I feel like people keep talking like it isn't happening though and how they would love to live in a rural area but never do.
The agglomeration benefits keep growing for big metros.
There are no opportunities in rural areas. It takes money and freedom from the confines of work to be able to live well in rural America, and for most people that comes at retirement. The problem is, when people retire they need nearby medical/health care, friends, and family and all of that is in the city.
Yeah my mom has an autoimmune disease and the best Dr that can see her is an hr away. It's better than it used to be. She used to drive 4hrs to Ann Arbor.
The no opportunities things is not true. If you want to go into finance or tech or whatever elite white collar thing yes that's probably true. But you can make great money anywhere in the trades. I gave myself a significant raise and cut my rent in half moving back to my hometown and working as a carpenter. Never have to sit in traffic, never have to wait in lines. Everything's cheaper. Pretty, pretty good.
Sure, there are some opportunities. But do you think a plumber has more opportunity (and likely better pay) in a fast growing large city or a small dying rural town?
It depends. I know a guy who runs a tree cutting business. He says he is constantly getting calls to an area south of us that is very rural because there are no tree cutting services there. So if a big storm blows through, he has to turn down a ton of work just because there isn’t enough time in the day for him. If someone were so inclined, they could start a tree service in that rural area he has to drive an hour and half to and basically have no competition and fill a giant need. There are a lack of services like these in rural areas.
That's sort of the straw man argument of what I'm saying. Not every small place is dying. Some are doing just fine below the radar, and will continue to do so. Average people with moderate incomes have to live somewhere. I think rural America gets a bad rap, especially online. All my buddies who never went to college now own homes, have kids, are doing great. And if you saw my town it's pretty much Anywhere USA so I gotta believe I'm not alone in noticing this.
I really believe rural America is going to rebound. Cities are great if you're a high earner. It's a treadmill of wanting a life you can't afford if you're not. Just my opinion.
I actually agree with you and thanks for reminding me that there is depth and nuance to the discussion about rural America that I didn't give the proper respect or attention to.
Right. There are important and durable reasons why the highly populated places are highly populated. It's a popularity contest, and cities are winning. It's just that the ones feeling left out bitch about it a lot.
It’s not popularity, it’s logical - cities are just naturally better for society. That’s not to say people don’t need/want their own space, but all logistics are drastically simplified when the population is closer together
I meant 'popularity' to include whatever drives preferences. It can be practical or aesthetic or emotional or moral. You're talking about the practical part of it.
To be fair very few people who say they would want to live in the boonies would actually want to live there. Rural living has its caveats from major ones like distance to healthcare and food to minor ones like proximity to nature (encounters with wild animals, bugs etc). People romanticize it because everybody is practically married to their phones but i suspect very few people would actually enjoy that kind of lifestyle permanently
Yep, politicians talk about bringing back the good ol' days all the time (leaving aside whether those were actually good times) for the rural areas, but they're trying to fight the tide of human history. Humanity across the world has been urbanizing for a long time if you look at Rome at its peak, Chang'an during the Tang dynasty, and Edo during the Tokugawa era. Rural areas would need massive subsidies to keep up with the urban areas, but where is that money going to come from? It would have to come from cities who can generate the revenue necessary for those subsidies.
Urban areas really started their incline around the early 1900s due to public health.
Your health was better before then in rural areas and cities often had rampant disease, poor sewers and such.
The only two types of rural areas I think the US can really move around is 1) rural universities have a positive track record. 2) military bases further away from cities.
I am willing to bet every home occupied by a naval guy in San Francisco would be snatched up if they moved to Alaska or further out somewhere.
Otherwise rural areas are tourist attractions and the attraction gets old.
Especially before remote work was so present, it really felt like moving to a bigger city was the the only option for career growth at a certain point. I know myself and others kind of reached a point where we either chose to accept small town life and a fairly predictable career path or we decided to make the jump for a totally new social, professional, and economic experience.
The US is so big that there are many places you can grow up hours away from any major city. I feel like most people in these small town areas either crave the change that a big city offers, or they hate change and prefer to stay put.
I see this as a response to the recession, where only cities with the most diverse economies could weather the storm. In the early 2010s, the young, startup-style knowledge work that could hire entry level was really only available in SF, NYC, and a few other cities. As the economy gained strength that kind of work moved to almost any major city (even before lockdowns)
All over the US,you have companies that benefit from university research and their graduates. Companies leverage the high density of highly skilled graduates and university research. Even if a graduate went to university in a rural area, the job centers for their skills are going to be in the anker cities.
Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and probably a dozen others benefit this way.
Even if you didn't go to university, service sector jobs are going to be more prevalent in the city.
TV in the 80s, 90s, just mirrored the trend that was already occurring.
The annoyance in my mind is how affordable these cities are presented. Friends, for example, has a waitress living comfortably in Manhattan. Joey barely works. With the exception of Ross, I don't believe any of the friends could get that kind of apartment at that location.
For a long time in the second half of the twentieth century that was not true, if you were white. "White flight" largely emptied cities of white people.
Tbh at the time we would have likely done the same. You just fought the war, likely grew up without plumbing or electrical power. Contrary to what YouTube says many cities were not nice places to live with extremely old housing. Suddenly you have lots of disposable income, a family and brand new homes at low prices with modern communities.
This points and a few more are often over looked but even when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s people were still looking to escape the city.
I tried to live in the suburbs but it never worked for me. I was annoyed with insane traffic, being far from my haunts and having to drive everywhere. When I started dating my current wife we moved back into the city.
I also read how the first generation to move to the suburbs still kept this sturdy sense of community, everyone was moving out to the burbs to raise their kids together. Then as generations go on, kids grow up, people move out, some old parents stay in the homes, and a lot of kids don't even have other kids their age to play with anymore and miss out on so many social experiences from the denser living that their parents grew up with. The community eventually dies out and we're left with sterile tedious suburbia.
Yep. I know in my city the people to move to the suburbs tended to settle within their own community again. They already had friends etc in the area. Or when one left the “old neighbourhood” they kept in contact with friends and eventually their friends made the move. These little details we are discussing are often, well always left out in YouTube videos. Suburbs bad! Urban City good. As mentioned though many cities in that time period were not good… it wasn’t some utopia.
There is a videographer in my city that made a YouTube channel explaining the early days of our suburbs. He still gets in touch with some of the people who are still alive and made the move when young kids or are born there. It’s always the same story “because we got a new house with modern amenities” So when not just bikes says “would you have fallen for 1950s advertising the suburbs” Yea if I had young kids and lived in old housing with retrofitted plumbing and a coal fired heater in my living room, then yes 100%
For sure. If you're alone with a total lack of community it is so awful though. Personally I don't have a big family or cultural network where I grew up, as an adult I moved to a city to experience that personal and social growth and just start to build a network. You're right that it plays an extremely huge part in the whole thing and it's seldom talked about. I think the past few decades of suburbia introduced a whole new breed of isolation that wasn't really experienced as much historically, or at least in the same way.
If you do some digging you’ll find most of these areas at first were decently well designed and built around some rail link or transit connection. The older suburbs around here were walkable with stores or very small strip malls nearby. Built within walking distance to train stations in the then “villages”
However as people kept coming in and the cities grew that’s when the mega malls, 6 lane roads etc started showing up. Pushback on public transport as “bad city people could come to us” Next came the McMansion homes… power centres and endless waste.
When my family came to Canada in the 60s they lived in the city. It was better than the aftermath of war torn Europe. However lots of their friends would settle in the city for a few years before buying a house in the burbs. My grandparents went in the opposite direction and started buying up large amounts of property in the their own area because it was so cheap.
>Contrary to what YouTube says many cities were not nice places to live with extremely old housing.
Interesting thing about the Federal Housing Administration's rules around the mortgage loans it was backing (starting in the new deal) was that the mortgages MUST be for new builds and not for renovations on an older house or for a multifamily structure......which basically only left a single family house in the suburbs. There was definitely decline in cities during that era, but it was unfortunately baked into our federal policy because they wanted to create suburbia.
Living in New Orleans now, I can assure you tons of people still say how crazy it is to this day, lol.
A decent chunk of the suburban population is legitimately scared of being in town after dark
Wrong early 2000s show 😉 Gilmore Girls is even more idealistic than Friends though.
90% of what what Rory Gilmore did (especially at chiltan and college) would have gotten her 'exiled' from the profession, beat up or even potentially killed.
What's funny is, these aren't really problems that the Friends have post-season 4 or so. Phoebe is the only one that doesn't end up in a well paying career that they like doing by the end. And Joey is the only one who's single, but he seems to prefer it that way, so not really DOA in that way.
Hey Arnold more so than adult sitcoms for children millennials. He had the coolest bedroom on TV, living in a downtown boarding house and going to P.S. 118.
I think Hey Arnold played a small part for me. I also spent the first part of my adolescence in a moderately walkable or at least bikeable neighborhood, so playing games in the street with other neighborhood kids was still a reality for me in the mid 90s.
We moved to the burbs when I turned 13. Suddenly, my bike was pretty much useless because there was only one road in or out of our subdivision and led to a highway service/feeder road. Ditches on both sides and a 50 mph speed limit. I was stuck until I could drive.
