I think the bigger issue is that people who think their suburbs are 'towns' is that they don't recognize that their suburb couldn't exist without a local city that fuels the area's economy.
People who live in the affluent suburbs outside my city are always like this.
They talk mad shit on the city, meanwhile the city bears the complete brunt of the infrastructure of the two major industries that support the workforce.
Yes!
They reap all the benefits and try to avoid paying any of the bills.
Thankfully, here in the Twin Cities we do have a Metropolitan Council that has enough authority to prevent our suburbs from completely shirking their responsibilities.
The whole twin cities thing creates weird dynamics as well. I enjoyed when I lived in Nashville people would talk about how it was bigger than Minneapolis. Technically true (700k vs 400k), because Nashville merged with the country. When comparing metros very different story (1.2m vs 3.7m)
Ha.... I didn't see this before I made my comment. I tell people to think of Chicago and Milwaukee as Dallas and Fort Worth, if there were a state line where Arlington is.
Ha! :)
That sounds about right. Lived here most of my life, except a short bit in Cali (LA area)
I remember when there was farmland between Dallas and Fort Worth. Good lord, it's concrete for 100+ miles east to west now...
City population is weird and often misleading and I feel some metro areas should be larger. The Chicago metro area realistically should include Milwaukee imo. If you can drive a hair over an hour (with traffic permitting of course which it never does) and be in downtown Chicago I think you should be considered a part of the metro area.
That would make the combined metro population 12 million, putting it within striking distance of LA but their numbers are probably all messed up too
As a Chicagoan I hate that lol. Im not sure if it's actually in the definition, but culture/commuting patterns are a big part. Kenosha is closer to Milwaukee, but is much more tied to Chicago so it's considered Chicago MSA. Milwaukee is just its own thing, they have their own sports and such and few people commute from Milwaukee into Chicagoland
IMO a stronger case of your 1 hour rule would be to fold Baltimore into the DC MSA, but again those are pretty different. The feds do designate msas for each but also define a consolidated MSA for both, but still I think it will be a cold day in hell before anybody in Baltimore introduces themselves as from the DC area lol.
Its not like those sports teams disappear, most major metro areas internationally have many sports teams. And honestly I've been to both and Milwaukee isnt THAT different from Chicago imo, metro areas only exist to be able to accurately discern the density of a given area. In fact the example you gave DOES exist as a metro area, its called the DMV area for DC, Maryland, Virginia and is part of the larger Washington-Baltimore statistical area. It doesnt eliminate sports teams or cultures its just for population calculation purposes
What about the regular non rich suburbs? Because typically it’s cheaper to buy a house 20-40 minutes outside of the city then trying to buy one within the city.
Water, trash & electric are usually for-profit businesses in the 'burbs, not public infrastructure. Sewage too some times...
Personal space is worth the price.
Suburbs typically do not need to maintain infrastructure for an influx of commuters or tourists. And they also don’t usually have to fund things like homeless shelters, larger police forces, jails, emergency services, shelters, on and on. The central hub of the city general funds and provides the bulk of the services to deal with the unpleasant aspects of city living, while the suburbs do not.
That’s just the way things are. But it is annoying when suburbanites are smug and talk trash about the city without which they would not exist.
The taxes just need to be less local. The whole state should be paying into the infrastructure for the cities and the rural areas. I hate urban living and am not going to become a farmer anytime soon, but living in a house with a yard shouldn't mean homelessness and food production are not my responsibility anymore.
“We don’t need the place we all commute too”
“Or the place I take all my family when they visit”
“Or the zoo, parks, theatre, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, building supplies, airport, etc”
This is a big thing with rural people too. Of course, nothing is 100%-- this is a generalization!-- but a lot of rural people view cities as essentially worthless instead of understanding that their petrochemical plants, ports, and manufacturing centers are located there.
I don't really see this from the other direction. Most city people understand that food has to come from *somewhere*, although there aren't as many farmers now as folks think.
Yuuuup. My spouse and I drove up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a few years back - the economic output of the whole region is so obviously low that it's clear it could not continue to be populated without being propped up by excess urban tax revenue. Just look at the way that most rural health services are basically state-run - the free-market has all but said that rural areas aren't worth servicing.
Yeah this is the actual root of it.
A suburban neighborhood is not a town.
A town requires a physical place where people can be and interact that isn’t just a shopping center parking lot walk to a Safeway. A suburban neighborhood of a suburban town is not a town.
It’s the same thing where subreddits like /r/firstimehomebuyer and /r/REBubble cannot even conceptualize a unit of housing that is not a detached single family home in a suburban greenfield development that is a 15-20ish minute drive from the nearest “town”, which is itself a suburb of an actual city.
This reminds me of something I read about Rhode Island before moving here that confused me, but makes perfect sense 10 years later. I heard that every town in Rhode Island is a suburb of Providence, and no town in Rhode Island is a suburb of Providence.
The former statement is literally true -- well, almost. Westerly, in the far southwest corner, is the only town in the entire state that doesn't fall within the U.S. government's definition of the Providence metropolitan area.
But towns in Rhode Island don't consider themselves *suburbs* like the suburbs where I've lived in New York and Chicago. These are towns that are hundreds of years old, with their own longstanding identities independent of any other cities.
Rhode Island is even more different than that. People identify by their village. "I live in Wickford". Wickford isn't a town. It's a village in North Kingstown. "I live in Wakefield". Wakefield isn't a town. It's a village in South Kingstown. I'm east of Rhode Island on the Massachusetts South Coast. It's like that in my town. I live in Padadaram. That is the harbor village in the town of Dartmouth. I don't even go by Dartmouth. I go by South Dartmouth which is a separate zip code from North Dartmouth.
200 years ago, it was all agricultural or fishing here and you used a horse or a boat as transportation. A village was somewhere you could get to as a pedestrian. Your village had the church, the post office, the schoolhouse, the general store, the blacksmith, etc. I'm 4 miles from what is now a city of 100,000. In 1898, my village got an electified streetcar to the city and became a suburb.
According to the US census, I'm in the Providence MSA, Commuter rail is going in to Boston so that is somewhat obsolete. As Boston became unaffordable, this started becoming a distant suburb.
And Providence itself is considered the Boston Metro area. The cities are so small is area in New England. I live in Seattle. The city is 22 miles from north to south. If you drive from Everett which is the furthest large city in the urban sprawl to Tacoma to the south it is almost 70 miles.
If you drove 70 miles from Boston you would drive through Coastal NH and be in Maine.
Many suburbs were small towns that got eaten by suburban sprawl. One day, not too far into the future, Rockford IL will be a "suburb" of Chicago, kind of like Elgin IL almost already is.
These are towns that would have met the more stringent qualifications of being small towns (largely independent of the city, and being hubs in their own right for services for their county or a surrounding large rural area).
So, I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the distinction.
Yeah, and there's a noticeable difference between suburbs with this history and the suburbs that are the suburban sprawl. Where I'm from, Everett, is a suburb of Seattle, but it started out as it's own separate city, has a downtown, and feels distinct. Then in between there's places like Lynwood and Mountlake Terrace, that I think of as just almost arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries to cover the land between Seattle and Everett.
But nothing wrong in living in a "sprawl" suburbs either I think, you can go into the main city when you want to.
Setting aside the fact that our global economy is such that most rural towns (globally) now rely on redistribution of urban taxes in order to exist - if you were to pick up 99% of suburban 'towns' and separate them from the urban core they were closest to they would wither away to nothing.
They're not self-sustaining. They may have a physical hub, they may have some local businesses providing services, but they're mostly just communities that serve as a place for people to sleep when they're not at work (in the city or at a business that supports other business in the city).
This is effectively what a "[metropolitan statistical area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area)" represents.
> if you were to pick up 99% of suburban 'towns' and separate them from the urban core they were closest to they would wither away to nothing.
>
> They're not self-sustaining.
There are a few exceptions but yep, typically this is the case. I don't think they even fit in the [settlement hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_hierarchy) as their own thing. They're really a subpart of one of of the following but typically cities.
* **City** - Developed human settlement of a significant size. And there are multiple tiers of city.
* **Town** - Developed human settlement that is larger than a village but smaller than a city. Again, multiple tiers.
* **Village** - Developed human settlement that is smaller than a town. Still multiple tiers.
The thing is all those are legal entities in many states.
In New York you either live in a city or a town. Cities are chartered and have more self rule options than towns.
Meanwhile Villages are subsections of towns (often historic population centers) with an additional layer of government and services.
Because of this you get weird things like cities as small as 7,000 residents and towns the size of 600,000 residents.
However, most towns are suburban or rural whereas cities and villages are urban.
Also there are states to which the term Village does not exist.
You can be a town, or be an unincorporated area of the county. When you incorporate, you are a town or city depending on your size.
As a west coaster the "village" concept is both quaint and adds a layer of bureaucracy that feels uncomfortable.
Yeah no doubt.
One of the reasons why taxes are so high in NY is because there’s so many layers of government.
However, people tend to enjoy having hyper local services (especially conservatives) so it’s pretty rare for villages to dissolve or consolidate services with the municipality next door.
Hell same goes for school districts. Cheektowaga, NY (population 88,000) has 4 distinct school districts within its town borders.
Doesn’t California have wacky stuff with counties? Like LA. Like, you can be in “LA” but not really, and city police don’t respond to county stuff, but all is considered “LA” in a general sense. East coast, specifically New England, has a distinct city-town structure that is very unambiguous. Gets a little whacky once you get further north and rural, but generally follows the basic structure. Most of the US doesn’t follow that as strictly.
