The cities where Americans most want to live
Well we’re not alone in wanting to live in Tampa. We learn from researchers at the Pew Center that Americans want to go South and West, that the top ten places where they want to live are Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento in the West, and Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio in the South. And that Eastern cities were down the list and Midwestern cities at the bottom.
David Brooks in an op ed piece in today’s NYTimes writes that,
“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.”
These places “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.”
I live in Tampa. I’ll have to think about what David says. I know already that my son’s garage is stuffed with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots, boating equipment and other such stuff. And that the social structures are loose, that there is visible social equality among people of different races and classes, that the neighborhoods are friendly, the life style leisured…,
