David Brooks has a column in The New York Times about a Pew Center study of where Americans would like to live and what sort of lifestyle they'd best like.
It's not The Palmetto State.
The researchers at Pew asked Americans what metro areas they would like to live in. Seven of the top 10 were in the West: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento. The other three were in the South: Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio. Eastern cities were down the list and Midwestern cities were at the bottom...
If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.
These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.
They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.
And, Brooks might have added, where homophobia as an instrument of government policy is over.
Thank ya, Jesus. I've visited all those cities but for Seattle. The last thing I want as a South Carolinian is for our state to become the kind of place that would appeal to those who think Orlando or Tampa are swell places to live.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to live in a relatively poor, God-fearing state...and if I weren't, I'd be gone.
To ummm, Seattle, maybe it's not as dreadful as those other charming burgs I've seen already.
That is a great thing about America....if you don't like where you are, you can move to a place that suits you better.