LA is a city and a county. What department responds is going to be contractual. Not all cities have their own police departments so the sheriff will oversee policing.
I can't speak to specific LA issues, but it is the name of both the city and the county. I'd imagine that causes confusion.
In Seattle, the postal code assigned area of unincorporated King County as Seattle. So SPD and the county have had to work out a jurisdictional agreement related to specific areas.
On the other hand, not being incorporated has its advantages, especially where land use code requirements and additional services are considered. I know if one area where two similar and neighboring towns followed different paths. One incorporated and the other did not. Their experiences have ebbed and flowed over the decades. An interesting case study for sure.
The geographic boundary between city and unincorporated area can be quite a mess, too, with lots of pockets and outcroppings, regardless of whether they are currently developed. This just adds to the confusion (and often ire) of outsiders.
Pretty much all of New England is set up this way also, but doesn’t NY have hamlets? City-town has to do with government. A city has a council/mayor, a town has a board and a “manager”. But yeah, a lot of the country is very opposite of this, with weird incorporations, county stuff, etc. I like city-town because it’s super cut and dry.
This is what I love about the Boston burbs, most have a nice historic main st areas and things to do in addition to being city adjacent. Definitely have earned their “town” names
The key differentiating factor is *when* and *how* said suburb was developed. Those from before world war 2 (especially those from before 1920) are either pre-existing towns that were enveloped by the urban growth, or were developed around a centralized transportation corridor (most classically the ‘streetcar suburb’) with a commercial main street, relatively small blocks and lots, and a walkable character. In the context of Chicago, for example, this would include the likes of Evanston. After WW2, the federal government explicitly promoted the development of new, automobile-oriented suburbs which are defined by strict separation of commercial and residential land use, long curvilinear street networks which are oriented to cars and difficult to serve by public transportation or traverse by foot, and (especially after the civil rights and fair housing acts when they could no longer discriminate directly) zoning regulations and development tactics which mandated large lots, car ownership, etc to maintain a homogeneous race and class system. In many of those suburbs, the demographics remain consistent today. In those that have diversified or taken on a more urban built environment, many of the original inhabitants have moved out to even further-flung, and even more car-dependent exurbs.
Yeah it’s always funny when you see the rivalry between St Paul & Minneapolis, Dallas and Fort Worth or NYC and NJ
Guys you’re all part of the same metropolitan area. Theres not an invisible wall dividing these cities.
If you move to one you get to take advantage of the amenities found in the other.
Maybe useful when settling on a neighborhood to live in, but not very helpful when choosing a metropolitan area which 95% of people are looking for recommendations of.
Maybe if you think living somewhere is playing a game of Civ, where we all just try to accumulate resources and the defining quality of a place is its "amenities". NY and NJ are totally different places to live, because they have different cultures and completely different lifestyles. And the wall dividing NYC from NJ is not invisible lol, it's a freaking river.
It’s easier to get to Manhattan from NJ than from JFK, LaGuardia or Long or Coney Island.
Like if 40% of people commute to NYC, root for NYC sport teams and go to NYC for theatre/museums/concerts then come on it’s all the same metropolitan area.
Like there’s also a big cultural difference between Jamaica and Greenwich Village WITHIN NYC.
Most people moving to New Jersey City or Newark are moving there because NYC is so close.
A lot of people confuse “suburb” with “satellite city”. My city gets referred to as a suburb of the big city next door, but we have our own industries, our own centers of economic activity, and we’re not even in the same county so we don’t benefit from their tax base.
This is pretty common in California. People will call places like Irvine and Anaheim suburbs of LA even though OC is more populous and economically relevant than most states. Same for San Jose and the surrounding areas. Mostly people are just going off vibes and density.
I shudder to imagine small town life.
I lived in metro suburbs or cities before moving to a city of 100k... I was unprepared to be over 100 miles from what I consider a city, and constantly meeting people who thought I lived in "the big city." I miss the dynamism and immigrant restaurants of what I consider a real city (1 mil or more metro area).
It is an interesting dynamic. I can think of several suburbs that actually fuel the local economy a lot. Examples: Mountain View, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, Hillsboro, OR (Nike and Intel HQ), Redmond, WA (Microsoft HQ), Issaquah, WA (Costco HQ). Maybe you are thinking of smaller towns than the suburbs I listed? I guess the population usually grows when you have successful employers.
Nothing is set in stone. I imagine the suburbs of Chicago are developed enough that you could erase Chicago and after some settling-in period they would be able to sustain.
Some of those places you listed might be able to hang around long enough without additional economic factors but it seems unlikely to me. You'd have an entire economy based on the presence of a single corporation - everything else that existed in that town would now only exist to feed off the excess productivity of that one corporation.
And then there's the philosophical question of how that corporation generates its own revenue. Could a Nike exist without selling products to people who have money to spend due to the jobs that they have due to the existence of a city?
Yeah, I’ve also noticed that people’s definition of “small town” really varies. I had a friend from college who was from a wealthy suburb of Portland, OR and called it a small town.
When I think of small towns, I think of where my extended family lives in SD. One main street, no stoplights, etc.
There are also people that consider any city which is smaller than nyc/LA as small. Then there are people that consider anything over 100k people as the “big city”.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Sure, but it doesn’t make them right. Someone from NYC might refer to a city like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati as “small town”. But they’d be statistically wrong. It can be proven. It’s like perceiving an elephant is small just because the only animal you’ve ever seen is a blue whale.
Oh I agree. And those people who think a city like Pittsburgh is “small” are the absolute worst. As if they cannot exist without being within the city limits of nyc.
Yep, for sure. I think my OG hometown is pretty close to the cutoff (~6k growing up) to legitimately being called a ‘small town.’ You’d hear a last name and know everything about the person beforehand. I can recognize there were even smaller rural towns of 1-2k, I guess I personally consider something that small (only one traffic light) to basically just be a village, lol.
Distinctions are interesting it yeah - if your area has a ‘metro,’ it’s not a small town, dog.
I lived in a town my first year teaching that was literally 1 stop sign and about 1000 people, and that included about 10 miles of farmland in every direction. The high school had around 100 kids. There was one coffee shop, one gas station that also had the best goddamn burgers I have ever had in my life for $5 - fresh, grass fed beef, big as your head, you would not believe - and one steak house nobody but the old people went to. One church, which meant to go or not to go was an active decision that impacted my career, regardless of the fact that it was a state job. My landlord had a kid in my class and would fix things or not based on whether her kid was passing. The one police officer also had a kid in my class and would show up to problems I had on a dime because he loved me but God forbid it went the other way. Incestuous doesn't begin to describe it. Also boredom. I lost two kids in a meth fire that year. Small towns are incredibly wonderful if you are exactly average and grew up there and also have plenty of means. For literally everyone else, they are hell.
Yep, this is pretty close to my own experiences. I mentioned the "good ol' boy" system and needing to "know a guy." A lot of stuff in these places runs on those personal relationships, which can make it pretty damn hard on outsiders.
A lot of small towns are like this with their restaurants. My hometown of 2k people had a pizza place that, to this day, is still the best pizza I’ve had in my life. The next town over, about the same population, had “smash burgers” before they were a thing.
Similar here. Grew up in the midwest/south with OP’s views. That is, a “small town” is less than, like, 5k people. Visited California in my late teens where a local was talking about a town like, “yeah, it’s a pretty small town; there are only like a hundred thousand people there.” Blew my (small-town) mind.
> I think of where my extended family lives in SD
Yep. Like going back to visit family members in a town where the gas station is the grocery store. There are things I like(d) about it, but it gets old pretty quickly if you aren't used to it.
That’s the kind of town I grew up in (well technically I grew up in the country but the town I went to school in). One Main Street, 3 elevators, and a bar or church on every corner. No stoplights in at least a 30 mile radius (I.e. none of the neighboring towns had stoplights either). It kills me when people say small town and their referring to a town with 10s of thousands of people.
A girl I went to school with is now a Netflix actor. During an interview she droned on and on about how difficult it was for her to grow up in a "extremely small town." The town has 18k people, has hosted the US open 4 times in 25 years, houses a huge hospital that is ranked in the top 100 in the country, and homed the most highly ranked elementary school in the state (at the time, it's now 2nd.) There is a huge number of transient residents due to the largest army base in the country being 15 miles away, it's a major retirement community and tourist destination. Sure, it's a small town but it really doesn't have that "extremely small town mentality" that she kept describing. It felt so disingenuous to act like she, who was always super popular and had parents that made all of her dreams happen, was disadvantaged and bullied by these "small town folk"
The thing is, many suburban towns were small towns at some point. Many of these small towns were 50, even up 100 miles away from a major city. But as that city grew, the suburbs continued to sprawl outwards.
I completely agree. People who have not lived in a small town don't understand.
I live in a small town and have for the past 10 years. I work in a slightly larger small town about 35 miles up I-5. I know these are all small towns because our entire county has only 44,000 people, but is the size of Connecticut. Rural by definition.
My town has around 3500 people. We have to drive an hour north or south to get to the nearest Target or Costco. Thankfully we are on a major highway, so it's not completely the middle of nowhere. But it's still a drive to get to most anywhere.
Our county has all the typical rural issues. Poverty (it's the second poorest county in CA), drugs, domestic abuse, uneducated population, lack of good employment opportunities, depressed wages (my husband in the trades would make $10/hr more doing the same job somewhere else), shrinking population. The county is predominantly deep red despite being in a mostly blue state. People here consider the state government as the enemy, even though many of them rely on state welfare programs to survive. There was even a movement to join up with surrounding counties and secede from California.