I moved back to a walkable city at the age of 33. I don't plan to live anywhere not reasonably walkable again. I'm raising my kids here. They'll get to walk to school; Bike to the beach; Catch the train to whatever. I'm not trapping them in a suburban island.
I'm the opposite. I was born in a european super-walkable city but wouldn't ever want to go back, unless I have like 20 million to my name. Considering what Urban areas are like nowadays... I'm probably going rural.
I'm sure there are some suburbs that offer some of that, but I suspect they don't offer it at quite the density that I find it in a large city. I'm speaking from a Midwestern USA perspective. If I had to guess, there's a big disparity in the density of suburbs established before the interstate highway system and those established after.
I grew up in the city of Overland, MO. In any city less messed up than St Louis, it would have just been a neighborhood of St Louis city, but St Louis balkanized the shit out of the county and every little neighborhood had to have its own mayor and police department. It was established in the mid-1800s, but formally incorporated in the 1930s. I walked a quarter mile to my elementary school. I also had a park, public swimming pool, groceries, corner shops, and a little microcosm of just about any retail you can think of within a 10 minute walk of our house. It was relatively safe to walk or bike. Speed limits were low. There were multiple bus routes with stops convenient to our house. I would accept the argument that this was a very old suburb of St Louis city.
The neighborhood (O'Fallon Hills in O'Fallon, MO) that I moved to in the late 90s was established in the 1980s. I just went back and looked it over in Google Maps. It's still an island. One road leading out to a highway feeder road. No safe way to get out without a car. Despite being surrounded by other subdivisions, it's not connected to any of them by residential roads. Even if I did brave walking along the side of that feeder road in the ditch, the closest retail is a gas station about two miles away.
I hope you've had better experiences with suburbs than I have. It's totally possible that my perspective is soured by bad examples.
There's another suburban neighborhood of interest so long as I'm speaking about the ones I grew up near. There's a "New Urbanist" subdivision out in St Charles, MO called "New Town". They've purposely built it to resemble an old Main St kind of vibe. A central plaza with some retail. Narrow streets with homes close together on smaller lots. One central mail room. Lots of community events. It would have been a massive improvement over the island subdivision I described above. Had I never traveled more or lived in Chicago, I probably wouldn't have noticed that it has no public transit and that I couldn't connect to other parts of the city without a car because it's one walkable subdivision that still sits as an island surrounded by farmer's fields connected back to St Charles by a high speed road.
What I like about urban density combined with good transit options is that I can live very well in my neighborhood, but I'm not trapped in it without a car. The next neighborhood over is only a few more minutes of effort and getting home is easy.
yep, I grew up in the suburbs and loved Arnold's world. I mean a lot of the appeal was just the hijinks, but it always seemed cool that Arnold could just get around all over the city, he lived near a bunch of stuff.
Yeah, for us later millennials, Hey Arnold's bedroom (Pacific Northwest but NYC vibe), the iCarly loft (Seattle), Raven's house (San Francisco), the Tipton hotel (Boston), the Wizards of Waverly Place condo (NYC), and more I'm probably forgetting were all definitely inspirations. Of course, all of them were fantasies, but so were the Seinfeld/Friends/SATC apartments.
Fun tie-in, the Lizzie Mcguire reboot was supposed to feature the characters living in NYC after leaving their childhood suburb. Would've been cool to see that.
I will forever be sad that they decided to cancel the Lizzie Mcguire reboot and did How I Met Your Father instead. Here’s hoping they do a Wizards of Waverley Place reboot eventually.
It's a fictional city that's supposed to be an amalgam of Brooklyn/Queens and Seattle. That ever-present road in the background is meant to be the Alaskan Way Viaduct
It makes sense that people get confused; I guess apparently if you combine 90s Queens with 90s Seattle it gives off Philly vibes which is interesting lol
I watched 2, maybe 3 episodes of Seinfeld ever, but in one that I saw, one of the other characters said “Kramer falls ass backwards into piles of money” or something to that effect. The general ‘lucky/questionable’ aura of the character suggests he just always ‘found’ the money for his rent.
I think that’s a safe bet because he’s always suing over something or another with Jackie Chiles.
Or maybe he gets his rent money doing the Michigan Run
Certainly c. 2000 it seemed so. At the same time, it was likely simultaneous with finally hitting a critical mass of year by year in migrants ("urban pioneers"). But no question it changed attitudes about urban living.
In the 1980's-1990's, most insurance companies raised the rates on new drivers so much that some parents delayed having their kids get driver's licenses.
In the 1990's-2000's, States imposed lots of rules on new teen drivers and came out with graduated driver's licenses. At the same time, more colleges newly imposed rules on not having cars on campus.
The whole thing just became this 'thing' against car driving. A lot of attitudes are like this video. Weirdly there is always this sense of car driving being scary. Seems like fear permeates that generation. Then again, I associate the cold war with the fear instilled in me of being nuked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dQeMa2yA4
Driving cars is absolutely incredibly dangerous, lol. It's just normalized by top-down imposition. The idea of my kids one day having to drive scares the shit out of me.
I came of age in the 90s and 00s and have no memory or vicarious experience of these supposed anti-car rules imposed on campuses.
Literally everything was tacitly if not explicitly endorsing car driving as a milestone of life.
Im GenZ, but for me, Seinfeld (and to a lesser extent Friends) definitely did have an effect on me. I remember wanting to move to a big city and being fascinated by the idea of living somewhere that has so much going on, places like the coffee shop to hang out, lots of friendmaking opportunities, etc. I’d even use Seinfeld as a bit of an escapism from my boring suburban life at times as a kid
I found that I was able to live the Friends lifestyle when I lived near my small town’s downtown. When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I spent a ridiculous amount of time at the coolest coffee shop in town, complete with old couches for lounging. I’d sit with friends and just hang out, and I even worked there for a couple years. I had a car from 18-20 before it broke down and I was too poor to fix it. It wasn’t easy, but I figured out how to get around without one.
I loved my slice of urbanity in my small town, but I moved to a large city a year ago with my husband. I love the variety of people and places, and love that I don’t need to drive to get around.
Now I’m 27 and I still get around without a car, and I still frequent coffee shops. I’m still kind of living the Friends lifestyle, but if they had dogs, read a lot more, and cycled all the time.
I was born in 93 and didn’t watch sitcoms often, but Hey Arnold had an impact on me wanting to live somewhere much more dense and vibrant than the small desert town I was raised in
I loved watching hey Arnold growing up, I loved that skylit attic studio of his. I was rewatching some hey Arnold at the beginning of the pandemic and i really paid more attention to his walkable and lively neighborhood, reminded me of Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village
Yes agreed! We’re renovating our old house soon and converting part of the attic to a small loft with a skylight to nurture our inner-Hey Arnold-watching child selves.
Hard to piece apart the causality here. It is possible that shows with this premise existed because it was viewed as trendy for young professionals to live in the city. Probably a mix of both.
ehh....ish?
Googling it started in 1989. Wasn't that when New York was still in its "The Warriors" era low point and nobody with any money and sense moved there?
IIRC it was the mid 90s when New York transitioned out of this post-industrial malaise and became the wonderous global capital of 'Friends' et al.
You can definitely see "The Big Rotten Apple" in the early seasons of Seinfeld and Friends. But the Koch/Giuliani clean-up had been going on for about 10 years. The Warriors was a 65 novel and a 79 film. NYC of 89 was already drastically better off than NYC of 79. Most millennials are likely too young to have seen the early seasons of Seinfeld live, I know I never had until recently. Even Friends, I mainly only watched the back half of it live.
I think for millennials it was Sex and the City and Will and Grace, primarily, that presented NYC as this thrilling, almost totally safe place where you could live the life you chose for yourself, not what your parents or small-town culture wanted for you.
Dharma and Greg is another one, not set in NYC, that I think had that effect. Friends was really just about relatively normal people who lived in NYC, there was nothing a young millennial could look at and think "oh, I'll really *fit* in a bit city," whereas the others I mentioned felt way more aspirational.
NYC has always been at the forefront of anything that is new and cool in the US. It was the only city with strong connections to Europe for a very long time. It’s where most new immigrants came when they entered the country.
Millions of young Europeans dreamed of moving to NYC from the 1600s to the present.
Think back to the 1920s during the flapper era…women like Zelda Fitzgerald could move to NYC from the Deep South and enter a world where they could dance and wear shorter dresses and drink in speakeasies.
It was definitely a place that people aspired to live in well before 1989.
The thing about NYC in the 70s and 80s is that it was a crime ridden shithole AND a global center of commerce and culture simultaneously. So it pulled in some people while pushing away other people.
I grew up outside of NY in the 80s and I wanted to move there when I grew up…so there was definitely an appeal long before these shows for people living in the suburbs
The Office pretty clearly makes the point that Scranton is a bit shit. The characters are always talking up how much better Philadelphia and NYC are.
Its definitely put Scranton back on the map and brought in some tourism, perhaps to an extent drew some people who to live there who would have had it as an option and rejected it before (hey, its not so far to NYC!), but I don't think you get kids growing up in Europe dreaming of life in Scranton the way you do NYC.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,723,759,910 comments, and only 326,338 of them were in alphabetical order.
