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Let's talk about finding a new place to live!
1ddqd
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My SO has mentioned that she would love to live in another part of the country for a while. She also has a dream of owning and running her own restaurant/bakery. I thought, why not do one better and find the ideal place in the country to put start her business? While she goes through the planning and research stages I figured I'd quietly research the place best suited to her.
I've only ever lived in Dallas so I'm not too familiar with the scenes of other cities. Where are the best places you've lived (or want to live)? I'm looking at the east coast (from Virginia to Maine), but honestly, Dallas is a pretty great little city. The highways have been improved upon continuously for over 40 years and there's only really bad traffic when there's an accident. The city seems to be pretty friendly to small business and the crime rate hasn't seen significant spikes since the recent down turn in the economy.
There is a big restaurant scene here. There's a saying that if it can't make it in Dallas, it can't make it anywhere, so lots of places open their test spot here before testing in LA or NYC. It's that sort of competition that has her worried, not to mention the lack of decent "urban" areas in which to place a "local" sort of restaurant/bakery. She likes the walking sort of scene for foot traffic, wihch is why we're looking at those so-called "picturesque" downtowns where you can walk about the shops owned by the locals. There are only really a handful of areas like that (McKinney Ave "uptown" area is probably the most "posh").
What are your cities like?
*edit*
Just to clarify, this isn't about ME finding/moving across country. If you've moved or spent significant amounts of time elsewhere due to work, I want to hear about it.
I've only ever lived in Dallas so I'm not too familiar with the scenes of other cities. Where are the best places you've lived (or want to live)? I'm looking at the east coast (from Virginia to Maine), but honestly, Dallas is a pretty great little city. The highways have been improved upon continuously for over 40 years and there's only really bad traffic when there's an accident. The city seems to be pretty friendly to small business and the crime rate hasn't seen significant spikes since the recent down turn in the economy.
There is a big restaurant scene here. There's a saying that if it can't make it in Dallas, it can't make it anywhere, so lots of places open their test spot here before testing in LA or NYC. It's that sort of competition that has her worried, not to mention the lack of decent "urban" areas in which to place a "local" sort of restaurant/bakery. She likes the walking sort of scene for foot traffic, wihch is why we're looking at those so-called "picturesque" downtowns where you can walk about the shops owned by the locals. There are only really a handful of areas like that (McKinney Ave "uptown" area is probably the most "posh").
What are your cities like?
*edit*
Just to clarify, this isn't about ME finding/moving across country. If you've moved or spent significant amounts of time elsewhere due to work, I want to hear about it.
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If you don't mind getting raped on your taxes, Vermont is beautiful.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
What is it like to be so wrong all the time, _J_?
Personally I consider Chicago to be the best city around, but then I am biased due to being a local and in love with architecture. Even so, it's got everything you could ever want, and then some, while actually letting a normal person live there. There are more than a few neighborhoods that would probably fit the bill for what you're talking about with a classic walkable urban sort of feel. Or you could look at the 'burbs which are actually their own city that just sort of gotten surrounded by the sprawl over time (Aurora or Naperville are basically tiny cities with a little over 150k people, and you're just a short train ride away from the Loop if you want to go have some fun) or the closer streetcar suburbs like Oak Park, though that one's pretty pricey.
That said, I work in a bakery in Evanston, just north of Chicago. The baking industry is both growing and struggling right now. The organic/artisan side of it is extremely profitable, but also takes the most skill to do right. In the past two years three different bakeries within 15 or so miles of us have failed after being open between 6 months and a year. Restaurants are even bleaker, maybe a dozen that ordered bread from us wholesale have closed, and all were Zagat rated and extremely high quality places. If you're going to do this, you need to find a niche that's not being filled, or being filled poorly.
i lived in kentucky for a spot, it was glorious weather aside from the occasional crazy-ass-tornado in town.
Short version: Move where you really want to live, then figure the rest out.