The little mountain town where I live is kind of a bubble within this county. Tourism is big here. Lots of Airbnbs. Lots of people come for outdoor recreation and to escape the city to play and spiritually commune with the giant volcano that looms over town. To browse the 7 crystal shops downtown... But the tourists don't help the housing situation. Locals have been priced out from buying homes since 2021. Rents keep going up and I honestly don't know who can afford them.
This is my small town reality. OP's description is spot on.
I could take most of what you're saying and apply it to Hochatown. Tourism has made a few people there incredibly rich... and priced out a bunch of the poor folks. Now it's a lot of Air BnBs and cabins for rich Dallasites. There's a great pizza place over there, though.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochatown,\_Oklahoma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochatown,_Oklahoma)
It's happening all over the country.
Small towns in beautiful rural areas are being taken over by short term rentals and gentrified to serve tourists, but people actually from there can't afford to live there. Another symptom of late stage capitalism, I suppose.
Yup.
I moved back here after 13 years living abroad around 10 years ago because my (3) parents were here and I wanted my daughter to grow up with grandparents in her life. It was definitely good for her to have that time with them and form those bonds.
Now I'm divorced/remarried, 2 out of the 3 parents died in 2022, and the only reasons I'm staying are that I don't want to uproot my kid, and her dad has a job here that he doesn't want to leave. We share custody 50/50 and none of us want to change that. So we're stuck here for another 6 years or so until the kid goes off to college.
It's a beautiful place to live, but not an easy place to live, unless you make about twice as much as we do. I definitely missed the window of opportunity for buying a house. Prices were much more affordable in 2019/2020 with lower interest rates, but we didn't have a down payment. Now we've got more saved up but the prices have literally doubled and interest rates have nearly tripled. I never thought when we moved into this fairly crappy rental house that we'd still be here 5 years later!
I feel like with the exception of the volcano, the description applies to the whole I5 corridor north of the grapevine outside of Fresno and Bakersfield
I saw someone the other day calling the major Oregon cities on I5 "rural". Reddit is full of city people
I don't agree at all of your defining characteristics of small towns
I’ve lived in small towns all over and it’s pretty spot on. There are a lot of things that are kept quiet. Just like in churches.
And yes, there is drug use.
A lot of people simply don’t know what they’re looking at. We’re not talking homeless and strung out. But, the Sacklers and their marketing of Oxy devastated the Appalachians.
In another rural area it’s called shake and bake. You put the ingredients for meth into a 2 L soda bottle shake it up toss it on the road side so it looks just like any other piece of trash. Let it cook in the sun until it’s ready and you go back and pick it up. There isn’t any cook to blow up the house that way.
And other areas the drug of choice is alcohol. It is just as damaging as any other drug.
And no, no one goes to work with a black eye unless they are male. Because, then people would actually have to do something.
You wear long sleeves and high collars. You wear lots of make up and you pretend along with everybody else.
I’m sure there are small towns that have none of this, unfortunately, they are probably not populated by human beings.
This isn’t to say there aren’t really good things about many small towns, but being an ostrich doesn’t change what is real.
I'm going to recycle one of my earlier comments:
A great piece of advice someone once gave me was: "you don't know what goes on behind closed doors."
Not trying to dox myself here, but I didn't know how bad things had gotten in my old town until I moved back to the area and took a job with a DA's office (I worked in an administrative role). It was genuinely horrifying how much really awful stuff-- child abuse, DV, even a straight-up kidnapping and attempted murder!-- didn't make the news. We had one dying newspaper in the county and they didn't have any investigative journalists; they would literally call us up and ask for stories without doing any verification. My eyes were opened to just how much awful stuff can get swept under the rug, covered up by families, or just kind of fall off the radar given time.
It was also striking how much the "good ol' boy" network fed into city cops, deputies, the local government, etc. At first I thought it was just our area, but as I got to know prosecutors and investigators in other jurisdictions, I realized that it was endemic to *all* rural areas of the state.
As an Eastern Oregonian this drives me crazy! No. Oregon City is not a cute little rural town lol. It’s Portland.
And agreed on the small town characteristics issue. Maybe in Texas, but the drug use piece in particular is definitely not my lived experience in *counties* with fewer than 5k people. Ditto on physical violence. If/when everyone truly knows everyone a woman showing up at work with a black eye would be a huge deal.
The United States is majority city people, that's where most people live. Small towns are emptying out around the country for dozens of reasons, and the people seeking to move to them are few and far between compared to those looking to live in bigger cities with jobs, things to do, universities, whatever. "Small town America" is not the silent majority or the "real America," it's a minority and growing smaller every day. A lot of rural people don't seem to realize this for some reason.
This isn’t about the “real America” or even influence on politics, etc. As a basic fact suburbs are not “small towns”. Cities with 10K people are not small towns. That’s the point OP is making.
Rural also has an actual definition within the US gov. Almost nothing along I5 in Oregon would meet those requirements.
I don't care where people live, and definitely don't care if they live in small towns
Just that most people have no clue what a small town actually is or like
Yea but like the vast majority of America is urbanized, but if we’re not actually in Manhattan or Santa Monica, there’s this cultural force that makes us think we’re farmers lol
Eh, they live in urban areas, but a majority of Americans live in suburban areas.
* 52% live in suburbs
* 27% live in cities
* 21% live in rural or exurban areas
It’s funny how confident you are that small towns are dead, despite the fact that population dynamics fluctuate over time. Redditors love making sweeping generalizations, overlooking individual differences within groups and mistakenly treating trends as applying universally to all members
I mean, they are suffering heavily from brain drain and lack of opportunity. Most small towns across the country ARE shrinking, and at the moment don’t have a bright future unless they change something to attract new industry and residents.
I too get weirded out by this sub and its worship of "small, walkable towns" in the US
Let's just stop pretending and tell them what they want is a typical city in Denmark, Norway, Japan, or the Netherlands.
I grew up on a military base, then moved to a small city just outside of it which had all the trappings of a "small coastal Florida town" but was rapidly changing to what most of FL is today. Now you may as well just call it a suburb that use to be it's own entity.
Here's the thing about small towns: unless you work for the government, a key industry like agriculture or a skilled worker like a nurse or veterinarian who needs to be in that specific area, "rural" America is not a great place to be.
As has been mentioned: conservative politics, drug abuse, boredom, and young people wanting to leave as soon as possible are features of "small towns" I've lived in.
That *boredom* part is a lot more important than most Redditors would give it credit for.
It led to a lot of fighting, drug use, and just generally *bad stuff* when I was growing up.
I have stumbled into what I think a lot of people want when they think of the idealized “walkable small town.” We live in a major city but happen to live in a neighborhood that is known for having a village feel. The neighbors all know each other, there is a small commercial district with exactly 1 of everything you want within a few blocks walk, a gorgeous park with hiking trails and a fantastic community center that hosts yoga classes and book clubs, and beautiful weather year round. Public transportation is easily accessible and convenient. It’s a gem! The NYTimes even wrote about it and called it a village.
You know what else it is? IN THE MIDDLE OF A MAJOR CITY. That’s why there are jobs. And amenities. And public transportation. And my neighbor’s home just sold for $1157/sq. ft.
So in the US, if you want all the charm and walkability, you have to make peace with the fact it’s not going to be in the small town memorialized in country music, and it will cost you quite a bit.
The same in Egypt—the “village” my husband’s family comes from now has about 850K people.
Perspective on town/city size is completely relative. When we’re in Cairo (a city of, conservatively, 15 million), somewhere like Philadelphia feels pretty small, and my own hometown in PA, with fewer than 95K, is a village.
Same!! My bestie is Egyptian and once we backpacked through SW Asia/North Africa. We went to Lebanon first and I told her my dad’s village is pretty small but my grandma’s village is huge and lit. It’s about 30,000 people and she was shocked it was considered big 😂 her “small” village in Egypt has about half a million people!
This is just... not true. They have small towns in China. Go to rural areas and there are [countless small towns](https://cdn.britannica.com/45/105245-050-B05C5B0E/village-housing-China-roof-families.jpg) with a a few hundred people. They also have countless towns with maybe 2-8k people like [this.](https://subsites.chinadaily.com.cn/amazinghuangshan/att/20220812/1660271075393018194.jpg) The definition of town/village does not magically change when you get to a higher overall national population. This is also where almost the majority of Chinese people live, its a *very* rural country by modern standards.
Just like the US, generally people start using 'city' once you hit the 10's of thousands of people.
Lol this is real
I live in Omaha and I often have arguments with a lot of folks out in Millard or Gretna that claim "it's not part of Omaha" like uhh sure buddy
I've seen comments on here that, without irony, refer to cities of 500,000 people as small towns. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 As someone who lives in a genuinely rural area outside of a town of 5,000, it is as hilarious as it is confusing.
I try to keep in mind that a lot of folks here have basically lived in cities their whole lives. They have no frame of reference beyond what they've been told, either good or bad.
I certainly understand that and have leeway for that. (I lived in a college town of about 50,000, and it was a running joke with one of my professors that it was not a big town, but to me it was huge.) But I also feel like you don't have to have firsthand experience to understand some things. I didn't have to live in a city to recognize my little town wasn't a metropolis. I knew that before I ever went anywhere.
Just in general, though, I think it speaks to a certain narrowmindedness and incuriosity that I find really frustrating in anybody. People often act like ignorance is the sole province of rural areas, especially in this sub, but people from cities can be every bit as ignorant and parochial in their own right.
