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Things which surprised/shocked you about specific US cities
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03-09-2014 6:42pm#1
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I like America suburbia. Have stayed in NJ with cousins in the past and as you say it is white picket fences with plenty of space around each house, big gardens, lovely tree lines avenues.
Now suburbia in Ireland for a most part is housing estates, lines and lines of 3-4 bed semi detatched houes with small boxed gardens. Awful really, thats why I live in the countryside
I suppose to take the opposite Irish cities have very concentrated city centers which means there is a buzz to the area and always something happening day and night (in some cases more so at night). Many larg americans cities are dead at night in the center/downtown area. Manahattan is probably an exception although I walked around downtown manahttan (near battery park) with a friend one night around 10am and the place was a ghost town.0 -
I like America suburbia. Have stayed in NJ with cousins in the past and as you say it is white picket fences with plenty of space around each house, big gardens, lovely tree lines avenues.
Now suburbia in Ireland for a most part is housing estates, lines and lines of 3-4 bed semi detatched houes with small boxed gardens. Awful really, thats why I live in the countryside
I suppose to take the opposite Irish cities have very concentrated city centers which means there is a buzz to the area and always something happening day and night (in some cases more so at night). Many larg americans cities are dead at night in the center/downtown area. Manahattan is probably an exception although I walked around downtown manahttan (near battery park) with a friend one night around 10am and the place was a ghost town.
NJ is actually the most densely populated state in the US !! (DC beats it but that's a bit misleading). The exurbia lifestyle where a car is required for everything is very, very different from countryside living. There are some very nice towns in NJ, but there's an awful lot of soulless places best used as a backdrop for the latest zombie apocalypse movie.
But you are right a lot of US cities (especially in the mid-West, but I might be biased) are not recognizable as cities in the European sense. The Battery Park area is basically the financial district. (Poeple would think of "downtown" more like the 20s. to the Village"). Like "The City" area of London once the markets are closed, and the tourists gone there is very little life there - and the residential area on the Hudson is still recovering very severe damage during Sandy.
I find it pretty sad to see the urban sprawl that now stretches Dublin into neighbouring counties and the bad reputation that urban/apartment living has.0 -
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I like America suburbia. Have stayed in NJ with cousins in the past and as you say it is white picket fences with plenty of space around each house, big gardens, lovely tree lines avenues.
Now suburbia in Ireland for a most part is housing estates, lines and lines of 3-4 bed semi detatched houes with small boxed gardens. Awful really, thats why I live in the countryside
I know. The residential parts of Irish towns and cities are very ugly and boring aren't they? Street after street of ugly concrete houses that all look identical. I love how US houses are generally detached, so you have a bit of privacy and space. I also love how over there, you buy the plot of land first and then you hire the builder to build the house. You will generally have loads of different designs to choose from, which leads to great diversity and variety in the houses. Here, it is build 200 houses that all look the same and people have no choice in what they look like.Killer Wench wrote: »The problem with gentrification is that it usually involves expelling the black and brown residents who have lived in that neighborhood for generations. They are priced out of the market because their neighborhood has become "trendy". It's pure elitism and classism.
It's got nothing to do with racism (I know you didn't specifically mention the word, but I will seeing as you brought up black and brown residents) or elitism or classism. It's got everything to do with economics and capitalism. People who own property/houses/land/apartments are going to want the people who can afford to pay the most to live in them. If that is hipster, young professionals earning $250,000 a year, versus a family living on social welfare or on a very low wage, who do you think they want to rent or sell to. Who would you want to rent or sell to if you owned an apartment block or a house?
It happens here too, not just in the US. There are plenty of people in Dublin who grew up in the traditional working class or lower middle class neighbourhoods that are close to the city. Their families may have lived there for generations. But there is no way that their kids, or anyone just starting out in life now, are going to be a able to afford to buy there, as the area has has become too trendy (aka expensive) for first time buyers. It's been happening to several generations of my family since the 1940's. In the US, people of colour are usually the hardest hit by all this. As they are usually the ones on the lower end of the socio economic spectrum, more of them would tend to live in run down, urban areas, but I don't that that there is a grand master plan anywhere to "expel them" from cities.0 -
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