about the commute. Many of these new burbs also have nothing on the older developments. The new suburbs look like ready made ghettos, or tenements. Walk around and it seems like anyone you see is giving you the skunk eye.
• Perfection without any drawbacks or downsides? On Earth?
• The good side is where I live.
• The good side is where the black people aren't. This is what we're all skirting about right? Apple store---Noah's Bagels---------------------------------black people
• I third Toronto the bestest. for me so far, nothing beats Toronto. This had not become clear to me until I moved to Vancouver recently... the cognitive dissonance of having affluent tourists set a foot wrong out of the ornate tourist trap that is Gastown into the near-abandoned area near Main and Hastings. I was in Vancouver for a month last year. It was great at first - perfect weather, clean streets, and fantastic Chinese/Japanese stuff in Richmond. Then one day I got on the wrong bus in downtown; it took me along Hastings. In five minutes' ride the visuals went from oh-so-pretty to I-feel-empty-inside.
• Slightly off tangent: Can anyone tell me the name of that 1979 film about kids running amok out of boredom in a brand-new, isolated, preplanned Denver subdivision? I've wanted to show it to my wife but I can't figure out the title. One of the cable networks was showing it a few years ago.
• Also a Toronto lover. (Originally from London Ontario, God's gift to 50's conservatism, so any modern city had to be an improvement.) I love Vancouver and Montreal, but I don't think I could last a year in either place. I live in East York. Near the subway, I can be downtown within 20 minutes by bike, or on the DVP in 5. Notwithstanding the discussion about east=bad, here the "good areas" of the city are north of downtown and central. (Roughly the area between the two wings of the subway.) Anywhere that requires east or west travel is looked down upon, since it involves changing subway lines, despite the popularity of certain neighbourhoods in both directions. I just don't get the suburbs. At all.
• rolypolyman, you're looking for Over the Edge. it's a classic.
• Perhaps it is a Texas thing. Or American South. To oversimplify, it is a tax thing. The school funding is based on local property values, to a great extent, with some cross-district fund transfer imposed by court order. Some funds come from the state, but that is not significant in states in the South, I believe (without doing a great deal of validation). I live in Houston. When the time came to consider school, we moved from the cheap rental in the poor area to the old small house next to the train tracks, in the good neighborhood. For those from Houston, we moved from east of the Medical Center to West University Place, with the train tracks in our backyard, and oil pipelines under the grass. Just looking at the schools was enough for us. In the bad side of town there is a tall chain-link fence around the school, to keep the kids in and the bad out. I never went in to see what it was like inside, but the fence turned me off. Our school now benefits from a lot of parental involvement, and local care. The school district is the same for both, however. Is there community here? Yes. As good as the Heights? No. Is Black bad. Not exactly. It is more of local attitude. I know proud Black neighborhoods, with good spirit. Mixed areas, too, that show what happens when people care. And many really depressing areas, with a majority of Black or hispanic residents. It is easy to generalize, and a mistake. I have been to the suburbs, around here. If they lack sidewalks, that is a bad sign. No walking, just driving, for them. Austin and San Antonio have some fine old areas, in the city, where I would not mind living. But not until the kids have finished school.
• The suburb where I grew up (between Dallas and Ft. Worth) was an older, established one. The houses aren't nearly as expensive (or cookie-cutter grand) as the new suburbs, but you know your neighbors and the schools are great (my sister is doing the International Baccalaureate program in Jr. High ... the first school in TX to offer it). I would say that your friend's experience with the broken ankle is a Dallas thing, but that would be a little too much Ft. Worth=good!, Dallas=bad! Instead, I think it's a "new suburb" thing. Too many people in new suburbs are just waiting to trade up. They don't want to build a life there, so why bother knowing the neighbors? If/when I get to buy a place, I'd like to either be in a residential part of a downtown area (best choice) or an older, funkier suburb. (Also, I'm missing Houston, where I went to college. I'd love to get an old bungalo style house in the Heights or Montrose... *sigh*)
• I live in East York Hee. You say "East York" like it's 1996. /amalgamation humour I live there too
• The Dallas/Ft. Worth area is almost solid suburb, really, it's just some suburbs are older than others... the new ones have become caricatures of suburbia: titanic zones, enormous central strip-malls, and you get to the grocery store by going on the highway. I'm not necessarily kidding. But then there are incongruous little folksy small-town downtown drags scattered in the middle of them. And, on the other hand, there are pockets of pricey new Urbanist areas popping up, which is interesting and welcome. But people living in these neighborhoods aren't radically friendlier than the far-out suburbanites; mostly they're the same types of people minus kids. It's interesting how the abandoned-and-screaming-in-Rowlett experience mirrors those stories of Bad Old New York City where everybody closes the windows when they hear you being murdered. I don't know what it means, but it's interesting.
• Amalgamation is all a conspiracy. It never really happened. Long live Etobicoke!
• Man, Earwax and merdithea, you're really making me homesick. I don't have kids, but I was raised in Houston. To get me in the gifted and talented program in HISD, they'd have had to put me on the bus to somewhere over near the Ship Channel at 5 AM. Unsurprisingly, they opted to send me to private school instead. So I totally understand about the tiny place next to the good school. And totally with you on the sidewalk thing. ActuallySettle, I can't speak to how many black people live in the Heights--historically, it's not a black neighborhood like the Fifth Ward--but one of the "downsides" of the Heights is that it's gentrifying out of being a Hispanic neighborhood, and a lot of the billboards are in Spanish. I don't think of this as a downcheck. In terms of food, in fact, it's a plus.
• you get to the grocery store by going on the highway. I'm not necessarily kidding. No shit. I live in suburban North Dallas, and I have to cross I-635 (LBJ Expressway) to get to Wal-Mart. No offense intended, native Houstonian (I've never been there.) Probably is just a Dallas thing, as it seems to me that nobody here really gives a shit about anyone except themselves.
• Rolypolyman, this isn't the film you're looking for, but it's very similar: Suburbia
• On Oahu (Hawai'i), we don't really a "bad" part of town. We have poor parts (most of the island), but nothing really dangerous. From poorest to wealthiest: South West North West Central South North South East North East I'd draw an ascii map of the island, but it would get pulverized by the different fonts. Each of these spots have their own mini-rich and mini-poor hoods, but in general, if you start leeward and work your way windward, you'll see an increase in income. It is Hawai'i, so it is somewhat utopian rolypolyman. Of course, "cheap" land still costs into the hundreds of thousands, and public schools are so underfunded that children have to share text books (think homework), and have to bring their own soap and toilet paper from home. But the weather's always nice, and people are courteous. They're not great drivers, but they'll wave an apology when they drive bad.
• Long live Etobicoke! Yeah, and east of Victoria Park is the mystical land of Scarborough where every house looks the same. I'm not twelve, you know.