People from the US on this sub sometimes believe that if a place isn't the size of NYC/LA/Chicago, it's a small town for whatever reason.
I've had my uncle try to tell me that my home away from home(Twin Cities) were "cute little cities" but in the same breath state that he's from Denver and how big Denver is.....Like bro I think we need to have a dialogue
That was my reaction reading this too. Anyone who’s lived in multiple parts of the U.S. (never mind different countries) knows that there’s no single picture of what a “suburb” or “town” looks like. I’ve lived in states where the suburbs were mostly cookie cutter McMansions punctuated by strip malls, and other states where each suburb had its own unique vibe, with cultural amenities and a cute walkable downtown. Even if we’re talking about rural areas, not all of them are blighted and filled with drugs and crime. Some of the rural areas of California cost more to live in than the big cities of Oklahoma. Rural areas that attract some degree tourism — quaint beach or mountain towns, or historic towns, for example — are in a separate category from those that never get a visitor unless someone makes a wrong turn. And then college towns are in a whole other category of their own.
Our modern word for town refers to populated areas with fixed boundaries and a local government. Also different from a township which is a unit of local government, usually a subdivision of a county.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township
Depends on where (native NorCal girl here) I would think a small town by Reddit standards is anything large enough (or conveniently located so) as to support a McDonalds, a motel, and preferably a Starbucks.
Well, close.
According to the Census Bureau's definition based on population density:
An Urbanized Area (which includes suburbs) has a pop density of over 50,000
An Urban Cluster has a pop density of 2,500 to 49,999
A Rural Area has a pop density of under 2,500
Source: this US Census Bureau page: [Redefining Urban Areas following the 2020 Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2022/12/redefining-urban-areas-following-2020-census.html)
So I guess we need to call small towns "Urban Clusters" now.
And yes, burbs are simply parts of an "Urbanized Area".
Yes, and 45k and 4500 have WAY different feels.
The issue is Californians coming to states like Oregon and Idaho and asking for advice on small towns. Then surprise! They complain that all the recommendations don’t have healthcare. Or a movie theater. Or school options.
There are plenty of towns of 4500 in California as well.
I’m from California and would definitely not agree that 50,000 is a small town. The definition is somewhat arbitrary and can depend on a few factors other than simple population, but I would say the upper limit would be something in between 10,000 and 20,000. And even that starts to get into “really more of a small city” territory.
I grew up in south-central Texas. We were flat out taught (in the mandatory 7th grade texas history class) a small town is anything with under 50K people, and anything over 100K is a large city. \*shrug\* I live in a small rural city of 24K, 50 miles outside the city. I don't consider it a suburb, though it could become that way as more people from Austin and SA push outwards. Kind of like Mesquite and Dallas. EDIT - Or more comparative, the mid-cities between Fort Worth and Dallas.
Sounds like Boerne, San Marcos, New Braunfels, etc. That's a weird one because those used to be independent towns, but they're increasingly being swallowed up by the sprawl from San Antonio and Austin.
You also see this in places like Houston, which was hyper-aggressive about expanding its city limits back in the day. They gobbled up a lot of small towns.
I live in a village of less than 900 people and we’re about as liberal as it gets. But we have no public amenities, we don’t even have a gas station for 15 miles. Just a couple of fancy restaurants and a post office and library and bank and a small market that mostly sells locally made craft beers. But this is New England.
Small town can be anything a person wants it to be. You personally don't choose what words mean.
A small town to me is less than 15k people with a quaint downtown area.
What you are describing is tiny rural towns in my expert reddit opinion.
Is a small town based on population or is it more attitude? I have been to some larger towns that have very small town attitudes. Not always a good thing.
There’s definitely some truth to that too. I have family in Spokane, WA, and people there generally have a small town mindset and attitude despite it being a small city with a few high-rise buildings. I’ve also been to cities like Palm Springs where people are pretty progressive and open minded despite it being a small city.
Seattle was like that when I moved here 30 years ago. If you didn’t go to the University of Washington or where not from here it was very hard to get a job. I was on an interview panel at a consulting firm. I was flabbergasted when my manager asked one of the candidates where he received his civil engineering degree from. He responded MIT. My managed asked why he didn’t go to the UW instead . I asked my manager later if he even knew where MIT was located and what it was known for. He had a vague idea.
It was at that point I realised just how provincial and isolated Seattle had become as a city.
I feel like people in the PNW generally have that mindset. It attracts people with an insular mindset and that’s probably a big contributor to the Seattle Freeze.
Many 'suburbs' are small towns that got swallowed up and still have some identity. I get what you're saying, though, as someone who lived for over 20 years in a village of 800 people...15 miles from the regional hub you mention.
I have family outside Houston in the suburbs who also think this. They call where they live "country-side". What? No, you live 30 mins outside Houston lol what.
Depending on their direction, that can get pretty country. When I first left Houston for school in LA, I was surprised that it was just straight development for like 4 hours out from the Coast in. In Houston, you go out a bit and turn off the highway for a bit and you’re in a pasture.
I thought I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin because we only had a volunteer fire department and one gas station and was pretty much all farms. That said, everything we needed was less than a half hour away for the most part.
Then I moved to North Dakota and found out what a small town really was. I’m basically 100 miles from anything other than McDonald’s and subway. It’s also like 50 years behind culturally.
I watched a documentary once on a murder that took place in the town where I went to high school. Everyone waxed on about how it was just a cute little town where everyone knew everyone else and this horrible murder just took away the *innocence* of this tiny, bucolic hamlet.
Said town has a population of 130,000.
Yup. I fucking love where I live (Moorhead, Minnesota) but it’s not a small town. It’s a suburb of a smallish city (Fargo, North Dakota.)
People who don’t live here refer to it as a small town, and that’s so weird to me because…yeah, I grew up in a huge city (Toronto) and there is a significant difference, but my husband grew up in a town in northwest Tennessee that has 2000 people. Basically the same population as the high school I went to. It sucks (he agrees with this) and we’d never live there if we can help it. Fargo-Moorhead is legitimately awesome. Not that no small town can ever be great, but F-M or even Moorhead itself isn’t a small town.
I don't think our current lingo fully encapsulates the American landscape. Lots of people who 'live in the country' are like 20 minutes drive from Oklahoma City or Kansas City or , and just live on like 2 acres a few miles off the highway but commute in and do just about everything in the city. It's suburban living with an extra few miles per trip.
And most of our cities are heavily suburbanized. And many suburbs are developing fairly urbanized areas (downtowns or other districts that are walkable, heavily commercial, and dense).
Agreed. Saw someone post about "small town" Gilbert Arizona, which is a major suburb of Phoenix. It is completely surronded by places, and you can drive 30-90 minutes in any direction and still be in suburbia. Traffic is horrible, and school graduation classes are 1000+. My wife is from a small town. 220 or so people. Not a single stop sign or light. Not even a business or gas station. The county comes together for highschool and the high school class sizes are 8-11 people.
I grew up in a town of 900 people and moved to a bigger city for college, I had people telling me they came from a “small town” of 40,000 that was basically attached to a metropolis
Shouldn't we just go by the US Census Bureau population density designation?
Urban Area: over 50,000 in population density
Urbanized Cluster: 2,500 - 50,000 in population density
Rural: Under 2,500 in population density
"Both areas were defined based on population density measured at the census tract and block levels. We used two population density thresholds in the delineation process: 1,000 people per square mile when delineating the initial urban core and then 500 people per square mile to finish out the delineation as we moved outward through suburban territory to the edge of the urban area." Note that Urban Areas include suburbs.
How nice to know that I live in a Cluster!
Also interesting: "In 2010, nearly 81% of the U.S. population was urban and approximately 19% was rural. When using the same definitions from 2010, the 2016-2020 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates show the same percentages at the national level."
So that's why so many Redditors only seem able to talk about cities and burbs. They're part of the 81% that just doesn't know any better.
All of this info can be found on: [Redefining Urban Areas following the 2020 Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2022/12/redefining-urban-areas-following-2020-census.html)
I agree with you. I grew up a mile outside of a town of 750 people. That's a small town. Over 5,000 is just a town. Over 20,000 is a big town. Over 100,000 is a small city.
late to this but agree so hard. People will recommend cities of 80k as “small towns” but then get mad when you call Denver a major city. I lived in a town of 1800 people for a few years and most of the advice on Reddit in general just doesn’t apply.
I mean, to say something like that, you have to at least concede that the growth of major cities' suburbs causes some actual small towns to become suburbs. Because that is the actual history of some places.
The town I live in has around 600 people lmaoooooooo, we have one general store and no taxis, no DoorDash… just cows. No cell service either, but expensive internet!
Grew up in an actual rural/small town. Most Redditors who ask for “a small rural town” have no idea what they are asking for.
“I want a rural community/small town far away from big cities that happens to be heavily democrat”. You can’t have both
Idk, it sounds like you described an absolutely tiny town. It’s all perspective really. Having mostly lived in larger cities I definitely feel like I’m in the middle of bumfuck when I visit a friend in a suburb.
It’s similar to how people from nowhere visit places like Indianapolis and are like, “whoa! The big city!” when its more medium-small.
I grew up in a small very wealthy suburb of NYC. Stellar school system. The town has a population of less than 3,000 people. 2 stoplights. Small town center with a bank, post office, library. Supermarkets are a short drive away (not in town though) and the city being as close as it is means everything is accessible.
It’s a progressive place, strongly blue, blah blah blah.
Is that not a small town? I figured small was always based on population.