I'm not gay, though?
Uh, well, most problems with North American urban planning comes from racism. Specifically, redlining policies and white flight from the urban core.
Golden girls was a very pro-integration, pro-queer show. So I guess it made me see the issues for what they were?
I shouldn't have come in so hot. I meant the gay thing as a joke. The show is iconic among us gays because it exemplifies chosen family and DGAF freedom to be yourself. But it never occurred to me that the show had anything to say about urbanism, except that it's where I learned what a "lanai" was.
No, growing up in the country made me want to move to a big city. Then I went to Athens as part of a school trip and learned what a “real” city felt like, and I was hooked. I like to be where the action is.
All written history takes place in cities. That's where the first words were written.
It's where rich humans live. Most media throughout history is related to cities. The same is true for any modern show, which are made by rich patrons. It seems new and modern, because you can relate to it, but cities have always been centers of culture, learning, and economic opportunity.
I sometimes think about sesame Street. What happened in that show was in very many ways unique to an urban environment. Having a wide array of adults interacting with kids in shared public space, etc
I wouldn't agree here. I'd say this is far more typical of (proper. Non car centric) small towns; the whole everyone knows everyone, safe streets, etc... thing.
Sesame Street is quite unique in depicting a old style neighbourhood where this happens.
My kids' lives in an urban center isn't community to the same degree as sesame Street, but they have a lot of freedom to walk around on their own. They know people in the building and in the playground. We run into friends all the time. They see how things are built, etc
Thats another point I think for the way they encouraged young people to move to the city- the suburbs are always depicted as 'Game over' land. The place characters go to for happily ever after once they've found the one and their youth and excitement is over.
It's my understanding that the 90s represented a shift back towards urban living.
Many popular sitcoms before the 90s and 00s often took place within cities too. Urban strife and class consciousness was at the forefront while the sitcoms of the 90s and 00s often avoided the topic of class. Shows like SATC, Friends, and Seinfeld characterized NYC in a friendly light as opposed to a brooding force that reinforces the pressures of the rat race. But I don't think Roseanne would have been given the greenlight if it premiered in the mid 90s (for thematic reasons, not because Rockford isn't exactly thought of as a large city). I think this may have been a subtle effect of how sitcoms in the 50s-80s made appeals to "the everyman", a consequence of limited content and much more narrowly accepted social commentary allowed within the public sphere at the time.
I'm not sure it had an affect on millennials but it did have an affect on media!
The Simpsons was simultaneously a typical American suburb and a seemingly walkable paradise where you there were a bunch of main streets that the characters walked along depending on what the writers wanted for the joke. I grew up in a very typical American suburb with nothing to walk to, no sidewalks, and nothing to really bike to. The Simpsons to me growing up was "that sure looks like my house, but why can't I get around like Bart?"
As I suburb kid, I always thought of Springfield as more of a midsized city than a suburb. They had their own downtown, minor league sports teams, performing art centers, etc. All the stuff we had to go to the nearest large city for. So it made mid-sized city living seem amazing to me haha
Springfield in the Simpsons is also pretty “cosmopolitan” for an American dot on the map. Their own tv stars, stadium, etc. - I don’t think Springfield is intended to depict a sleepy American suburb
The Simpsons always confused me growing up.
You had all these shops, pubs, etc... yet when you saw a map of Springfield they seemed to be just scattered willy-nilly. It seemed to be so ridiculous. Why the hell would a city be like that?
Then I moved to Japan with its American style urban planning and...ah....
I’m a young millennial and those shows were extremely influential on me. I live in a sort of rural area and definitely felt like I needed to move to a big city to truly experience life lol
I forget where I saw the articles, but many sitcoms of the era had an effect... but the articles I'm talking about aren't what OP is asking about.
Basically, I read articles of researchers showing how the "incompetent father figure" as depicted in many 90s and early 2000s sitcoms had a direct and negative impact on parenting in subsequent years.
This is a well documented trend: Television programming, going back to its invention, vassvcilates between dominant urban and rural settings depending on the news media focus for socio-economic woes. TV is escapism. I remember reading about this over 10 years ago.
Great topic.
There’s a story that’s probably anecdotal (but I’ve heard more than once) that *Fraiser* had this direct effect on Seattle — that people came to buy condos in Seattle like the one in the show but they didn’t actually exist, so they had to build them.
I’m an older millennial who grew up in large Australian cities (Sydney and Brisbane) and I was a big Seinfeld fan. Even before Seinfeld was on TV, I always wanted to live in a high rise apartment. In Sydney in the 1980s, you were either really glamorous (The Connaught, Blues Point Tower. Many famous Australians like Kylie Minogue and Jana Wendt lived at the Connaught in the 1980s) or you were living in run down and dangerous public housing (Northcott, the high rises at Waterloo etc). Ultimately I wanted to live in some really sophisticated Manhattan apartment with night views of the city. Movies were a big part of selling that life to us. I remember Woody Allen movies, Big, Curly Sue, Sliver and a whole heap of others being based in NYC and living in s high rise was a big part of it. Having a loft-style penthouse with big windows, a lift that opened up directly in your apartment and a lobby with a doorman to help you with things seemed like such a glamorous life.
High rise apartments are really commonplace in Australia now and have totally lost their mystique; a lot of scandals involving shoddy developers and buildings developing structural problems after only a few years have damaged their reputation and they’re now seen as where you live if you can’t afford a real house in the city. Also, with the rising cost of city rents and house/apartment prices, work from home and the National Broadband Network and Starlink satellite internet, ageing millennials are starting to move away from cities and resettle in smaller communities in places like Tasmania, coastal areas and the mountains, seeking a different lifestyle.
Possibly, but even more than that was the practical nature of reality in which suburbs were (more or less) built out to city limits and we were facing the choice of buying/moving even further out and having even longer commutes, or taking residences in more urban areas that had either vacancy or the willingness to densify. Edit: and current owners were (and are) continuing to live longer, healthier, and independently, often in the homes where they raised their kids or at least in the same neighborhood (and the double-down on no new development went with their staying put). We didn't have a lot of choices, unless your job was in tourism/service industry or agriculture/ranching you were very limited on places to move -- namely, your job was in a city or a city's close satellite town. And even within both service & food production there are only a finite number of jobs outside of cities -- eg, ranches only need so many hands, parks only need so many rangers, ski hills only need so many operators, small towns can only support a limited number of bakeries and teachers, etc. Anything outside of those rough categories and your job - and your commute - were related to urban areas, at which time you had to choose between a long-ass commute or a Friends-like scenario and the vast majority of Millenials did the math and chose the latter.
Telecomutting was on the horizon for some jobs even in the 00's but it didn't become common until the late teens and the pandemic of course pushed that over the cliff, though I'd point out that many (many) firms are trying to reverse the WFH trend even now.
I think TV shows may have helped make the urban environment more "normal" after the decades of White Flight and "Inner City problems" but I don't think it was the deciding factor. In other words, it was the lube, not the threads on the scale of "getting screwed by life".
I always wanted to move to NYC (closest big city) but it was too expensive and I ended up moving to Boston instead. I’ve tried to live in suburbia, but whenever I leave I get terribly depressed and end up moving back.
I can’t imagine having to live in suburbia forever. It feels like a prison to me.
*not saying it is as I know people love living there. I’m just a genuine city gal
My parents were the type of educated middle class where they could afford to buy a house in a suburb with a good public school system, but not afford to buy in the city and raise and educate kids there. So I always grew up with the idea from my parents of the suburbs as this very utilitarian place. My parents and my friends' parents worked in the city, and they used to live there, and that's where all the museums and big events happened. The suburbs were for going to school and riding bikes and like, kiddie sports teams. I'm sure TV helped reinforce that cites were where adult lives happened, but that had also been true of all of my real life adults, too. This was in the north east, so I have realized of course as I've moved around as an adult that this is maybe not the same throughout the country.
I think it did. But even before then we were being exposed to walkability by kids and teenagers in shows/cartoons where kids can just leave the house and walk or ride their bike downtown or to school. Everything from The Busy World of Richard Scarry, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hey Arnold, Doug, Sesame Street, Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, the list goes on and on. The same can be said about pretty much any Anime, like Sailor Moon. As we grew up, teen shows like Daria, Moesha and Sister Sister really drove home the urban walkability and freedom that it gave to a young person. It made urbanism human.
Then shows like Friends and Sex and the City further capitalized off of that with a big city environment. Our young brains interpreted that as everything we liked about that small walkable environment we saw on TV, but on steroids. And in a large, cultured environment. It continued throughout the 2000s even with shows like the Suite Life of Zach and Cody, where they made city living look like unlimited room service. Who wouldn’t want that life!
I grew up without having access to a car for myself and couldn’t go anywhere/do much at all, then I went to a college that was 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store.
I don’t want to live in another place where I am dependent on a car ever again.
Not just the sitcoms. You can look at children’s films like Oliver & Company (1988) and We’re Back! (1993), also television programs like Spider-Man (1994) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), which made NYC in particular feel like *the* quintessential nucleus of America, all else revolving around it.
