What I learned about myself by moving to the suburbs (hint: it has to do with density)
I was a city snob.
It’s true. Despite being born in the Houston burbs (somewhere between Spring and Humble) and raised in the Atlanta burbs (Lawrenceville in Gwinnett County), I didn’t find my true “home” until I was in college. Georgia Tech is about a mile from Downtown Atlanta, on the other side of the highway from Midtown Atlanta, and nestled smack dab in the middle of an…interesting neighborhood (lemme just say we were highly discouraged from wandering too far from campus), It was there that I learned to love the city. The density. The access to just about anything. The variety of people, the weirdos, the black kids, the hispanic kids, the white kids, the mingling of everything just felt….right to me?
From my freshman year in 1996 to 2018 I lived within 5 miles of downtown Atlanta. My NYC and DC friends are rolling their eyes at me right now thinking “city? you didn’t live in the city. you lived in a city suburb”. They’re probably right. Either way, the idea of living 20 miles from the city made my brain slowly melt down as if you’d put a styrofoam box of Chinese leftovers in the microwave.
What I loved about the city was the accessibility of everything. In our last neighborhood in ATL, Kirkwood, my barber, my favorite mexican restaurant, our weekly breakfast spot, and the shady gas station (word up Valero on Hosea) were all within walking distance of our house. I was rarely in my car for more than a few miles. I could get to the subway in a 10 minute walk in 2 different directions. Everything I needed was right there. Even a late night back alley illegal gambling spot was at my fingertips. I never wanted to leave.
But then In 2018 my family and I moved from Atlanta to Seattle. We wanted to be closer to family and to be closer to my wife’s new job. Naturally we’d move into the city similar to what we did in Atlanta.
Ha. Hahahahahaha. Reality had yet to hit me over the head like Marshawn Lynch doing a touchdown dance on my head.
You probably already know what dawned on me. Seattle is a west coast city full of Microsoft and Amazon and Zillow millionaires (and one of the highest per capita rates of billionaires in the US). In 2018 a modest 1500 square foot home in a decent neighborhood in Seattle would cost us around $1,000,000. THAT’S ONE MILLION DOLLARS YOU GUYS. And this is before the COVID real estate bubble would turn housing prices into a pressure cooker on high.
On top of that, the commute for my wife would be brutal from the city. So we rented a house in the burbs in a neighborhood called Finn Hill. It juts out on a peninsula overlooking Lake Washington with an amazing view of the Cascade mountains. It was beautiful. And I was miserable.
All of my concerns about suburban living came true. The closest anything to our house was 3 miles away. I couldn’t walk anywhere in under an hour. I couldn’t bike anywhere (Seattle, if you haven’t heard, is hilly as shit). The isolation, in combination with a big transcontinental move at the age of 40, put me into a depression. I needed to get back to the city! It was right around this point that I’d heard of the 15 Minute City. In my opinion, the 15 minute city doesn’t describe a city or a suburb or an exurb or any of that. It describes a way of life. From their site:
Everyone living in a city should have access to essential urban services within a 15 minute walk or bike. The 15-Minute City Project is designed to help access-focused urban transformations be what we need them to be: ambitious, inclusive, measurable and effectively implemented.
Practically speaking what the 15 minute city describes is that all of the things you know and love and NEED are clustered together. The barber shop, that Mexican place you love, the transit center, the grocery store, and your favorite pub are all within 15 minutes via bike or foot. And these places are specifically designed NOT to accommodate cars! So maybe it wasn’t the “city” that I missed? Maybe it was the density? Maybe Kirkwood and all these other places I’d lived in the city that i loved were in fact their own 15 minute cities?
After a year of living in a rental, we started to look for something to buy. We both wanted to be closer in but we knew it wouldn’t work for us to be in the city. So we looked a bit farther north in a suburb called Bothell. We found a house about a mile from Bothell’s downtown area and almost immediately my thoughts on the burbs changed. I was walkable to a barber shop, coffee shops, restaurants, and a handful of bars (sadly, no sketchy gas station with a backroom poker setup has been found yet). I was happy. In the burbs. And then it struck me.
It wasn’t the “city” that I loved. It was the density. It was the accessibility of things that I needed to be happy. I even added an ebike to my commute to make things even easier on myself. No more parking garages, angling for parking spots, wondering when I’m going to get my next workout (yes, you can get a workout on an ebike). Bothell was a 15 minute city!
So when we embarked on our big roadtrip, we purposefully sought out a few things:
We wanted 15 minute cities. We looked at LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Denver and eliminated all of them because we specifically wanted cities we could easily get across
Bike friendly towns. We were only going to have 1 car for 4 months and honestly we really only used that for drives longer than 5 miles. Everything else would be via bike.
Proximity to National Parks. We like hiking ok?