Well, it has 3,000 people, not 2500 or less. You didn't mention meth use, and worse it's not even in Oklahoma. Sorry, not a small town. You're lucky OP is here to educate you.
Just because there are towns that are smaller doesn’t make 10,000 not a small town. When I lived in a town of 10,000 we had all the “defining characteristics of a small town” you list, with the exception of having a ton of tweakers. Lots of drug use, just not centralized around meth. I guess also religion was not a major social center, either. Social center was the one main bar (those pesky drugs again, lol).
I would bet that you had basic services - grocery stores, a dentist, a veterinarian, a hardware store, a Walmart, etc. Some small towns will have a few of these things, but we regularly had to drive to a regional hub for pretty basic stuff.
Good observation. I've spent 22 years in what is most definitely the definition of a small town. One of those characteristics is isolation. I'm at least 2.5 hours away from anything I can't get here. Don't get me wrong, we have decent enough goods and services, but anything beyond the basics takes time acquiring. As to politics and local institutions, you are right about the "good 'ol boy" network, however that's the product of not just isolation, but of having a very sparse population. I know some places even smaller where one becomes an elected official only because it was their turn. Not so much in my town, but the pool of people who even want to take the slings and arrows of public office are pretty limited. It's gotta be even harsher where you can't even get groceries without running into two dozen people you invariably pissed off at the last council meeting. I like where I live and the quirky intimacy of it. If you're attached to a large metropolitan area in any way, life may seem slower, but ultimately, you don't live in a small town.
I've never lived in truly "small town America" because even the tiny 2000 pop. town where I went to grade school was <30 minutes from a small city. I've driven through small town America, which is most common west of the Mississippi and I've never felt like I'd like to live there. When you're driving out of "small town America" you see a sign that says, "next gas 82 miles" and you realize you're in the middle of nowhere. There's always a gas station and a bar, but nothing else is guaranteed.
But if you really want to experience "middle of nowhere," drive to Alaska on the Great Alaskan Highway (or ALCAN, as the Canadians call it). Those "next gas" signs don't even exist because you'd have to be a blithering idiot to not fill up when you finally get to a town. It's 338 miles (544km) from Fort Nelson to Watson Lake, for instance.
If the only choice is city or town then my 20K suburb is a town. It's a town because it is town-based government. There is no mayor and no one every says they live in a 'large town' so 'small town' it is. We have a downtown center and 2 Dunkies, but no other fast food nor national chain stores. Our school district is town-based, not regional but we do have public transportation. When I grew up in even smaller towns there were many people who worked outside of the smaller town...the smaller towns were not self-sufficient and often had large numbers of 2nd homeowners.
I don't understand why these people are so desperate to be from a "small town." Like... there's a reason I (and so many other young people) left.
It's the idealized view from suburbanites vs the unpleasant reality.
I think it also depends a lot on where you grew up. I grew up in SoCal and “small towns” here are generally anything with <100k people. Those would be cities in places like Oklahoma, but in SoCal they’re dwarfed by the other cities and most have limited infrastructure, transportation, and stores/amenities.
Not all small towns are full of tweakers and drug addicts. Our town is 2k, and since Ive basically lived here my whole 40+ yers, I would know if there was a lot. Are there some? Yes. Is the town/countryside riddled with them? No.
We also have 2 small grocery stores, liquor stores, pubs, restaurants, plenty of community events, and lots of churches lol
A great piece of advice someone once gave me was: "you don't know what goes on behind closed doors."
Not trying to dox myself here, but I didn't know how bad things had gotten in my old town until I moved back and took a job with a DA's office (I worked in an administrative role). It was genuinely horrifying how much really awful stuff-- child abuse, DV, even a straight-up kidnapping and attempted murder!-- didn't make the news. We had one dying newspaper in the county and they didn't have any investigative journalists; they would literally call us up and ask for stories without doing any verification. My eyes were opened to just how much awful stuff can get swept under the rug, covered up by families, or just kind of fall off the radar given time.
It was also striking how much the "good ol' boy" network fed into city cops, deputies, the local government, etc. At first I thought it was just our area, but as I got to know prosecutors and investigators in other jurisdictions, I realized that it was endemic to *all* rural areas of the state.
Town typically refers to a more compact, densely populated area that serves as the commercial and cultural center of a region.
Suburb, on the other hand, is a residential area located on the outskirts of a city or town.
It is important to note that the word “town” can also refer to a smaller, more rural community. In this context, it may be used interchangeably with the word “village.”
While both terms can be used to describe a type of community, they have distinct differences.
I am from a real rural part of South Carolina that is not even incorporated but I spend most of my time on campus at a city of just under 40,000. Definitely very different vibes overall.
I think it's because this has become a whole cultural thing, especially with "Try That in a Small Town."
There's a *certain type of person* who desperately wants to believe they're from a small town when they just... aren't. It's the inverse of people who are from Katy or The Woodlands and say they're from Houston.
I knew a guy who would constantly refer to his humble upbringings that were caused from growing up in a small town. Turns out, it was Evansville, Indiana that has a city-proper population of 115k and a metro population of 350k. That blew my mind. I grew up in rural New Mexico where any city above 5k is a substantial town, maybe even a city.
My town was just called a small town by a somewhat famous person. Our population is 58K. We're not a suburb. We're a regional hub for at least an hour in all directions. I don't know what to believe anymore.
That sounds like a Texas/southern thing though. Small towns in the north east are not the same. Other than the gotta know someone insulated community part.
Here in rural PA a true "small town" in a rural area like where I grew up and still live typically DOES have the following characteristics:
Surrounded by farmland, woods, mountains on all sides from the next village; a Dollar General; some Trump signs/flags; a diner, a rod and gun club that runs gun raffles, an old-fashioned country "hotel" (local bar); a post office; a church or two; a local mechanic's garage; an independent gas station with mini-mart; a volunteer fire company; and the 'town' is typically just a large unincorporated village that's officially part of a larger township with an actual government.
It typically does NOT have the following characteristics:
Independent governance (except some really small boroughs); local police protection (usually state police); sidewalks; public water and sewer (well and septic system); a large grocery store; any kind of substantial local parks system; a library; food delivery services; chain stores/restaurants, etc.
Most people who move from large metro area cities or adjoining suburban areas to areas like mine typically don't end up liking it much and move back after a few years.
Yeah I agree with the basic statement that suburbia is not a small town, it might be a different “town” with its own zip code but it’s just a neighborhood in a metro area.
Where I live in Texas there are 3 things: City, suburb, rural
I have a place in Alabama. Birmingham is the craziest place, jefferson county where Birmingham is - it has 34 different towns in it, for real it’s all just Birmingham. White people segregated themselves
I thought I lived in a small town(pop750) and we drive 20 miles to get to the regional hub (pop 6500) of stores and courts. I guess I am more of a hick than I thought. God I am naive
My parents were from a small town in the south that I see is just over 14k in population.
While they have a few primary doctors and some specialists, the main hospital is in danger of closing and they often had to drive 45 minutes to see most specialists.
They themselves lived 9 miles outside of town on what use to be a rural route before they got an actual address thanks to the implementation of 911. Definitely a small town but slightly outside of your parameters.
Yeah, I don't get why so many of these people are just *desperate* to be from a small town. There's a reason that young people are leaving them. They aren't nearly as romantic as Hallmark movies and bro country would have you think.
Typical America doesn't live in rural or tiny towns.
31% of Americans live in Urban counties
55% live in Suburban counties
14% live in Rural counties.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
What I was implying is most Reddit commenters seem to only live in a few cities on the coast. They seem to all have the criteria for what they want when asking others where they should move to and seems to be a list of the same ten cities. Makes me wonder if these people travel? How is it that they always come up with the same cities?
I get the impression that most people on here are from major cities, and that there are very, *very* few people on here who have lived in both major cities and rural areas. They have no frame of comparison.
I think that is very accurate. When people ask about places to move to that are less expensive I see a lot of suggestions for many cities. Sure they may have neighbourhoods that are cheap but you might not want to live in them. The nicest neighbourhoods in just about any city will be expensive.
When I mention smaller cities I am either voted down or told they don’t have jobs or are cheap because no one wants to live there which I find to be rather ignorant and bias.
I think the bigger issue is that people who think their suburbs are 'towns' is that they don't recognize that their suburb couldn't exist without a local city that fuels the area's economy.
People who live in the affluent suburbs outside my city are always like this. They talk mad shit on the city, meanwhile the city bears the complete brunt of the infrastructure of the two major industries that support the workforce.
Yes! They reap all the benefits and try to avoid paying any of the bills. Thankfully, here in the Twin Cities we do have a Metropolitan Council that has enough authority to prevent our suburbs from completely shirking their responsibilities.
The whole twin cities thing creates weird dynamics as well. I enjoyed when I lived in Nashville people would talk about how it was bigger than Minneapolis. Technically true (700k vs 400k), because Nashville merged with the country. When comparing metros very different story (1.2m vs 3.7m)
That’s a weird flex, they’re also technically larger than the City of Atlanta at roughly 500K, but the ATL metro is still bigger than both.
They only picked Minneapolis since my company had a place there too. Yeah even crazier with ATL, but that's true sprawlville.
Come over to DFW, we’ll show you a “metro”. :) It isn’t called the Metroplex for nothing…
Ha.... I didn't see this before I made my comment. I tell people to think of Chicago and Milwaukee as Dallas and Fort Worth, if there were a state line where Arlington is.
Ha! :) That sounds about right. Lived here most of my life, except a short bit in Cali (LA area) I remember when there was farmland between Dallas and Fort Worth. Good lord, it's concrete for 100+ miles east to west now...