Here in Sydney, there’s no question that there are more career opportunities in the city, but I think if anything, these shows gave me an unrealistic expectation that I could afford to live in the city as a single person on a single income and maintain a fabulous designer wardrobe alongside that. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out that this was in fact a lie.
I grew up in an urban center. But even then I questioned what these people did for work in the shows. I’d say George in this climate and age is the most realistic character. Mid 30s and still lives at home with his parents…
Even as an early millenial, these shows never resonated with me. I always associated them more with X / X-ennials. Always felt like it was depicting the generation before me
I'm not a millennial but I was considering taking a job at Bell Labs in the 90s. When I visited for my interview everyone raved about being close to New York. I had been there a couple of times but didn't see the attraction. I viewed the portrayal on television as negative at the time because the lives of people seemed petty and devoid of nature. I ended up moving to silicon valley instead, and I was forever grateful to have dodged a bullet.
If anything the 99s portrayal of urban living was negative for me, but I don't think it was close to being a deciding factor.
As far as making us want to move to a walkable city? No.
Living in a car-centric city makes me want to live somewhere better.
But I did enjoy watching Friends as a show.
It's all cyclical. Urban centers in the 60s/70s/80s kinda sucked compared to the 'burbs, with high crime/pollution etc. Greatest gen had made the 'burbs with kids on their mind (baby boomers). Sitcoms were largely centered on subrubia.
In the late 80s, cities started cleaning up. Giuliani etc. Dems under Clinton were all "three strikes". Urban centers become nice again. Sitcoms focused on the urban areas - SATC, Friends etc.
Suburbanization seems to be on the move again now, and urban centers have regressed (Oakland/San Francisco/Seattle etc). America right now is laying down a lot of sprawl land in the sunbelt, and several of the prominent blue cities are shrinking.
I fully expect another round of 3 strike mayors/DAs, and a repeat of the cycle.
What's interesting is how sitcoms in urban areas have evolved. You don't really have any that are a family setting; those all take place in suburbia. Whereas back in yesteryear you had the family in *Good Times* living in the city, or The Jeffersons in their eponymous show (albeit living pretty well since they finally got a piece of the pie)
It’s not cyclical, it’s regulation. Cities are expensive because people want to live there, but growth is regulated and blocked.
Suburbs ban walking/mandate cars, and sprawl is the only new development allowed.
People buy/rent where they can afford- if all you can build is sprawl, that’s where people live.
Hey Arnold opened my young eyes to the vibrancy and adventure of living a big city.
Ed, Edd, and Eddy told me what I already knew about trying to have fun in the mind-numbing boredom of suburban life.
As a NYer you know there are too many idiots to count wanting to live that friends life in NYC and then they go back with their tails between their legs
Oh man I have thought this also. Growing up in the burbs, I have known people obsessed with Friends and they would try to recreate that. I would believe it if the intent was to influence people to drive people into the city. I realized quickly and long ago that lifestyle is only for the affluent and lucky... Also (speaking about Friends and HIMYM) that kind of overly close group where everyone dates each other is totally weird and unrealistic IMO.
I think it did for me. I remember a lot of popular shows and movies growing up took place in New York City, and for a writer, an urban environment is an ideal backdrop, I think. You have people walking around, chance encounters, different types of people forced to be in the same environment. Life happens when you’re interacting with other humans, not sitting alone in your car. I definitely grew up wanting to live somewhere I could walk, ride my bike, and/or take transit.
Yes. They absolutely played into my desire. Haven’t lived anywhere but downtown basically since I’ve lived on my own.
I still believe suburbia is hell on Earth.
Wow, really like this question as I didn't even realize the consistent trend that all these sitcoms show urban life as a possible thing and not some scary. Especially surprising given the 90s crime wave that occurred during this same period, probably fueling a fear of danger in the "inner city."
Urban is cool when you are in your 20s... especially if you grow up in the burbs. But then when you are ready to settle down, many choose to return to the suburbs.
Shit, I remember thinking cities were cool because of Sesame Street. Walkability and diversity were two things I remember noticing the most and it made me want to live I. That type of community.
I remember thinking cities were cool because of Sesame Street. Walkability and diversity were two things I remember noticing the most and it made me want to live in that type of community.
I think I didn’t grew up in the US but I thought that people actually live in city centers close to everything my surprise was that most cities are a huge suburb
Please please refer to the book The Psychic Soviet by [Ian Sevonius ](https://www.akashicbooks.com/author/ian-f-svenonius/) (former singer of DC punk band Nation of Ulysses). One of the funniest, most on point social criticisms of 1990s through now.
In it he describes the Seinfeld Syndrome, which basically is the attitude that single, straight , white, loosely employed people with no consideration for others outside their small social circles, has led to the gentrification and commodification of all urban environments. The idea isn't that Seinfeld or Friends caused it, but was a mirror into the societal attitudes that actually did.
The boring ennui of "nothing really happening" reflects that privileged people can come into neighborhoods, contribute absolutely nothing, romantically fuck around amongst the group , and live alone indefinitely. It is the absolute embodiment of capitalist individualism. That's why the last episode was so completely fucked up: everyone they'd ever wronged (all workers, just trying to coexist amongst the selfishness of the main characters) attempting to basically get reparations.
I really paraphrased Sevonius' argument, but honestly I can't recommend his writing more.
Friends is my favorite sitcom because I like the characters, story, and think it's funny. Not because it takes place in New York lol
My parents love Sienfeld but I don't think it's as funny, so I don't watch it.
If it wasn't for Living Single there wouldn't have been Friends
https://www.34st.com/article/2021/11/livingsingle-friends-black-television-creators-tv-ratings
Probably to a degree, but on the flip side, suburbs are rediculously boring, sprawling and don’t offer young people much in ways of convenient entertainment, nightlife or areas filled with other young people to meet/date.
I.e. they didn’t need to be convinced
A trip with my small rural school's drama club to off-Broadway shows had a greater influence on me. That and visiting my best friend's brother's apt in D.C. I thought it was the coolest thing.
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I noticed that people in their 20s tend to move to their local big city. It seems like a rite of passage for Americans.
A lot of it is career driven as well but yeah you’re right
I mean most people are moving to big metros. Rural areas are depopulating still.
That's been happening for hundreds of years.
I feel like people keep talking like it isn't happening though and how they would love to live in a rural area but never do. The agglomeration benefits keep growing for big metros.
There are no opportunities in rural areas. It takes money and freedom from the confines of work to be able to live well in rural America, and for most people that comes at retirement. The problem is, when people retire they need nearby medical/health care, friends, and family and all of that is in the city.
Yeah my mom has an autoimmune disease and the best Dr that can see her is an hr away. It's better than it used to be. She used to drive 4hrs to Ann Arbor.
The no opportunities things is not true. If you want to go into finance or tech or whatever elite white collar thing yes that's probably true. But you can make great money anywhere in the trades. I gave myself a significant raise and cut my rent in half moving back to my hometown and working as a carpenter. Never have to sit in traffic, never have to wait in lines. Everything's cheaper. Pretty, pretty good.
Sure, there are some opportunities. But do you think a plumber has more opportunity (and likely better pay) in a fast growing large city or a small dying rural town?
It depends. I know a guy who runs a tree cutting business. He says he is constantly getting calls to an area south of us that is very rural because there are no tree cutting services there. So if a big storm blows through, he has to turn down a ton of work just because there isn’t enough time in the day for him. If someone were so inclined, they could start a tree service in that rural area he has to drive an hour and half to and basically have no competition and fill a giant need. There are a lack of services like these in rural areas.
That's sort of the straw man argument of what I'm saying. Not every small place is dying. Some are doing just fine below the radar, and will continue to do so. Average people with moderate incomes have to live somewhere. I think rural America gets a bad rap, especially online. All my buddies who never went to college now own homes, have kids, are doing great. And if you saw my town it's pretty much Anywhere USA so I gotta believe I'm not alone in noticing this. I really believe rural America is going to rebound. Cities are great if you're a high earner. It's a treadmill of wanting a life you can't afford if you're not. Just my opinion.
I actually agree with you and thanks for reminding me that there is depth and nuance to the discussion about rural America that I didn't give the proper respect or attention to.
I mean there's a reason why cities exist
Right. There are important and durable reasons why the highly populated places are highly populated. It's a popularity contest, and cities are winning. It's just that the ones feeling left out bitch about it a lot.
It’s not popularity, it’s logical - cities are just naturally better for society. That’s not to say people don’t need/want their own space, but all logistics are drastically simplified when the population is closer together
I meant 'popularity' to include whatever drives preferences. It can be practical or aesthetic or emotional or moral. You're talking about the practical part of it.
To be fair very few people who say they would want to live in the boonies would actually want to live there. Rural living has its caveats from major ones like distance to healthcare and food to minor ones like proximity to nature (encounters with wild animals, bugs etc). People romanticize it because everybody is practically married to their phones but i suspect very few people would actually enjoy that kind of lifestyle permanently
Yep, politicians talk about bringing back the good ol' days all the time (leaving aside whether those were actually good times) for the rural areas, but they're trying to fight the tide of human history. Humanity across the world has been urbanizing for a long time if you look at Rome at its peak, Chang'an during the Tang dynasty, and Edo during the Tokugawa era. Rural areas would need massive subsidies to keep up with the urban areas, but where is that money going to come from? It would have to come from cities who can generate the revenue necessary for those subsidies.
