In Praise Of Urban Living

Oh, a rare and welcome thing, an article about people who actually like living in cities and actually value things other than the square footage of the house they can purchase:

But those plotting a hasty exit to the suburbs (the space! the schools! the space!) may want to consider the experience of others who went before them, only to double back within a year.

“I’m never leaving the city again; I’m terrified of leaving the city,” said Anna Hillen, 42, summing up the prevailing sentiment among the repatriates interviewed for this article.

Ms. Hillen, her husband, Gerry McConnell, 42, and their son, Duncan, who was 1 at the time, vacated their TriBeCa loft in December 2001, shortly after 9/11. They bought a 6,000-square-foot newly built McMansion on three acres in the upscale, semirural Westchester enclave of Pound Ridge, N.Y., not far from the country homes they had rented before.

“It was just a giant, echoing space,” Ms. Hillen said, adding, “It was great to have all that room, but we never used it,” except to put up extended family on holidays.

Once settled, Ms. Hillen, a stay-at-home mother, embarked on a fruitless hunt for companionship. “Out there, you have to work at being with people,” she said. “In a year, I got one play date for my kid. We joined the Newcomers Club, and the day we put our house on the market, they finally called. You’d go to the library for a reading and there would be no one there.” She added, “You’re a lonely, desperate housewife with nothing to do.”

Even the playgrounds were desolate. “And on the rare occasions there was somebody there and you struck up a conversation,” she said, “they would literally move away. And they didn’t encourage the kids to play together. We were so shocked.”

She spent every Wednesday in the city. At home, she busied herself with gardening. Still, she said, “you could only garden so many hours a day. And Duncan – I mean, you wouldn’t think at one and three-quarters they’re set in their ways but they are. He wouldn’t go outside. In the summer I would stand outside with a Popsicle and go, ‘Come on, honey, you can have a Popsicle if you come outside.’ But he would just stand at the door.”

[…]

It’s worth noting that the suburbs are populated by plenty of satisfied former city dwellers harboring few, if any, regrets. Fully expecting to join the ranks of the contented, most of the couples interviewed here said their motivation for moving out was linked to a vague understanding that it was a prerequisite for raising children – a normal transition from one phase of life to the next, and one in which they would find plenty of company.

“Everybody says when you get the baby, you leave the city,” said Ronn Torossian, 31, the president and chief executive of 5W Public Relations in Midtown Manhattan. In July, he and his wife, Zhana – who have a 1-year-old daughter – sold their large one-bedroom on West 68th Street and Broadway and moved into a 3,500-square-foot split-level house in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., near friends. With the help of Ilan Bracha, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, who had sold their apartment on West 68th, they moved back in December to a three-bedroom rental a block south from where they started.

“It’s like death out there,” said Mr. Torossian, a fast-talking Bronx native who resisted the comparatively tempered pace, like food delivery that stops at 9 p.m. and a newspaper delivered at 7:30 a.m.

“I can’t wait 15 minutes in a bagel store to get two bagels,” he said. “I can’t have people looking at me like I’m crazy when I walk in and put a quarter on the table to get my paper and walk out. I go home and there’s, like, people doing their lawn every five minutes. They seem like normal people but they spend, like, hours working on their lawn.”

What pushed him over the edge, he said, was the “drama” of his commute by car into Midtown. At 5 a.m., when Mr. Torossian ordinarily made the trip to avoid traffic, it took as little as 17 minutes. But coming home took three or four times that (two hours or more in foul weather), partly because of the bottleneck at his Midtown garage. “Calling ahead doesn’t work because everybody leaves at the same time,” he said. “If you don’t bribe the guys there, you wait 15 to 20 minutes for your car.” He said he spent $100 a week in tips.

His miasma has evaporated since his return to the city last month. “I feel like I’m walking on water,” he said. “It’s just a whole level of stress eliminated from my life. I go out a lot more, it’s allowed me a lot more time to spend with my daughter, it’s less stressful at work. It’s phenomenal.”

The amenities and ability to walk are the biggest reason I like the city, of course, but the thing about people working on their lawns is another reason why I’ve never had the slightest discontent with urban living–if there’s one thing I have no desire to do, it’s spending the majority of the leisure time I could be using to spend reading or listening to music or watching a ballgame or meeting friends or seeing a movie etc. etc. engaging in work that’s even more boring and tedious than the worst aspects of my actual job. My parents, although they pay for landscaping and housecleaning services, still manage to generate absolutely staggering amounts of busywork for themselves around the house. I’ll pass without a second thought, thanks.

I hasten to add, of course, that 1)I don’t have and don’t particularly want kids, and 2)many people will prefer suburban life and that’s great; I don’t say that my priorities are better, just different. But I am baffled by the Glenn Reynoldses of the world who can’t imagine why everyone might not want to live in suburban Houston…