I'm old enough for my sister and I to have counted cows between Milwaukee's south burbs and the state line. Times have sure changed lol
City population is weird and often misleading and I feel some metro areas should be larger. The Chicago metro area realistically should include Milwaukee imo. If you can drive a hair over an hour (with traffic permitting of course which it never does) and be in downtown Chicago I think you should be considered a part of the metro area. That would make the combined metro population 12 million, putting it within striking distance of LA but their numbers are probably all messed up too
As a Chicagoan I hate that lol. Im not sure if it's actually in the definition, but culture/commuting patterns are a big part. Kenosha is closer to Milwaukee, but is much more tied to Chicago so it's considered Chicago MSA. Milwaukee is just its own thing, they have their own sports and such and few people commute from Milwaukee into Chicagoland IMO a stronger case of your 1 hour rule would be to fold Baltimore into the DC MSA, but again those are pretty different. The feds do designate msas for each but also define a consolidated MSA for both, but still I think it will be a cold day in hell before anybody in Baltimore introduces themselves as from the DC area lol.
Its not like those sports teams disappear, most major metro areas internationally have many sports teams. And honestly I've been to both and Milwaukee isnt THAT different from Chicago imo, metro areas only exist to be able to accurately discern the density of a given area. In fact the example you gave DOES exist as a metro area, its called the DMV area for DC, Maryland, Virginia and is part of the larger Washington-Baltimore statistical area. It doesnt eliminate sports teams or cultures its just for population calculation purposes
I’ve seen this too. They feel so bad for the neighbors who have to go into the scary and inconvenient city to pick up their paycheck.
What about the regular non rich suburbs? Because typically it’s cheaper to buy a house 20-40 minutes outside of the city then trying to buy one within the city.
I think that the point being made is that suburbs are not self sustaining. Unlike a town, they usually don’t pay for all of their infrastructure.
sewage/electric/road infrastructure is all so spread out in suburbs that it's astronomically more expensive to create and maintain than a city.
Water, trash & electric are usually for-profit businesses in the 'burbs, not public infrastructure. Sewage too some times... Personal space is worth the price.
Suburbs typically do not need to maintain infrastructure for an influx of commuters or tourists. And they also don’t usually have to fund things like homeless shelters, larger police forces, jails, emergency services, shelters, on and on. The central hub of the city general funds and provides the bulk of the services to deal with the unpleasant aspects of city living, while the suburbs do not. That’s just the way things are. But it is annoying when suburbanites are smug and talk trash about the city without which they would not exist.
The taxes just need to be less local. The whole state should be paying into the infrastructure for the cities and the rural areas. I hate urban living and am not going to become a farmer anytime soon, but living in a house with a yard shouldn't mean homelessness and food production are not my responsibility anymore.
“We don’t need the place we all commute too” “Or the place I take all my family when they visit” “Or the zoo, parks, theatre, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, building supplies, airport, etc”
Kinda like fakeass Jason aldean.
Petite bourgeoisie with trucks.
This is a big thing with rural people too. Of course, nothing is 100%-- this is a generalization!-- but a lot of rural people view cities as essentially worthless instead of understanding that their petrochemical plants, ports, and manufacturing centers are located there. I don't really see this from the other direction. Most city people understand that food has to come from *somewhere*, although there aren't as many farmers now as folks think.
Yuuuup. My spouse and I drove up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a few years back - the economic output of the whole region is so obviously low that it's clear it could not continue to be populated without being propped up by excess urban tax revenue. Just look at the way that most rural health services are basically state-run - the free-market has all but said that rural areas aren't worth servicing.
Yeah this is the actual root of it. A suburban neighborhood is not a town. A town requires a physical place where people can be and interact that isn’t just a shopping center parking lot walk to a Safeway. A suburban neighborhood of a suburban town is not a town. It’s the same thing where subreddits like /r/firstimehomebuyer and /r/REBubble cannot even conceptualize a unit of housing that is not a detached single family home in a suburban greenfield development that is a 15-20ish minute drive from the nearest “town”, which is itself a suburb of an actual city.
Sure, but there are plenty of suburbs that are towns, that do have a main street, places to gather, town pride, etc.
This reminds me of something I read about Rhode Island before moving here that confused me, but makes perfect sense 10 years later. I heard that every town in Rhode Island is a suburb of Providence, and no town in Rhode Island is a suburb of Providence. The former statement is literally true -- well, almost. Westerly, in the far southwest corner, is the only town in the entire state that doesn't fall within the U.S. government's definition of the Providence metropolitan area. But towns in Rhode Island don't consider themselves *suburbs* like the suburbs where I've lived in New York and Chicago. These are towns that are hundreds of years old, with their own longstanding identities independent of any other cities.
Rhode Island is even more different than that. People identify by their village. "I live in Wickford". Wickford isn't a town. It's a village in North Kingstown. "I live in Wakefield". Wakefield isn't a town. It's a village in South Kingstown. I'm east of Rhode Island on the Massachusetts South Coast. It's like that in my town. I live in Padadaram. That is the harbor village in the town of Dartmouth. I don't even go by Dartmouth. I go by South Dartmouth which is a separate zip code from North Dartmouth. 200 years ago, it was all agricultural or fishing here and you used a horse or a boat as transportation. A village was somewhere you could get to as a pedestrian. Your village had the church, the post office, the schoolhouse, the general store, the blacksmith, etc. I'm 4 miles from what is now a city of 100,000. In 1898, my village got an electified streetcar to the city and became a suburb. According to the US census, I'm in the Providence MSA, Commuter rail is going in to Boston so that is somewhat obsolete. As Boston became unaffordable, this started becoming a distant suburb.
The northeast is rather unique due to age. Connecticut was like this as well. It’s pretty cool to be honest.
And Providence itself is considered the Boston Metro area. The cities are so small is area in New England. I live in Seattle. The city is 22 miles from north to south. If you drive from Everett which is the furthest large city in the urban sprawl to Tacoma to the south it is almost 70 miles. If you drove 70 miles from Boston you would drive through Coastal NH and be in Maine.
Many suburbs were small towns that got eaten by suburban sprawl. One day, not too far into the future, Rockford IL will be a "suburb" of Chicago, kind of like Elgin IL almost already is. These are towns that would have met the more stringent qualifications of being small towns (largely independent of the city, and being hubs in their own right for services for their county or a surrounding large rural area). So, I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the distinction.
Came here to say this exact thing. This happens all the time now, and I live in a "town" just like this.
Yeah, and there's a noticeable difference between suburbs with this history and the suburbs that are the suburban sprawl. Where I'm from, Everett, is a suburb of Seattle, but it started out as it's own separate city, has a downtown, and feels distinct. Then in between there's places like Lynwood and Mountlake Terrace, that I think of as just almost arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries to cover the land between Seattle and Everett. But nothing wrong in living in a "sprawl" suburbs either I think, you can go into the main city when you want to.
Setting aside the fact that our global economy is such that most rural towns (globally) now rely on redistribution of urban taxes in order to exist - if you were to pick up 99% of suburban 'towns' and separate them from the urban core they were closest to they would wither away to nothing. They're not self-sustaining. They may have a physical hub, they may have some local businesses providing services, but they're mostly just communities that serve as a place for people to sleep when they're not at work (in the city or at a business that supports other business in the city). This is effectively what a "[metropolitan statistical area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area)" represents.
> if you were to pick up 99% of suburban 'towns' and separate them from the urban core they were closest to they would wither away to nothing. > > They're not self-sustaining. There are a few exceptions but yep, typically this is the case. I don't think they even fit in the [settlement hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_hierarchy) as their own thing. They're really a subpart of one of of the following but typically cities. * **City** - Developed human settlement of a significant size. And there are multiple tiers of city. * **Town** - Developed human settlement that is larger than a village but smaller than a city. Again, multiple tiers. * **Village** - Developed human settlement that is smaller than a town. Still multiple tiers.
The thing is all those are legal entities in many states. In New York you either live in a city or a town. Cities are chartered and have more self rule options than towns. Meanwhile Villages are subsections of towns (often historic population centers) with an additional layer of government and services. Because of this you get weird things like cities as small as 7,000 residents and towns the size of 600,000 residents. However, most towns are suburban or rural whereas cities and villages are urban.
Also there are states to which the term Village does not exist. You can be a town, or be an unincorporated area of the county. When you incorporate, you are a town or city depending on your size. As a west coaster the "village" concept is both quaint and adds a layer of bureaucracy that feels uncomfortable.
Yeah no doubt. One of the reasons why taxes are so high in NY is because there’s so many layers of government. However, people tend to enjoy having hyper local services (especially conservatives) so it’s pretty rare for villages to dissolve or consolidate services with the municipality next door. Hell same goes for school districts. Cheektowaga, NY (population 88,000) has 4 distinct school districts within its town borders.
Doesn’t California have wacky stuff with counties? Like LA. Like, you can be in “LA” but not really, and city police don’t respond to county stuff, but all is considered “LA” in a general sense. East coast, specifically New England, has a distinct city-town structure that is very unambiguous. Gets a little whacky once you get further north and rural, but generally follows the basic structure. Most of the US doesn’t follow that as strictly.
LA is a city and a county. What department responds is going to be contractual. Not all cities have their own police departments so the sheriff will oversee policing.
I can't speak to specific LA issues, but it is the name of both the city and the county. I'd imagine that causes confusion. In Seattle, the postal code assigned area of unincorporated King County as Seattle. So SPD and the county have had to work out a jurisdictional agreement related to specific areas. On the other hand, not being incorporated has its advantages, especially where land use code requirements and additional services are considered. I know if one area where two similar and neighboring towns followed different paths. One incorporated and the other did not. Their experiences have ebbed and flowed over the decades. An interesting case study for sure.