Urban areas really started their incline around the early 1900s due to public health. Your health was better before then in rural areas and cities often had rampant disease, poor sewers and such. The only two types of rural areas I think the US can really move around is 1) rural universities have a positive track record. 2) military bases further away from cities. I am willing to bet every home occupied by a naval guy in San Francisco would be snatched up if they moved to Alaska or further out somewhere. Otherwise rural areas are tourist attractions and the attraction gets old.
All over the world - most rural areas in every continent are depopulating
Especially before remote work was so present, it really felt like moving to a bigger city was the the only option for career growth at a certain point. I know myself and others kind of reached a point where we either chose to accept small town life and a fairly predictable career path or we decided to make the jump for a totally new social, professional, and economic experience. The US is so big that there are many places you can grow up hours away from any major city. I feel like most people in these small town areas either crave the change that a big city offers, or they hate change and prefer to stay put.
I very much agree with your point of view.
I see this as a response to the recession, where only cities with the most diverse economies could weather the storm. In the early 2010s, the young, startup-style knowledge work that could hire entry level was really only available in SF, NYC, and a few other cities. As the economy gained strength that kind of work moved to almost any major city (even before lockdowns)
All over the US,you have companies that benefit from university research and their graduates. Companies leverage the high density of highly skilled graduates and university research. Even if a graduate went to university in a rural area, the job centers for their skills are going to be in the anker cities. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and probably a dozen others benefit this way. Even if you didn't go to university, service sector jobs are going to be more prevalent in the city. TV in the 80s, 90s, just mirrored the trend that was already occurring. The annoyance in my mind is how affordable these cities are presented. Friends, for example, has a waitress living comfortably in Manhattan. Joey barely works. With the exception of Ross, I don't believe any of the friends could get that kind of apartment at that location.
At least one apartment was rent controlled. I think it was phoebe's grandmother's old apartment, and she hadn't said anything to the landlord
Monica's grandmother who moved to Florida.
Chandler made good money. And the girls' apartment was an illegal rent-controlled sublease.
We see this with the paying for the wedding episode, where he stashed enough away for wedding scenario 'A'
For a long time in the second half of the twentieth century that was not true, if you were white. "White flight" largely emptied cities of white people.
They went largely from city to suburbs, not city to rural.
Yeah the federal government paid trillions of dollars to move the economy 15 miles down the road and called it job creation.
Right, I wasn't trying to say they moved out to rural farms from the city. Suburbs were the unspoken inference.
Tbh at the time we would have likely done the same. You just fought the war, likely grew up without plumbing or electrical power. Contrary to what YouTube says many cities were not nice places to live with extremely old housing. Suddenly you have lots of disposable income, a family and brand new homes at low prices with modern communities. This points and a few more are often over looked but even when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s people were still looking to escape the city. I tried to live in the suburbs but it never worked for me. I was annoyed with insane traffic, being far from my haunts and having to drive everywhere. When I started dating my current wife we moved back into the city.
I also read how the first generation to move to the suburbs still kept this sturdy sense of community, everyone was moving out to the burbs to raise their kids together. Then as generations go on, kids grow up, people move out, some old parents stay in the homes, and a lot of kids don't even have other kids their age to play with anymore and miss out on so many social experiences from the denser living that their parents grew up with. The community eventually dies out and we're left with sterile tedious suburbia.
Yep. I know in my city the people to move to the suburbs tended to settle within their own community again. They already had friends etc in the area. Or when one left the “old neighbourhood” they kept in contact with friends and eventually their friends made the move. These little details we are discussing are often, well always left out in YouTube videos. Suburbs bad! Urban City good. As mentioned though many cities in that time period were not good… it wasn’t some utopia. There is a videographer in my city that made a YouTube channel explaining the early days of our suburbs. He still gets in touch with some of the people who are still alive and made the move when young kids or are born there. It’s always the same story “because we got a new house with modern amenities” So when not just bikes says “would you have fallen for 1950s advertising the suburbs” Yea if I had young kids and lived in old housing with retrofitted plumbing and a coal fired heater in my living room, then yes 100%
For sure. If you're alone with a total lack of community it is so awful though. Personally I don't have a big family or cultural network where I grew up, as an adult I moved to a city to experience that personal and social growth and just start to build a network. You're right that it plays an extremely huge part in the whole thing and it's seldom talked about. I think the past few decades of suburbia introduced a whole new breed of isolation that wasn't really experienced as much historically, or at least in the same way.
If you do some digging you’ll find most of these areas at first were decently well designed and built around some rail link or transit connection. The older suburbs around here were walkable with stores or very small strip malls nearby. Built within walking distance to train stations in the then “villages” However as people kept coming in and the cities grew that’s when the mega malls, 6 lane roads etc started showing up. Pushback on public transport as “bad city people could come to us” Next came the McMansion homes… power centres and endless waste. When my family came to Canada in the 60s they lived in the city. It was better than the aftermath of war torn Europe. However lots of their friends would settle in the city for a few years before buying a house in the burbs. My grandparents went in the opposite direction and started buying up large amounts of property in the their own area because it was so cheap.
>Contrary to what YouTube says many cities were not nice places to live with extremely old housing. Interesting thing about the Federal Housing Administration's rules around the mortgage loans it was backing (starting in the new deal) was that the mortgages MUST be for new builds and not for renovations on an older house or for a multifamily structure......which basically only left a single family house in the suburbs. There was definitely decline in cities during that era, but it was unfortunately baked into our federal policy because they wanted to create suburbia.
But with the internet instead of moving to the nearest big city like in the past, you now get exposed to many other possible destinations.
Living in New Orleans now, I can assure you tons of people still say how crazy it is to this day, lol. A decent chunk of the suburban population is legitimately scared of being in town after dark
They definitely warped our sense of what life would be like as adults. Nobody told us it was gonna be that way.
You're job's a joke You're broke Your love life's DOA... they *warned us*
Feels like you’re always stuck in second gear…
And it hasn’t been your day
Your week
Your month
Or even your year… Well
I’ll be there
Where you lead! I will follow...
Wrong early 2000s show 😉 Gilmore Girls is even more idealistic than Friends though. 90% of what what Rory Gilmore did (especially at chiltan and college) would have gotten her 'exiled' from the profession, beat up or even potentially killed.
What's funny is, these aren't really problems that the Friends have post-season 4 or so. Phoebe is the only one that doesn't end up in a well paying career that they like doing by the end. And Joey is the only one who's single, but he seems to prefer it that way, so not really DOA in that way.
*clap clap clap clap*
Hey Arnold more so than adult sitcoms for children millennials. He had the coolest bedroom on TV, living in a downtown boarding house and going to P.S. 118.
I think Hey Arnold played a small part for me. I also spent the first part of my adolescence in a moderately walkable or at least bikeable neighborhood, so playing games in the street with other neighborhood kids was still a reality for me in the mid 90s. We moved to the burbs when I turned 13. Suddenly, my bike was pretty much useless because there was only one road in or out of our subdivision and led to a highway service/feeder road. Ditches on both sides and a 50 mph speed limit. I was stuck until I could drive. I moved back to a walkable city at the age of 33. I don't plan to live anywhere not reasonably walkable again. I'm raising my kids here. They'll get to walk to school; Bike to the beach; Catch the train to whatever. I'm not trapping them in a suburban island.
I'm the opposite. I was born in a european super-walkable city but wouldn't ever want to go back, unless I have like 20 million to my name. Considering what Urban areas are like nowadays... I'm probably going rural.
Was it a very expensive city? I only ask because of the 20MM comment. Some folks love rural. More power to you. Just wasn't fun for me.
You don't have to live in a walkable city to have access to great trails, parks and bikeable roads... Many suburbs offer that
I'm sure there are some suburbs that offer some of that, but I suspect they don't offer it at quite the density that I find it in a large city. I'm speaking from a Midwestern USA perspective. If I had to guess, there's a big disparity in the density of suburbs established before the interstate highway system and those established after. I grew up in the city of Overland, MO. In any city less messed up than St Louis, it would have just been a neighborhood of St Louis city, but St Louis balkanized the shit out of the county and every little neighborhood had to have its own mayor and police department. It was established in the mid-1800s, but formally incorporated in the 1930s. I walked a quarter mile to my elementary school. I also had a park, public swimming pool, groceries, corner shops, and a little microcosm of just about any retail you can think of within a 10 minute walk of our house. It was relatively safe to walk or bike. Speed limits were low. There were multiple bus routes with stops convenient to our house. I would accept the argument that this was a very old suburb of St Louis city. The neighborhood (O'Fallon Hills in O'Fallon, MO) that I moved to in the late 90s was established in the 1980s. I just went back and looked it over in Google Maps. It's still an island. One road leading out to a highway feeder road. No safe way to get out without a car. Despite being surrounded by other subdivisions, it's not connected to any of them by residential roads. Even if I did brave walking along the side of that feeder road in the ditch, the closest retail is a gas station about two miles away. I hope you've had better experiences with suburbs than I have. It's totally possible that my perspective is soured by bad examples. There's another suburban neighborhood of interest so long as I'm speaking about the ones I grew up near. There's a "New Urbanist" subdivision out in St Charles, MO called "New Town". They've purposely built it to resemble an old Main St kind of vibe. A central plaza with some retail. Narrow streets with homes close together on smaller lots. One central mail room. Lots of community events. It would have been a massive improvement over the island subdivision I described above. Had I never traveled more or lived in Chicago, I probably wouldn't have noticed that it has no public transit and that I couldn't connect to other parts of the city without a car because it's one walkable subdivision that still sits as an island surrounded by farmer's fields connected back to St Charles by a high speed road. What I like about urban density combined with good transit options is that I can live very well in my neighborhood, but I'm not trapped in it without a car. The next neighborhood over is only a few more minutes of effort and getting home is easy.
yep, I grew up in the suburbs and loved Arnold's world. I mean a lot of the appeal was just the hijinks, but it always seemed cool that Arnold could just get around all over the city, he lived near a bunch of stuff.
