Quote:
Originally Posted by Locke
I dont know where small towns got their good, wholesome family reputation because thats a huge load of BS.
I know people who moved to Linden because its a nice small town where they can safely raise their kids away from the big, bad city. These people are in for a shock, sure it may be all fun and games now, but when their kids get older reality is going to kick them in the face.
Hell, I just had this conversation over the weekend with a girl and her friend who couldnt believe the number of times they were 'alone' (together) downtown Calgary at night!
Downtown Calgary. At night. Its not downtown Kosovo or anything, its Calgary. A handful of people were killed last year, so few its hardly worth mentioning, and most of them were killed in the suburbs!
I agree with Mike Milbury, the pansification of our society is becoming unreal. So these people are going to move to small towns, great, and then what? When their kids grow up and go to school and need to move to a city for University, what then? Will they need an armed guard? Will their parents move in with them? What happens when they get a job downtown just like daddy has? They're going to be woefully unprepared.
The only perceived benefit of moving to small towns is the lower cost of property, but that comes with its own costs in longer commute times and various other drawbacks.
The moral of the story is: Dont sell yourself the crap about moving out of the big bad dangerous city to raise your family in some haven of a small town. Its just doing you and your family a disservice.
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The whole, wholesome family values, safer streets, raising kids arguement is complete and utter BS. I think the perception has a lot of this has to do with misconceptions of an old history in a completely different country. Cities in the US rotted and decayed in the 70s- early 90s as crime increased and people moved to the suburbs to escape this. This led to a prodominant belief that Big City = gritty poor mess. This perception was only really applicable to Calgary in the sense that property values used to be higher in the outer suburbs vs. more inner city. IE when commutes really weren't an issue a newer bigger house in a community of newer bigger houses was preferrable. On a relative scale the roughest neighborhoods in Calgary in the 1970s and 80s were nothing even remotely approaching the scale that the popular culture that permiated from the US protrayed big city life to be. The complete inverse has occurred post 2000 where it's now more expensive to live inner city vs. outter suburbs.
Back to Airdrie in particular. I can't see how Airdrie is socially distingushable positively from other Calgary outter suburbs. It's 45,000 people in a smattering of the exact same types of housing developments we're seeing in other places in Calgary (And in many cases populated by people who used to live in Calgary's suburbs anyway). A newlywed couple who moves to Airdrie today, will see their first born experience their high school years in a city of 100,000 whose city limits run right into the city limits of another city that has 1.5 million people. The urban developments between the two cities at the border will be virtually indistingushable. The only difference will be an ever more increasingly congested stretch of freeway between Airdire and everything else in the city of Calgary.