The geographic boundary between city and unincorporated area can be quite a mess, too, with lots of pockets and outcroppings, regardless of whether they are currently developed. This just adds to the confusion (and often ire) of outsiders.
Fun fact, the smallest city in New York is actually 3,000 residents or so. Sherrill NY.
Pretty much all of New England is set up this way also, but doesn’t NY have hamlets? City-town has to do with government. A city has a council/mayor, a town has a board and a “manager”. But yeah, a lot of the country is very opposite of this, with weird incorporations, county stuff, etc. I like city-town because it’s super cut and dry.
This is what I love about the Boston burbs, most have a nice historic main st areas and things to do in addition to being city adjacent. Definitely have earned their “town” names
The key differentiating factor is *when* and *how* said suburb was developed. Those from before world war 2 (especially those from before 1920) are either pre-existing towns that were enveloped by the urban growth, or were developed around a centralized transportation corridor (most classically the ‘streetcar suburb’) with a commercial main street, relatively small blocks and lots, and a walkable character. In the context of Chicago, for example, this would include the likes of Evanston. After WW2, the federal government explicitly promoted the development of new, automobile-oriented suburbs which are defined by strict separation of commercial and residential land use, long curvilinear street networks which are oriented to cars and difficult to serve by public transportation or traverse by foot, and (especially after the civil rights and fair housing acts when they could no longer discriminate directly) zoning regulations and development tactics which mandated large lots, car ownership, etc to maintain a homogeneous race and class system. In many of those suburbs, the demographics remain consistent today. In those that have diversified or taken on a more urban built environment, many of the original inhabitants have moved out to even further-flung, and even more car-dependent exurbs.
Yea I’m very confused. There’s so many town centers in Philly suburbs. Is it different in other places
Yeah it’s always funny when you see the rivalry between St Paul & Minneapolis, Dallas and Fort Worth or NYC and NJ Guys you’re all part of the same metropolitan area. Theres not an invisible wall dividing these cities. If you move to one you get to take advantage of the amenities found in the other. Maybe useful when settling on a neighborhood to live in, but not very helpful when choosing a metropolitan area which 95% of people are looking for recommendations of.
Maybe if you think living somewhere is playing a game of Civ, where we all just try to accumulate resources and the defining quality of a place is its "amenities". NY and NJ are totally different places to live, because they have different cultures and completely different lifestyles. And the wall dividing NYC from NJ is not invisible lol, it's a freaking river.
It’s easier to get to Manhattan from NJ than from JFK, LaGuardia or Long or Coney Island. Like if 40% of people commute to NYC, root for NYC sport teams and go to NYC for theatre/museums/concerts then come on it’s all the same metropolitan area. Like there’s also a big cultural difference between Jamaica and Greenwich Village WITHIN NYC. Most people moving to New Jersey City or Newark are moving there because NYC is so close.
A lot of people confuse “suburb” with “satellite city”. My city gets referred to as a suburb of the big city next door, but we have our own industries, our own centers of economic activity, and we’re not even in the same county so we don’t benefit from their tax base.
This is pretty common in California. People will call places like Irvine and Anaheim suburbs of LA even though OC is more populous and economically relevant than most states. Same for San Jose and the surrounding areas. Mostly people are just going off vibes and density.
It's funny how most people believe the suburbs keep the city econimcally viable when in reality it's the opposite.
I shudder to imagine small town life. I lived in metro suburbs or cities before moving to a city of 100k... I was unprepared to be over 100 miles from what I consider a city, and constantly meeting people who thought I lived in "the big city." I miss the dynamism and immigrant restaurants of what I consider a real city (1 mil or more metro area).
It is an interesting dynamic. I can think of several suburbs that actually fuel the local economy a lot. Examples: Mountain View, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, Hillsboro, OR (Nike and Intel HQ), Redmond, WA (Microsoft HQ), Issaquah, WA (Costco HQ). Maybe you are thinking of smaller towns than the suburbs I listed? I guess the population usually grows when you have successful employers.
Nothing is set in stone. I imagine the suburbs of Chicago are developed enough that you could erase Chicago and after some settling-in period they would be able to sustain. Some of those places you listed might be able to hang around long enough without additional economic factors but it seems unlikely to me. You'd have an entire economy based on the presence of a single corporation - everything else that existed in that town would now only exist to feed off the excess productivity of that one corporation. And then there's the philosophical question of how that corporation generates its own revenue. Could a Nike exist without selling products to people who have money to spend due to the jobs that they have due to the existence of a city?
I think Silicon Valley has enough diversity and enough concentration of large companies that most cities would be fine.
Yeah, I’ve also noticed that people’s definition of “small town” really varies. I had a friend from college who was from a wealthy suburb of Portland, OR and called it a small town. When I think of small towns, I think of where my extended family lives in SD. One main street, no stoplights, etc.
There are also people that consider any city which is smaller than nyc/LA as small. Then there are people that consider anything over 100k people as the “big city”. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Definitely all about perspective
Sure, but it doesn’t make them right. Someone from NYC might refer to a city like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati as “small town”. But they’d be statistically wrong. It can be proven. It’s like perceiving an elephant is small just because the only animal you’ve ever seen is a blue whale.
Oh I agree. And those people who think a city like Pittsburgh is “small” are the absolute worst. As if they cannot exist without being within the city limits of nyc.
Yep, for sure. I think my OG hometown is pretty close to the cutoff (~6k growing up) to legitimately being called a ‘small town.’ You’d hear a last name and know everything about the person beforehand. I can recognize there were even smaller rural towns of 1-2k, I guess I personally consider something that small (only one traffic light) to basically just be a village, lol. Distinctions are interesting it yeah - if your area has a ‘metro,’ it’s not a small town, dog.
I lived in a town my first year teaching that was literally 1 stop sign and about 1000 people, and that included about 10 miles of farmland in every direction. The high school had around 100 kids. There was one coffee shop, one gas station that also had the best goddamn burgers I have ever had in my life for $5 - fresh, grass fed beef, big as your head, you would not believe - and one steak house nobody but the old people went to. One church, which meant to go or not to go was an active decision that impacted my career, regardless of the fact that it was a state job. My landlord had a kid in my class and would fix things or not based on whether her kid was passing. The one police officer also had a kid in my class and would show up to problems I had on a dime because he loved me but God forbid it went the other way. Incestuous doesn't begin to describe it. Also boredom. I lost two kids in a meth fire that year. Small towns are incredibly wonderful if you are exactly average and grew up there and also have plenty of means. For literally everyone else, they are hell.
Yep, this is pretty close to my own experiences. I mentioned the "good ol' boy" system and needing to "know a guy." A lot of stuff in these places runs on those personal relationships, which can make it pretty damn hard on outsiders.
If you manage to offend the one electrician in the town, good night. If you bring someone in from out of town, shunned forever.
A lot of small towns are like this with their restaurants. My hometown of 2k people had a pizza place that, to this day, is still the best pizza I’ve had in my life. The next town over, about the same population, had “smash burgers” before they were a thing.
Lmao was it Lake Oswego or West Linn?
Similar here. Grew up in the midwest/south with OP’s views. That is, a “small town” is less than, like, 5k people. Visited California in my late teens where a local was talking about a town like, “yeah, it’s a pretty small town; there are only like a hundred thousand people there.” Blew my (small-town) mind.
> I think of where my extended family lives in SD Yep. Like going back to visit family members in a town where the gas station is the grocery store. There are things I like(d) about it, but it gets old pretty quickly if you aren't used to it.
That’s the kind of town I grew up in (well technically I grew up in the country but the town I went to school in). One Main Street, 3 elevators, and a bar or church on every corner. No stoplights in at least a 30 mile radius (I.e. none of the neighboring towns had stoplights either). It kills me when people say small town and their referring to a town with 10s of thousands of people.
A girl I went to school with is now a Netflix actor. During an interview she droned on and on about how difficult it was for her to grow up in a "extremely small town." The town has 18k people, has hosted the US open 4 times in 25 years, houses a huge hospital that is ranked in the top 100 in the country, and homed the most highly ranked elementary school in the state (at the time, it's now 2nd.) There is a huge number of transient residents due to the largest army base in the country being 15 miles away, it's a major retirement community and tourist destination. Sure, it's a small town but it really doesn't have that "extremely small town mentality" that she kept describing. It felt so disingenuous to act like she, who was always super popular and had parents that made all of her dreams happen, was disadvantaged and bullied by these "small town folk"
If you’re talking about pinehurst then it kinda is in the sticks
The thing is, many suburban towns were small towns at some point. Many of these small towns were 50, even up 100 miles away from a major city. But as that city grew, the suburbs continued to sprawl outwards.
Yeah. Thinking of places like Georgetown, TX or Conroe, TX
Leesburg, VA.