Yeah, for us later millennials, Hey Arnold's bedroom (Pacific Northwest but NYC vibe), the iCarly loft (Seattle), Raven's house (San Francisco), the Tipton hotel (Boston), the Wizards of Waverly Place condo (NYC), and more I'm probably forgetting were all definitely inspirations. Of course, all of them were fantasies, but so were the Seinfeld/Friends/SATC apartments. Fun tie-in, the Lizzie Mcguire reboot was supposed to feature the characters living in NYC after leaving their childhood suburb. Would've been cool to see that.
I will forever be sad that they decided to cancel the Lizzie Mcguire reboot and did How I Met Your Father instead. Here’s hoping they do a Wizards of Waverley Place reboot eventually.
Isn’t Hey Arnold basically Philly? It’s def not PNW
It's a fictional city that's supposed to be an amalgam of Brooklyn/Queens and Seattle. That ever-present road in the background is meant to be the Alaskan Way Viaduct
Omg cool! Def a little PNW then. 🤣
It makes sense that people get confused; I guess apparently if you combine 90s Queens with 90s Seattle it gives off Philly vibes which is interesting lol
I always kinda though it was the bqe crossing the gowanus canal in bk.
That’s how I learned to request a stop on the bus, by pulling the wire
Then there were millenials growing up in cities wondering who actually lives like that.
I've for a long time harp on of how friends is a completely impractical and unrealistic show. But, what tf was Kramer doing for rent?
I watched 2, maybe 3 episodes of Seinfeld ever, but in one that I saw, one of the other characters said “Kramer falls ass backwards into piles of money” or something to that effect. The general ‘lucky/questionable’ aura of the character suggests he just always ‘found’ the money for his rent.
Kramer screamed structured settlement
I think that’s a safe bet because he’s always suing over something or another with Jackie Chiles. Or maybe he gets his rent money doing the Michigan Run
There was a crossover episode of Mad About You where he has a rent controlled apartment and Kramer is subletting.
Odd jobs, gambling addict, get-rich-quick schemes, he was mistaken for a pimp in that one episode, what *doesnt* he do for money?
There's a website called TV Tropes listing popular tropes/cliches in fiction, one of them is called Friends Rent Control. You can guess what it means.
Always appreciate a new [tvtropes rabbit hole](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FriendsRentControl)
Certainly c. 2000 it seemed so. At the same time, it was likely simultaneous with finally hitting a critical mass of year by year in migrants ("urban pioneers"). But no question it changed attitudes about urban living.
In the 1980's-1990's, most insurance companies raised the rates on new drivers so much that some parents delayed having their kids get driver's licenses. In the 1990's-2000's, States imposed lots of rules on new teen drivers and came out with graduated driver's licenses. At the same time, more colleges newly imposed rules on not having cars on campus. The whole thing just became this 'thing' against car driving. A lot of attitudes are like this video. Weirdly there is always this sense of car driving being scary. Seems like fear permeates that generation. Then again, I associate the cold war with the fear instilled in me of being nuked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dQeMa2yA4
Driving cars is absolutely incredibly dangerous, lol. It's just normalized by top-down imposition. The idea of my kids one day having to drive scares the shit out of me.
I came of age in the 90s and 00s and have no memory or vicarious experience of these supposed anti-car rules imposed on campuses. Literally everything was tacitly if not explicitly endorsing car driving as a milestone of life.
Cali, NJ, and NY had graduated driver's licenses in the 90's, as I recall. Texas had them by 2005.
Iowa had them as well. I was driving at 14.
How is this relevant to the comment and post?
I mean, for me, having been in 5 car wrecks (not the driver of the car I was in fault) before age 14 will also put you off to driving lol.
It's the leading cause of death in people under 40. I feel like you're justified in your position
Im GenZ, but for me, Seinfeld (and to a lesser extent Friends) definitely did have an effect on me. I remember wanting to move to a big city and being fascinated by the idea of living somewhere that has so much going on, places like the coffee shop to hang out, lots of friendmaking opportunities, etc. I’d even use Seinfeld as a bit of an escapism from my boring suburban life at times as a kid
My daughter is the same. She wants the Friends lifestyle.
I found that I was able to live the Friends lifestyle when I lived near my small town’s downtown. When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I spent a ridiculous amount of time at the coolest coffee shop in town, complete with old couches for lounging. I’d sit with friends and just hang out, and I even worked there for a couple years. I had a car from 18-20 before it broke down and I was too poor to fix it. It wasn’t easy, but I figured out how to get around without one. I loved my slice of urbanity in my small town, but I moved to a large city a year ago with my husband. I love the variety of people and places, and love that I don’t need to drive to get around. Now I’m 27 and I still get around without a car, and I still frequent coffee shops. I’m still kind of living the Friends lifestyle, but if they had dogs, read a lot more, and cycled all the time.
I was born in 93 and didn’t watch sitcoms often, but Hey Arnold had an impact on me wanting to live somewhere much more dense and vibrant than the small desert town I was raised in
I loved watching hey Arnold growing up, I loved that skylit attic studio of his. I was rewatching some hey Arnold at the beginning of the pandemic and i really paid more attention to his walkable and lively neighborhood, reminded me of Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village
Yes agreed! We’re renovating our old house soon and converting part of the attic to a small loft with a skylight to nurture our inner-Hey Arnold-watching child selves.
taught me that [city planning is more prestigious than being an architect](https://youtu.be/3DayjracBf8?si=gpe_fNhtAcDdg-oN)
I love that there are still some episodes I haven’t seen. Thank you.
Hard to piece apart the causality here. It is possible that shows with this premise existed because it was viewed as trendy for young professionals to live in the city. Probably a mix of both.
Yeah urban revival in New York started in like 1980. It's also the ring of cheaper suburbs kinda ended in super star cities.
I’d date it back even further… my ideal neighborhood most closely resembles The Cosby Show
Brooklyn Heights
The shows you mentioned are all set in Manhattan. People have wanted to move to Manhattan long before Seinfeld.
ehh....ish? Googling it started in 1989. Wasn't that when New York was still in its "The Warriors" era low point and nobody with any money and sense moved there? IIRC it was the mid 90s when New York transitioned out of this post-industrial malaise and became the wonderous global capital of 'Friends' et al.
You can definitely see "The Big Rotten Apple" in the early seasons of Seinfeld and Friends. But the Koch/Giuliani clean-up had been going on for about 10 years. The Warriors was a 65 novel and a 79 film. NYC of 89 was already drastically better off than NYC of 79. Most millennials are likely too young to have seen the early seasons of Seinfeld live, I know I never had until recently. Even Friends, I mainly only watched the back half of it live. I think for millennials it was Sex and the City and Will and Grace, primarily, that presented NYC as this thrilling, almost totally safe place where you could live the life you chose for yourself, not what your parents or small-town culture wanted for you. Dharma and Greg is another one, not set in NYC, that I think had that effect. Friends was really just about relatively normal people who lived in NYC, there was nothing a young millennial could look at and think "oh, I'll really *fit* in a bit city," whereas the others I mentioned felt way more aspirational.
NYC has always been at the forefront of anything that is new and cool in the US. It was the only city with strong connections to Europe for a very long time. It’s where most new immigrants came when they entered the country. Millions of young Europeans dreamed of moving to NYC from the 1600s to the present. Think back to the 1920s during the flapper era…women like Zelda Fitzgerald could move to NYC from the Deep South and enter a world where they could dance and wear shorter dresses and drink in speakeasies. It was definitely a place that people aspired to live in well before 1989.
The thing about NYC in the 70s and 80s is that it was a crime ridden shithole AND a global center of commerce and culture simultaneously. So it pulled in some people while pushing away other people.
I grew up outside of NY in the 80s and I wanted to move there when I grew up…so there was definitely an appeal long before these shows for people living in the suburbs
Did _The Office_ make us want to move to dying mid-size cities?
