yeah, but you can walk outside and hop right on a train or bus or walk to some real culture instead of having to drive 1/2 hour, park, etc to experience life. Its fine if you like to stay home a lot, as I stated, married with kids...staying home probably has a lot more appeal than being mobile, eating out, going to events, etc..sure you can do it in the burbs but after a while it becomes a hassle and you settle into the typical suburban mindset.
A cliche is a cliche, no matter if you're living downtown or living in the burbs. Details Magazine is the Applebee's of the urban set.
I really like condos but even if the economy was stable how could you buy one as a real estate investment when a condo tower is going up just a block or two away? This market gets saturated and fast. An example; this is the future vision of South Waterfront and every block is slated to be a condo or apartment tower:
As an investment, they're even shittier. BTW, if you're looking for an investment, buy the worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford. Don't be tempted to fix the inside before you've addressed the outside first--roof, flashings, gutters, siding, windows, foundation and yard slope. Know if you see a home pre-1978, paper wrapping on pipes and tiles will have asbestos. The paint will have lead. Price in those remediations costs (some can just be covered, others have to be completely removed. Once you've made the house safe and dry, focus on the systems--electrical, HVAC and plumbing. Only when that is done, do you work on the interior finishes. The homes before 1910 generally weren't well built. The homes between then and pre-war were well-built, but the exterior and systems are generally a mess. Houses built in the 50s through the mid-70s are ugly, but they were built like tanks. After that, engineers got involved in the homebuilding process, durability went down because everything went to minimum standard.
I wonder what % of people who live downtown in condos (etc) actually do that, vs the % of those who live downtown in condos (etc) who don't vs those who live downtown in condos (etc) who live downtown in condos because they like to tell people they can just walk outside and "hop right on a train or bus" and get some "real culture" instead of driving a half an hour to a park to 'experience life'. It's probably about the same % of people who owns trucks and 4x4's and never use them off road, AND probably at a much lower % then the people who pull out that cliche during conversations on a message board, only because they heard it repeated enough times that they want to sound clever when they say it.
yeah, i'm sure they end up eating a chili's whenever they're hungry too. Face it, the type of person who lives in a downtown condo is very different than a person who wants to live in an "upscale suburban neighborhood". priorities are different. if you buy in for location, you're buying in for the convenience for what the area offers. downtown, you have culture, nightlife, and ease of access to the lively sections of town. In the burbs, you're there for space, convenience, good schools and "safety".
sure, but they definitely have different priorities. there is a certain lifestyle associated with living in a busy, high demand area and one for living in the burbs. To say they're the same is rediculous.
why does it have to be an "upscale suburban neighborhood"? not all suburban neighborhoods are upscale. Hell, some of them are barely scale, let alone upscale. ah, the old "safety" in quotes, which we all know means "whites don't want blacks/minorities near them so they move to the suburbs".
yeah. its true. Suburbs = teh whiteness. Its clean and washed for the masses. days spent at the mini-mall. nights spent at home. In Portland, the suburbs are a vast array of intel engineers in mini-mcmansions obsessing over granite countertops, sub zeros and stainless steel BBQ grills.
also, the houses in the burbs are generally ugly as fuck unless they were build pre-1970. They are ghastly creatures of oppulence that just look shitty. IMO.
You've been hanging in Hillsboro way too much. Track houses are for sure ugly. The same person has the same exact setup 2 houses down.
you have an odd definition of suburbs. I grew up in the suburb, and my parents house wasn't a mini-mcmansion, didn't have granite countertops, and didn't have a stainless steel anything. No one in our neighborhood did either, and no one I knew from school did either. Maybe where YOU grew up in the suburb (what, the west hills? private school-palooza?) that was an issue, but the rest of the suburbs are not near that.
The worst part of the population boom was the houses where all the trees were cut down (on hillsides) and the houses were all the same. And then the people complain when their houses slide when it rains. my personal favorite part of Portland is parts of sellwood and parts of NE. Wide flat streets, lots of parks and old old houses. maybe you are defining suburban different then me.
He has said he went to Jesuit. Im much more of a city person as well, its where I spent most of my youth. But, the main reason why families decide to move to burbs is because they want a better atmoshphere for their kids.
oh? maybe I missed that. I don't remember a lot of what I read. In one eye, out the other. having not gone to Jesuit, I don't know if it's true or not, but I would suspect it's more upper class then the average suburban school in the region.
