Category Archives: Urban Living

Moving Back to the City

For baby boomers, moving to the suburbs when they got married and had children was part and parcel of the American Dream. It seemed to be the natural order of things that you would leave behind the strife and stress of the city for a greener, safer place where you could raise your children.

Recently, though, I stood at the kitchen window watching an industrious gopher unearth a truly gopheramazing amount of dirt into the middle of my back yard. As the excavation of his ever-expanding underground empire began to pile up, I began to think. That back yard is little used now, (except by the gopher), and the swing set is long abandoned by children who have gone off to make lives and families of their own.

I began to remember the care-free days of apartment living. No weeds to pull, no lawns to mow, no roof tiles to replace. Is it time to move back to the city?

The fact of the matter is, according to U.S. census data, large city centers are growing faster than their suburban counterparts for the first time in more than 90 years. As we discussed in a previous post, both baby boomers and the adult children they raised are looking for “urban villages”, where they are not tied to their automobiles as tightly and can walk and bike to the places they need to go. Continue reading

Helping the Environment One Storage Unit at a Time

apartment-buildingThere are a number of emerging studies that suggest that urbanization is actually good for the environment. The theory goes that by condensing a large population into a smaller geographic area, you save more natural open space from being destroyed. Also at play are economies of size: with smaller spaces to heat, cool, and light, electricity use per capita in urban areas is actually lower than in suburban or rural areas. Those who study this also say there are fewer carbon emissions per person in an urban area where many people are using public transportation, rather than suburban areas where there is often one person per automobile. Continue reading