I agree with you entirely about different strokes for different folks and freedom of movement. What I wish the car lobby would understand is that all movement is not motorized. Some of us actually live in the neighborhoods that suburbanites only drive through, and their roads can easily become hazards and barriers.
My daughters walk home from school, I ride a bike to work, and my wife could and should, but that’s another story. Here this is not an unusual pattern. It could be much more common than it is if we zoned for mixed use neighborhoods and planned transportation better.
By the way, I didn’t like New York either. Lived there for two years and am glad to have had the experience, but that was enough.
If you like living in a city, have at it. Just make sure you & your wife limit your employment to jobs within mutual biking distance, and make sure that as you grow older, you don’t get arthritis or any injuries.
Me? I think I’ll keep my 2 acres, 3 dogs and 3 horses. It took my wife & I 25 years of working and saving to get it...
On the other hand, some people just don’t want to be bothered dealing with close neighbors.
We have had the worst possible luck with neighbors that anyone could imagine.
In our first home, we had a huge limousine pull up with four men in over coats, who sat there all day long for three days, watching my next door neighbor’s house. She said that her ex-husband was the head of NASA and that he had hired the men. I didn’t believe her.
In California, we had a child molester on one side a woman who went after every man on the street on the other, and waged a war against their wives.
When we first moved to WA, we had a drugged out fisherman, who actually was a pharmacist, but lost his license for sampling his own wares, we a socio-pathic kid, who was terrorizing the neighborhood and was caught several times in women’s bedrooms, while the slept, before he was finally put away for a few years. The day he got out of jail, he tracked us down to our new house and started calling us.
In the next house, we chose a gated community, where we had a man who was under house arrest for international fraud (he had somehow swindled the pilots of Air Canada out of their pensions). Next door to him, we had another woman, who could only be described as a nymphomaniac. She not only came on to my husband, but she came onto my 15 year old son, and a whole lot of other men in the neighborhood. Then the last straw was this rich guy who moved in next door to us, who told us that he was so old that he could kill anyone he wanted and nothing would happen to him because he would die before they ever sent him to jail.
You folks are easy to spot.