Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
Why are you glad you stayed in the city? My parents had the same dilemma but opted for suburbia. I spent my first 11 years in a very dense city core (London) and the next 9 in a leafy Halifax suburb. I love my downtown Toronto neighbourhood but am glad I grew up in the suburbs. Not saying there's any right or wrong, but curious.
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Well, for starters, we don't live in some small downtown highrise condo, we live in a city neighborhood in a large 2-floor condo unit in a Chicago 3-flat on a quiet tree-lined residential side street. We certainly don't live in the epicenter of the action, but our neighborhood still gives us plenty of stuff to walk to, and we live one block away from a brown line stop that gives us easy access to downtown and its myriad amenities.
Chicago has an absolute crapload of these types of family-friendly mid-range urban neighborhoods. Pop. density in the 20 - 35K ppsm range makes them pleasantly walkable, but because every block is bisected by an alley, car ownership is typically not egregiously onerous (but it's also not required). And best of all, because Chicago ain't coastal, you don't need a 7-figure net worth to purchase a family-sized home in a decent city neighborhood here.
The biggest compromise we had to make for choosing to stay in an urban city neighborhood was not having the "American Dream" detached SFH with the big back yard, but we were ultimately ok with that because our 2,300 SF 3 bed/3 bath condo is still very comfortable for our family of 4, we just have neighbors who live in the two units above us. And while our outdoor living space is certainly tighter than it would have been out in the burbs, we still have a decent sized deck off of the kitchen, a large shared patio in back of the building, and a small front yard with some actual grass that our kids make the best of. When we need actual large open space to kick a soccer ball around or fly a kite, the elementary school one block south of us has a large athletic field that is open to the public when it's not being used for PE classes. And within a ten minute walk we have access to 4 large city parks, and numerous city playgrounds and pocket parks.
All in all, I really couldn't be happier about where we ended up planting ourselves to raise our kids. I was born to be a city neighborhood person.