Great foodie town. Top notch public transportation. Fairly affordable. You have the Oregon coast (all public) about an hour and a half west, and the mountains an hour and a half east.
At least come and visit us
Boston has the National Seashore and apple picking.
You lose.
But going back to the start, while I really like Boston its an expensive area, it gets cold and the weather is tough on some people, and if you're mainly focusing on the best place to open a bakery its likely not the best place.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Maybe I'm taking the wrong approach to this topic though, since this really isn't the place to get help on business decisions. I know that for me, I want to live in a very dense city, and honestly NYC is the only place in the entire US that seems to qualify. All of our other cities are so spread out that they're basically nothing but a collection of suburbs.
Yeah, Waltham would probably be better for that, although the competition might be a little stiff. What's it like out west?
o_O
I was actually really impressed with what I saw of St. Louis. Still haven't spent much time in Chicago though.
Would that be counting Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop?
Edit: wrong quote
edit: and St. Louis is HORRIBLE. It's a city that sprung up in the 19th century, and it's been on the decline ever since. It's hard to go anywhere without seeing an abandoned building.
You were probably in the wrong part of Boston. The age of the city means that many areas are spread out because they're already occupied by small buildings. I mean, there's not much that can compete with downtown Manhattan, but must of the city can beat out Hell's Kitchen and the other boroughs.
Really? Chicago is just a quaint little burg in comparison to Paris where you have to go 10 miles out of of the city itself in order to find anything that isn't a 5 storey Mansard row house?
Tokyo I'll grant you, but that's because it is the most populous city on the bloody planet. It has more residents than the entirety of Canada. 10 of them would house everybody in the US. They don't really have any other option, considering. More or less the same with Seoul. Asia is on a different level, but I can't think of any Western city that makes Chicago look like a sprawled out megalopolis. Or plenty of other American cities, for that matter.
And good luck actually living in Manhattan.
NYC: 10,606/km² (Manhattan alone: 27,490.9/km²)
Boston: 4,850/km²
Chicago: 4,816/km²
Philadelphia: 4,140.1/km²
St. Louis: 2,209.2/km²
I think Pi-r8 has a point, at least. For what it's worth, Paris is 24,948/km².
Which is artificially inflated due to the anachronistic way Paris's boundaries are set, much to the chagrin of its Mayor. You might as well compare it solely to the Loop and Near North side.
Or, put another way;
London: 4,761/km² (less 'dense,' you'll note, than Boston and Chicago)
Do you honestly believe that Paris is 5x as dense as London and only comparable to the island of Manhattan?
That this:
is as densely populated as this:
This is getting ridiculous.
11th Arrondissement, Paris: 40672/km²
So, yes, it seems quite plausible Paris has a lot of people, perhaps five times London's density (for comparison, the densest borough of London, Kensington and Chelsea, comes in at 14724/km²). You only need to stack people a little bit upwards to achieve a O_o population density; if you see lots of skyscrapers, those are offices. Just a tip.
edit: but, yes, this has increasingly little to do with what a city actually feels like. But I think it is clearly true that NYC is dramatically more dense than any of the other US cities held up as similar in this thread. I wouldn't call any of them quaint or small towns, but if someone is used to NYC I can see how that feeling might occur.
edit #2: y'know, I'm looking at the two photos you posted and it struck me that it is self-evident that the first photo would be more dense than the second, so I'm not really sure why you picked those photographs. People generally don't live in skyscrapers; the vast majority of people in NYC stay in those short stumpy <20-storey buildings next to those skyscrapers. So an area with a lot of skyscrapers is actually pretty depopulated. On the other hand, the miles and miles and miles of short buildings crowded close together, as in your first photo, does imply an extremely dense neighbourhood.
