Re: We are all Slave now.
 

My ex moved out to the suburbs. I can honestly say that if I moved to the suburbs, I would kill myself.

Some things that would lead me to this:

• Going to a "good" restaurant in a strip mall
• Conversation with other suburban people--I manage to survive it at my daughter's games, but if these people were my only options, forget it
• Doing house and yard stuff
• Knowing which of my neighbors votes for Trump with their little yard signs
• People minding my fucking business ("Well, his car is there, he must be home")
• Commuting
• Car culture
• Idle housewives power walking or whatever
• Malls--holy fuck do I hate malls

I realize people seek where they grew up. But the idea that I would want to design my life such that I don't have to interact with anyone who isn't like me is crazy. Leave my house that has it's own little play area for my kids and is in a neighborhood that no one who doesn't live there has any reason to visit, to get in my car so that I don't have to interact with anyone to drive to a mall to hang out or to some strip mall to have a drink would be torture.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

There are advantages. For example, it's kind of fun to piss off your neighbors by leaving all kinds of shit in your yard.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I can walk to a golf course.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I agree with all of that, even though we bought a house in a part of the city that is sorta like a suburb, aside from having a street grid, sidewalks and things we can walk to. I've gotten used to the yard stuff, the Trump voters (rare overall but right next door!) I was judging for other reasons anyway.

But I gotta still say absolutely not to malls and do what I can to avoid driving. It helps that I can ride a bike to work and for most of my needs.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I can too! Well, assuming that it's not currently flooded because it was built on a wetland. And at least until the Park Board that owns it decides there's no other choice but to return it to a wetland.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I have 300 dinner options--and I'm only talking delivery.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'll definitely endorse drinking with service and bar industry workers. Good hunk of friends in this arena. I don't even pretend to try to keep up.

I drink with a lot of academic medicine types, engineers, o&g people, marketing people, and architects. I don't drink with many lawyers. And usually it's just a mix from various professions who don't talk about work much.

The worst I've ever endured was an evening with mortgage bankers in the early aughts on a trip to Hawaii put on by their bank. Made a free trip to Hawaii almost not worth it, and I've avoided the entire profession (aside from the one friend who took me to Hawaii with him) ever since.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

you counting both Mustang Sallys?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

This one area where the suburbs can catch up. Delivery services in the burbs mean that restaurants have more potential people and can do more interesting things.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

They don't deliver.

The burbs will never catch up. Your pizza and Chinese food sucks. Those are staples. And the fact that restaurants have to pay more people to cover more square mileage of fewer people means it will never work well in the 'burbs.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

One of my friends used to be kind of a hipster. She was involved in one of the early alt-rock radio stations in the area, and thought it was funny when I showed up at a dinner party she was throwing for her mom severely messed up on . . . stuff. Recently, at a party, she was drunkenly blathering on about how much bang for the property tax buck she got in her suburb. Eventually, I just stopped her and said, "If you say one more word about this subject, we will never speak again." She stopped, but was silently resentful.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I just plugged my address into one of the local restaurant delivery services and it came up with . . . 300 dinner options. Ex. Actly. 300.

Whoa.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Every now and then we look at moving to a bigger place, and then realize that to do so, we'd have to move further out, and we quickly end the discussion. We're 20 minutes from anywhere we want to be. We are surrounded by restaurants, within walking distance to the bayou, within biking distance to museums and downtown. If you look at the bullseye that is the Houston map, we're right to the southwest right outside the most center ring, about a mile and a half from downtown. The idea of commuting makes my blood run cold.

Our neighborhood has gentrified considerably in the 16 years that I've been in my house, but it's still the artsy, quirky space I moved to when I came back to Houston, even though some of the cute bungalows have been torn down to be replaced by ridiculous McMansions*. It's a mix of blue collar Hispanic and extreme white collar. It's been the gayborhood for decades. If it were up to Montrose, Beto O'Rourke would already have beaten Ted Cruz fro the Senate seat.

The city is the size of Rhode Island, so almost everyone lives a somewhat suburban life by Thurgreed's standards. The car culture is ridiculous, and the strip mall is king in this town, but some of them are awesome, with Korean restaurants and Mexican sports bars and Japanese Karaoke bars in the same 100 yard space. And the clusters of communities are also amazing.

Ft. Bend County, which is the suburban cousin to the west of Harris County (where Houston is) is one of the most diverse in the country with a population that was 19 percent Asian, 24 percent Hispanic, 21 percent black and 36 percent white in the 2010 census. It's probably even more widely distributed now. And it's almost 50/50 Republican/Democratic. Montgomery county to the North, though, is still pretty white and Republican and I can't imagine a more soulless existence than living there.

But all in all, I'm really happy to be deep inside the city in my small 1000 square foot house. And I love the house and yard stuff.

*The one next door is 4000 square feet on a 5000 square foot lot, 4 bedrooms and 5 1/2 baths. So ridiculous that it's been on the market for over 400 days. We're conflicted in that we want someone to move in (after the developer has endured significant pain), but we know anyone who would buy this thing is just terrible.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Living in a near burb, I can get delivery from the City.

Which is a constant reminder that if I lived in the city I could walk to these restaurants instead. And that means I could work through their wine list.

I'm think I'm going to go home and park on the lawn tonight.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I wasn't referring to procedural gamesmanship. I was thinking of (since I do insurance coverage) the figuring out the answer - the research in any of the 50 states and applying the facts to the law.