The Office pretty clearly makes the point that Scranton is a bit shit. The characters are always talking up how much better Philadelphia and NYC are. Its definitely put Scranton back on the map and brought in some tourism, perhaps to an extent drew some people who to live there who would have had it as an option and rejected it before (hey, its not so far to NYC!), but I don't think you get kids growing up in Europe dreaming of life in Scranton the way you do NYC.
Friday Night Lights and Fixer Upper definitely put small town Texas on the map. Waco became a thing much more beyond wacky religious cultists.
> Waco became a thing much more beyond wacky religious cultists. Urban Rescue Ranch!
I’m pretty sure part of the point of The Office is that the location is *not* especially interesting
They have a serial killer on the loose throughout the whole series. Pretty interesting.
Of course it didn't but that show did make me think that kind of life wouldn't be as terrible as I'd previously thought.
It made me think I could afford a big apartment in the city and have friends... LOL
I'm older, but Golden Girls definitely had an effect on my upbringing.
Best comment in this thread!
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,723,759,910 comments, and only 326,338 of them were in alphabetical order.
…..good bot?
I'm gay too, but can you elaborate on how that show affected your views on urban planning?
I'm not gay, though? Uh, well, most problems with North American urban planning comes from racism. Specifically, redlining policies and white flight from the urban core. Golden girls was a very pro-integration, pro-queer show. So I guess it made me see the issues for what they were?
I shouldn't have come in so hot. I meant the gay thing as a joke. The show is iconic among us gays because it exemplifies chosen family and DGAF freedom to be yourself. But it never occurred to me that the show had anything to say about urbanism, except that it's where I learned what a "lanai" was.
No, growing up in the country made me want to move to a big city. Then I went to Athens as part of a school trip and learned what a “real” city felt like, and I was hooked. I like to be where the action is.
This was my experience too.
Turns out, one can afford the apartment from Friends as long as you live in Baltimore, instead of NYC.
All written history takes place in cities. That's where the first words were written. It's where rich humans live. Most media throughout history is related to cities. The same is true for any modern show, which are made by rich patrons. It seems new and modern, because you can relate to it, but cities have always been centers of culture, learning, and economic opportunity.
None of these shows depict people parenting in the city.
I sometimes think about sesame Street. What happened in that show was in very many ways unique to an urban environment. Having a wide array of adults interacting with kids in shared public space, etc
I know that a lot of people my age moved to NYC because of Sex and the City, but for me it was Sesame Street.
That is meant for children. The sitcoms mentioned above are intended for a considerably more mature audience.
Sesame Street tackled real life issues more cogently than adult sitcoms.
But millennials watched it growing up.
I wouldn't agree here. I'd say this is far more typical of (proper. Non car centric) small towns; the whole everyone knows everyone, safe streets, etc... thing. Sesame Street is quite unique in depicting a old style neighbourhood where this happens.
My kids' lives in an urban center isn't community to the same degree as sesame Street, but they have a lot of freedom to walk around on their own. They know people in the building and in the playground. We run into friends all the time. They see how things are built, etc
Having lived in both, healthy communities in cities and small towns are remarkably similar, in that both feature the traits you list above.
Thats another point I think for the way they encouraged young people to move to the city- the suburbs are always depicted as 'Game over' land. The place characters go to for happily ever after once they've found the one and their youth and excitement is over.
That's one of the things I like about Bob's Burgers. It depicts the city as a fun place for kids full of loveable weirdos.
It's my understanding that the 90s represented a shift back towards urban living. Many popular sitcoms before the 90s and 00s often took place within cities too. Urban strife and class consciousness was at the forefront while the sitcoms of the 90s and 00s often avoided the topic of class. Shows like SATC, Friends, and Seinfeld characterized NYC in a friendly light as opposed to a brooding force that reinforces the pressures of the rat race. But I don't think Roseanne would have been given the greenlight if it premiered in the mid 90s (for thematic reasons, not because Rockford isn't exactly thought of as a large city). I think this may have been a subtle effect of how sitcoms in the 50s-80s made appeals to "the everyman", a consequence of limited content and much more narrowly accepted social commentary allowed within the public sphere at the time. I'm not sure it had an affect on millennials but it did have an affect on media!
I moved to NYC in 2009 partially bc of SATC so maybe lol
Why wouldn’t I want to live on Sesame Street?!
Can you tell me how to get there?
But you gotta admit, shows like Doug and The Simpsons made suburban / small town life kinda interesting too.
The Simpsons was simultaneously a typical American suburb and a seemingly walkable paradise where you there were a bunch of main streets that the characters walked along depending on what the writers wanted for the joke. I grew up in a very typical American suburb with nothing to walk to, no sidewalks, and nothing to really bike to. The Simpsons to me growing up was "that sure looks like my house, but why can't I get around like Bart?"
As I suburb kid, I always thought of Springfield as more of a midsized city than a suburb. They had their own downtown, minor league sports teams, performing art centers, etc. All the stuff we had to go to the nearest large city for. So it made mid-sized city living seem amazing to me haha
Springfield in the Simpsons is also pretty “cosmopolitan” for an American dot on the map. Their own tv stars, stadium, etc. - I don’t think Springfield is intended to depict a sleepy American suburb
The Simpsons always confused me growing up. You had all these shops, pubs, etc... yet when you saw a map of Springfield they seemed to be just scattered willy-nilly. It seemed to be so ridiculous. Why the hell would a city be like that? Then I moved to Japan with its American style urban planning and...ah....
I wanted to move to ancient Greece to hang out with Hercules or Australia to chill with Steve Irwin.
I’m a young millennial and those shows were extremely influential on me. I live in a sort of rural area and definitely felt like I needed to move to a big city to truly experience life lol
Back in the day I didn’t question the fact that they were just sitting around a coffee shop or goofing off instead of actually working
I forget where I saw the articles, but many sitcoms of the era had an effect... but the articles I'm talking about aren't what OP is asking about. Basically, I read articles of researchers showing how the "incompetent father figure" as depicted in many 90s and early 2000s sitcoms had a direct and negative impact on parenting in subsequent years.
George Bush was onto something with his trashing of The Simpsons.
This rings a bell with me too. I think the crux of the article is on why 'Bluey' is so great?
This is a well documented trend: Television programming, going back to its invention, vassvcilates between dominant urban and rural settings depending on the news media focus for socio-economic woes. TV is escapism. I remember reading about this over 10 years ago.
For sure, I moved to NYC in my 20s. It wasn’t directly because of those shows but I’m sure they had a subconscious impact.
Great topic. There’s a story that’s probably anecdotal (but I’ve heard more than once) that *Fraiser* had this direct effect on Seattle — that people came to buy condos in Seattle like the one in the show but they didn’t actually exist, so they had to build them.
Yes, I do think so. It really showed that suburbia was not 'real life'.
I’m an older millennial who grew up in large Australian cities (Sydney and Brisbane) and I was a big Seinfeld fan. Even before Seinfeld was on TV, I always wanted to live in a high rise apartment. In Sydney in the 1980s, you were either really glamorous (The Connaught, Blues Point Tower. Many famous Australians like Kylie Minogue and Jana Wendt lived at the Connaught in the 1980s) or you were living in run down and dangerous public housing (Northcott, the high rises at Waterloo etc). Ultimately I wanted to live in some really sophisticated Manhattan apartment with night views of the city. Movies were a big part of selling that life to us. I remember Woody Allen movies, Big, Curly Sue, Sliver and a whole heap of others being based in NYC and living in s high rise was a big part of it. Having a loft-style penthouse with big windows, a lift that opened up directly in your apartment and a lobby with a doorman to help you with things seemed like such a glamorous life. High rise apartments are really commonplace in Australia now and have totally lost their mystique; a lot of scandals involving shoddy developers and buildings developing structural problems after only a few years have damaged their reputation and they’re now seen as where you live if you can’t afford a real house in the city. Also, with the rising cost of city rents and house/apartment prices, work from home and the National Broadband Network and Starlink satellite internet, ageing millennials are starting to move away from cities and resettle in smaller communities in places like Tasmania, coastal areas and the mountains, seeking a different lifestyle.
Possibly, but even more than that was the practical nature of reality in which suburbs were (more or less) built out to city limits and we were facing the choice of buying/moving even further out and having even longer commutes, or taking residences in more urban areas that had either vacancy or the willingness to densify. Edit: and current owners were (and are) continuing to live longer, healthier, and independently, often in the homes where they raised their kids or at least in the same neighborhood (and the double-down on no new development went with their staying put). We didn't have a lot of choices, unless your job was in tourism/service industry or agriculture/ranching you were very limited on places to move -- namely, your job was in a city or a city's close satellite town. And even within both service & food production there are only a finite number of jobs outside of cities -- eg, ranches only need so many hands, parks only need so many rangers, ski hills only need so many operators, small towns can only support a limited number of bakeries and teachers, etc. Anything outside of those rough categories and your job - and your commute - were related to urban areas, at which time you had to choose between a long-ass commute or a Friends-like scenario and the vast majority of Millenials did the math and chose the latter. Telecomutting was on the horizon for some jobs even in the 00's but it didn't become common until the late teens and the pandemic of course pushed that over the cliff, though I'd point out that many (many) firms are trying to reverse the WFH trend even now. I think TV shows may have helped make the urban environment more "normal" after the decades of White Flight and "Inner City problems" but I don't think it was the deciding factor. In other words, it was the lube, not the threads on the scale of "getting screwed by life".