A district which takes up an area of 3.5 kilometers. The entire 'city' takes up 87 km in comparison to London (1,708km), Chicago (606km), and New York proper (1,215 km). It really is only comparable to Manhattan because they haven't pushed the border beyond the medieval wall, so to speak, even though its grown a little bit in the last few hundred years. It's the equivalent of saying that Brooklyn and everywhere else is a suburb. So thank you for proving my point that their boundaries are awkward at best.
And Paris' population is a third of that of London and about 100k less than Chicago proper. A great deal of those skyscrapers are actually condos, and while you may only have to stack a few apartments on top of each other to get 'o_O' density it helps even more if you pretend the city stops halfway out. La Defense, for instance, is not considered 'in' Paris, even though it very much is.
Well, okay. Take a map of Paris and the surrounding area, there's one on Wikipedia. You're right that the border of Paris is about as meaningful as that of Manhattan, so let's expand it so it becomes more analagous to that of London.
Adding the Inner Ring gives it a population of 6.5 million, which I trust is respectable compared to London's 7.5. The area is nonetheless just 760km², however, and unsurprisingly the density is about 8501/km², dramatically higher than London's 4761/km². It is, if anything, very similar to New York City, which is yes much more dense than London. I trust it becomes more similar if we can add in the urban areas of the outer ring, but I don't speak French and would rather not trawl through the appropriate statistics.
Anyway! Anyway! I have no horses in this race, honestly. Based on the rough numbers a few minutes of Googling threw up, if someone comes up to me and says that he thinks that Chicago feels like a collection of suburbs, I'm going to feel confident in saying that NYC is yes pretty much the only city in the US that is going to be sufficiently peopled to his taste. Of London, only anywhere near the center, which presumably simulates Brooklyn more than Manhattan. There aren't any 27490.9/km² districts in London.
And of course, the Blue Ridge Mountains are always nice.
Only real problem is that if you don't already have a job...there doesn't seem to be much opportunity here. I've been looking for a job for months, and I can't find anything. Of course, the economy blows and I'm not quite out of college yet, so it may just be my bad timing.
Western NC is awesome.
However, 5 months of the year its an unrelenting ice laden hell. Still, 7 months of nice vs 5 months of "Oh god my eyes just froze open"...
Ooh, and the city government seems at least vaguely competent compared to chicago which is the city it's most like
But Portland has a tremendous amount of great things going for it. The weather is pretty mild with the occasional snow storm that seems to hit here every other year. The bar and food scene is great. And if you are into beer, there really isn't a better place to be. While Portland isn't as big as SF, Seattle and LA, we still get a fair amount of big entertainment acts. As it was mentioned before, we are equal distant from mountains and beaches.
I have always considered moving to Chicago or Cincinnati for a change. But I suppose that will have to wait a few years.
Yes when talking about some of the largest metropolitan centers of business, industry, culture, science, education and population in the world, quaint is what comes to mind.
ed - Also when comparing very large cities, population density is not a good measure. London's urban area is more densely populated than its city proper. The fact is saying any of the above is a quaint small town, even in comparison to the largest supercities in the world, is ridiculous and rings of trying too hard to be cosmopolitan.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Speaking as a Floridian, both Sarasota's downtown and Tampa's Ybor City are pretty cool. The latter has a ton of character, but it can also get kind of scary if you wander into the wrong areas.
Man, Chicago must be so f-ed when it comes to governance. When I was growing up Minneapolis governance was always the one known as the most disfunctional. There are a lot of weird power struggles that occur amongst its various districts when compared to its sister city. That said, Minneapolis has done far better for itself than St. Paul despite that disfunction.
Anyhow, you probably don't want to choose a foody city or a dense urban area since they are probably already being served, or even overserved in the current economy. A medium sized city that has been growing, but at a sustainable rate is probably your best bet at the moment. But really, your best bet would be to find some cities in an area you think you would like to move to and then research the economic conditions of the area. The census and Fed should have some measures of the local economy, and you can also call the local chamber of commerce for information. Food preperation is a field where there is significant competition and starting out you will be at a disadvantage, so you want to minimize the pain.