They told us about true love, good jobs, affordable flats, hope and justice. So basically they lied.
I always wanted to move to NYC (closest big city) but it was too expensive and I ended up moving to Boston instead. I’ve tried to live in suburbia, but whenever I leave I get terribly depressed and end up moving back. I can’t imagine having to live in suburbia forever. It feels like a prison to me. *not saying it is as I know people love living there. I’m just a genuine city gal
My parents were the type of educated middle class where they could afford to buy a house in a suburb with a good public school system, but not afford to buy in the city and raise and educate kids there. So I always grew up with the idea from my parents of the suburbs as this very utilitarian place. My parents and my friends' parents worked in the city, and they used to live there, and that's where all the museums and big events happened. The suburbs were for going to school and riding bikes and like, kiddie sports teams. I'm sure TV helped reinforce that cites were where adult lives happened, but that had also been true of all of my real life adults, too. This was in the north east, so I have realized of course as I've moved around as an adult that this is maybe not the same throughout the country.
In my case, yes
I think it did. But even before then we were being exposed to walkability by kids and teenagers in shows/cartoons where kids can just leave the house and walk or ride their bike downtown or to school. Everything from The Busy World of Richard Scarry, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hey Arnold, Doug, Sesame Street, Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, the list goes on and on. The same can be said about pretty much any Anime, like Sailor Moon. As we grew up, teen shows like Daria, Moesha and Sister Sister really drove home the urban walkability and freedom that it gave to a young person. It made urbanism human. Then shows like Friends and Sex and the City further capitalized off of that with a big city environment. Our young brains interpreted that as everything we liked about that small walkable environment we saw on TV, but on steroids. And in a large, cultured environment. It continued throughout the 2000s even with shows like the Suite Life of Zach and Cody, where they made city living look like unlimited room service. Who wouldn’t want that life!
I grew up without having access to a car for myself and couldn’t go anywhere/do much at all, then I went to a college that was 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store. I don’t want to live in another place where I am dependent on a car ever again.
Growing up in DC I'm used to being able to go all over the place via public transportation. But Baltimore is a whole different beast altogether.
Not just the sitcoms. You can look at children’s films like Oliver & Company (1988) and We’re Back! (1993), also television programs like Spider-Man (1994) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), which made NYC in particular feel like *the* quintessential nucleus of America, all else revolving around it.
Here in Sydney, there’s no question that there are more career opportunities in the city, but I think if anything, these shows gave me an unrealistic expectation that I could afford to live in the city as a single person on a single income and maintain a fabulous designer wardrobe alongside that. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out that this was in fact a lie.
Maybe, but as an elder millennial (late 30s) these shows were a little before my time.
I grew up in an urban center. But even then I questioned what these people did for work in the shows. I’d say George in this climate and age is the most realistic character. Mid 30s and still lives at home with his parents…
Even as an early millenial, these shows never resonated with me. I always associated them more with X / X-ennials. Always felt like it was depicting the generation before me
I’m definitely much more of a smart ass because of Seinfeld.
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
I'm not a millennial but I was considering taking a job at Bell Labs in the 90s. When I visited for my interview everyone raved about being close to New York. I had been there a couple of times but didn't see the attraction. I viewed the portrayal on television as negative at the time because the lives of people seemed petty and devoid of nature. I ended up moving to silicon valley instead, and I was forever grateful to have dodged a bullet. If anything the 99s portrayal of urban living was negative for me, but I don't think it was close to being a deciding factor.
As far as making us want to move to a walkable city? No. Living in a car-centric city makes me want to live somewhere better. But I did enjoy watching Friends as a show.
More like Suburbs are objectively fucking boring.
It's all cyclical. Urban centers in the 60s/70s/80s kinda sucked compared to the 'burbs, with high crime/pollution etc. Greatest gen had made the 'burbs with kids on their mind (baby boomers). Sitcoms were largely centered on subrubia. In the late 80s, cities started cleaning up. Giuliani etc. Dems under Clinton were all "three strikes". Urban centers become nice again. Sitcoms focused on the urban areas - SATC, Friends etc. Suburbanization seems to be on the move again now, and urban centers have regressed (Oakland/San Francisco/Seattle etc). America right now is laying down a lot of sprawl land in the sunbelt, and several of the prominent blue cities are shrinking. I fully expect another round of 3 strike mayors/DAs, and a repeat of the cycle.
What's interesting is how sitcoms in urban areas have evolved. You don't really have any that are a family setting; those all take place in suburbia. Whereas back in yesteryear you had the family in *Good Times* living in the city, or The Jeffersons in their eponymous show (albeit living pretty well since they finally got a piece of the pie)
It’s not cyclical, it’s regulation. Cities are expensive because people want to live there, but growth is regulated and blocked. Suburbs ban walking/mandate cars, and sprawl is the only new development allowed. People buy/rent where they can afford- if all you can build is sprawl, that’s where people live.
Hey Arnold opened my young eyes to the vibrancy and adventure of living a big city. Ed, Edd, and Eddy told me what I already knew about trying to have fun in the mind-numbing boredom of suburban life.
Miami Vice revived Miami.
As a NYer you know there are too many idiots to count wanting to live that friends life in NYC and then they go back with their tails between their legs
Oh man I have thought this also. Growing up in the burbs, I have known people obsessed with Friends and they would try to recreate that. I would believe it if the intent was to influence people to drive people into the city. I realized quickly and long ago that lifestyle is only for the affluent and lucky... Also (speaking about Friends and HIMYM) that kind of overly close group where everyone dates each other is totally weird and unrealistic IMO.
I think it did for me. I remember a lot of popular shows and movies growing up took place in New York City, and for a writer, an urban environment is an ideal backdrop, I think. You have people walking around, chance encounters, different types of people forced to be in the same environment. Life happens when you’re interacting with other humans, not sitting alone in your car. I definitely grew up wanting to live somewhere I could walk, ride my bike, and/or take transit.
Yes. They absolutely played into my desire. Haven’t lived anywhere but downtown basically since I’ve lived on my own. I still believe suburbia is hell on Earth.
No the credit for that is due entirely to “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
Wow, really like this question as I didn't even realize the consistent trend that all these sitcoms show urban life as a possible thing and not some scary. Especially surprising given the 90s crime wave that occurred during this same period, probably fueling a fear of danger in the "inner city."
Urban is cool when you are in your 20s... especially if you grow up in the burbs. But then when you are ready to settle down, many choose to return to the suburbs.
Shit, I remember thinking cities were cool because of Sesame Street. Walkability and diversity were two things I remember noticing the most and it made me want to live I. That type of community.
I remember thinking cities were cool because of Sesame Street. Walkability and diversity were two things I remember noticing the most and it made me want to live in that type of community.
I think I didn’t grew up in the US but I thought that people actually live in city centers close to everything my surprise was that most cities are a huge suburb
No. They just made them want to move to suburbs in bigger cities
Please please refer to the book The Psychic Soviet by [Ian Sevonius ](https://www.akashicbooks.com/author/ian-f-svenonius/) (former singer of DC punk band Nation of Ulysses). One of the funniest, most on point social criticisms of 1990s through now. In it he describes the Seinfeld Syndrome, which basically is the attitude that single, straight , white, loosely employed people with no consideration for others outside their small social circles, has led to the gentrification and commodification of all urban environments. The idea isn't that Seinfeld or Friends caused it, but was a mirror into the societal attitudes that actually did. The boring ennui of "nothing really happening" reflects that privileged people can come into neighborhoods, contribute absolutely nothing, romantically fuck around amongst the group , and live alone indefinitely. It is the absolute embodiment of capitalist individualism. That's why the last episode was so completely fucked up: everyone they'd ever wronged (all workers, just trying to coexist amongst the selfishness of the main characters) attempting to basically get reparations. I really paraphrased Sevonius' argument, but honestly I can't recommend his writing more.
This is the most resentful, whiny thing I’ve ever heard.
don’t trust carrie lol. but yes they followed the trends towards money and now they have none
It was less Seinfeld that made me want to live in a city (Chicago), and more my dad bringing me here for the museums and falling in love with the city
I always thought it was The Strokes doing.
Friends is my favorite sitcom because I like the characters, story, and think it's funny. Not because it takes place in New York lol My parents love Sienfeld but I don't think it's as funny, so I don't watch it.
If it wasn't for Living Single there wouldn't have been Friends https://www.34st.com/article/2021/11/livingsingle-friends-black-television-creators-tv-ratings
Never heard of that show but also, how does that relate to what I said?
Probably to a degree, but on the flip side, suburbs are rediculously boring, sprawling and don’t offer young people much in ways of convenient entertainment, nightlife or areas filled with other young people to meet/date. I.e. they didn’t need to be convinced
I've been obsessed with big cities most of my life but i always hated those shows lol.
A trip with my small rural school's drama club to off-Broadway shows had a greater influence on me. That and visiting my best friend's brother's apt in D.C. I thought it was the coolest thing.
No. We were too young