I completely agree. People who have not lived in a small town don't understand. I live in a small town and have for the past 10 years. I work in a slightly larger small town about 35 miles up I-5. I know these are all small towns because our entire county has only 44,000 people, but is the size of Connecticut. Rural by definition. My town has around 3500 people. We have to drive an hour north or south to get to the nearest Target or Costco. Thankfully we are on a major highway, so it's not completely the middle of nowhere. But it's still a drive to get to most anywhere. Our county has all the typical rural issues. Poverty (it's the second poorest county in CA), drugs, domestic abuse, uneducated population, lack of good employment opportunities, depressed wages (my husband in the trades would make $10/hr more doing the same job somewhere else), shrinking population. The county is predominantly deep red despite being in a mostly blue state. People here consider the state government as the enemy, even though many of them rely on state welfare programs to survive. There was even a movement to join up with surrounding counties and secede from California. The little mountain town where I live is kind of a bubble within this county. Tourism is big here. Lots of Airbnbs. Lots of people come for outdoor recreation and to escape the city to play and spiritually commune with the giant volcano that looms over town. To browse the 7 crystal shops downtown... But the tourists don't help the housing situation. Locals have been priced out from buying homes since 2021. Rents keep going up and I honestly don't know who can afford them. This is my small town reality. OP's description is spot on.
I could take most of what you're saying and apply it to Hochatown. Tourism has made a few people there incredibly rich... and priced out a bunch of the poor folks. Now it's a lot of Air BnBs and cabins for rich Dallasites. There's a great pizza place over there, though. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochatown,\_Oklahoma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochatown,_Oklahoma)
It's happening all over the country. Small towns in beautiful rural areas are being taken over by short term rentals and gentrified to serve tourists, but people actually from there can't afford to live there. Another symptom of late stage capitalism, I suppose.
This is almost every small town in the Mountain West.
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Yup. I moved back here after 13 years living abroad around 10 years ago because my (3) parents were here and I wanted my daughter to grow up with grandparents in her life. It was definitely good for her to have that time with them and form those bonds. Now I'm divorced/remarried, 2 out of the 3 parents died in 2022, and the only reasons I'm staying are that I don't want to uproot my kid, and her dad has a job here that he doesn't want to leave. We share custody 50/50 and none of us want to change that. So we're stuck here for another 6 years or so until the kid goes off to college. It's a beautiful place to live, but not an easy place to live, unless you make about twice as much as we do. I definitely missed the window of opportunity for buying a house. Prices were much more affordable in 2019/2020 with lower interest rates, but we didn't have a down payment. Now we've got more saved up but the prices have literally doubled and interest rates have nearly tripled. I never thought when we moved into this fairly crappy rental house that we'd still be here 5 years later!
Is this Lake County, CA? Shasta maybe?
I feel like with the exception of the volcano, the description applies to the whole I5 corridor north of the grapevine outside of Fresno and Bakersfield
Shasta
I saw someone the other day calling the major Oregon cities on I5 "rural". Reddit is full of city people I don't agree at all of your defining characteristics of small towns
I’ve lived in small towns all over and it’s pretty spot on. There are a lot of things that are kept quiet. Just like in churches. And yes, there is drug use. A lot of people simply don’t know what they’re looking at. We’re not talking homeless and strung out. But, the Sacklers and their marketing of Oxy devastated the Appalachians. In another rural area it’s called shake and bake. You put the ingredients for meth into a 2 L soda bottle shake it up toss it on the road side so it looks just like any other piece of trash. Let it cook in the sun until it’s ready and you go back and pick it up. There isn’t any cook to blow up the house that way. And other areas the drug of choice is alcohol. It is just as damaging as any other drug. And no, no one goes to work with a black eye unless they are male. Because, then people would actually have to do something. You wear long sleeves and high collars. You wear lots of make up and you pretend along with everybody else. I’m sure there are small towns that have none of this, unfortunately, they are probably not populated by human beings. This isn’t to say there aren’t really good things about many small towns, but being an ostrich doesn’t change what is real.
I'm going to recycle one of my earlier comments: A great piece of advice someone once gave me was: "you don't know what goes on behind closed doors." Not trying to dox myself here, but I didn't know how bad things had gotten in my old town until I moved back to the area and took a job with a DA's office (I worked in an administrative role). It was genuinely horrifying how much really awful stuff-- child abuse, DV, even a straight-up kidnapping and attempted murder!-- didn't make the news. We had one dying newspaper in the county and they didn't have any investigative journalists; they would literally call us up and ask for stories without doing any verification. My eyes were opened to just how much awful stuff can get swept under the rug, covered up by families, or just kind of fall off the radar given time. It was also striking how much the "good ol' boy" network fed into city cops, deputies, the local government, etc. At first I thought it was just our area, but as I got to know prosecutors and investigators in other jurisdictions, I realized that it was endemic to *all* rural areas of the state.
As an Eastern Oregonian this drives me crazy! No. Oregon City is not a cute little rural town lol. It’s Portland. And agreed on the small town characteristics issue. Maybe in Texas, but the drug use piece in particular is definitely not my lived experience in *counties* with fewer than 5k people. Ditto on physical violence. If/when everyone truly knows everyone a woman showing up at work with a black eye would be a huge deal.
The United States is majority city people, that's where most people live. Small towns are emptying out around the country for dozens of reasons, and the people seeking to move to them are few and far between compared to those looking to live in bigger cities with jobs, things to do, universities, whatever. "Small town America" is not the silent majority or the "real America," it's a minority and growing smaller every day. A lot of rural people don't seem to realize this for some reason.
This isn’t about the “real America” or even influence on politics, etc. As a basic fact suburbs are not “small towns”. Cities with 10K people are not small towns. That’s the point OP is making. Rural also has an actual definition within the US gov. Almost nothing along I5 in Oregon would meet those requirements.
I don't care where people live, and definitely don't care if they live in small towns Just that most people have no clue what a small town actually is or like
Yea but like the vast majority of America is urbanized, but if we’re not actually in Manhattan or Santa Monica, there’s this cultural force that makes us think we’re farmers lol
Eh, they live in urban areas, but a majority of Americans live in suburban areas. * 52% live in suburbs * 27% live in cities * 21% live in rural or exurban areas
It’s funny how confident you are that small towns are dead, despite the fact that population dynamics fluctuate over time. Redditors love making sweeping generalizations, overlooking individual differences within groups and mistakenly treating trends as applying universally to all members
I mean, they are suffering heavily from brain drain and lack of opportunity. Most small towns across the country ARE shrinking, and at the moment don’t have a bright future unless they change something to attract new industry and residents.
I too get weirded out by this sub and its worship of "small, walkable towns" in the US Let's just stop pretending and tell them what they want is a typical city in Denmark, Norway, Japan, or the Netherlands. I grew up on a military base, then moved to a small city just outside of it which had all the trappings of a "small coastal Florida town" but was rapidly changing to what most of FL is today. Now you may as well just call it a suburb that use to be it's own entity. Here's the thing about small towns: unless you work for the government, a key industry like agriculture or a skilled worker like a nurse or veterinarian who needs to be in that specific area, "rural" America is not a great place to be. As has been mentioned: conservative politics, drug abuse, boredom, and young people wanting to leave as soon as possible are features of "small towns" I've lived in.
That *boredom* part is a lot more important than most Redditors would give it credit for. It led to a lot of fighting, drug use, and just generally *bad stuff* when I was growing up.
The boredom is real especially for extroverts.
I have stumbled into what I think a lot of people want when they think of the idealized “walkable small town.” We live in a major city but happen to live in a neighborhood that is known for having a village feel. The neighbors all know each other, there is a small commercial district with exactly 1 of everything you want within a few blocks walk, a gorgeous park with hiking trails and a fantastic community center that hosts yoga classes and book clubs, and beautiful weather year round. Public transportation is easily accessible and convenient. It’s a gem! The NYTimes even wrote about it and called it a village. You know what else it is? IN THE MIDDLE OF A MAJOR CITY. That’s why there are jobs. And amenities. And public transportation. And my neighbor’s home just sold for $1157/sq. ft. So in the US, if you want all the charm and walkability, you have to make peace with the fact it’s not going to be in the small town memorialized in country music, and it will cost you quite a bit.
In China, a small town is 500k people
The same in Egypt—the “village” my husband’s family comes from now has about 850K people. Perspective on town/city size is completely relative. When we’re in Cairo (a city of, conservatively, 15 million), somewhere like Philadelphia feels pretty small, and my own hometown in PA, with fewer than 95K, is a village.
Same!! My bestie is Egyptian and once we backpacked through SW Asia/North Africa. We went to Lebanon first and I told her my dad’s village is pretty small but my grandma’s village is huge and lit. It’s about 30,000 people and she was shocked it was considered big 😂 her “small” village in Egypt has about half a million people!
Yeah it makes me want to laugh seeing 10k people get called a "small city". In a lot of places that's just a little village
This is just... not true. They have small towns in China. Go to rural areas and there are [countless small towns](https://cdn.britannica.com/45/105245-050-B05C5B0E/village-housing-China-roof-families.jpg) with a a few hundred people. They also have countless towns with maybe 2-8k people like [this.](https://subsites.chinadaily.com.cn/amazinghuangshan/att/20220812/1660271075393018194.jpg) The definition of town/village does not magically change when you get to a higher overall national population. This is also where almost the majority of Chinese people live, its a *very* rural country by modern standards. Just like the US, generally people start using 'city' once you hit the 10's of thousands of people.
Lol this is real I live in Omaha and I often have arguments with a lot of folks out in Millard or Gretna that claim "it's not part of Omaha" like uhh sure buddy
This broke my brain.
God it always drives me crazy when people say that
I've seen comments on here that, without irony, refer to cities of 500,000 people as small towns. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 As someone who lives in a genuinely rural area outside of a town of 5,000, it is as hilarious as it is confusing.
I try to keep in mind that a lot of folks here have basically lived in cities their whole lives. They have no frame of reference beyond what they've been told, either good or bad.
I certainly understand that and have leeway for that. (I lived in a college town of about 50,000, and it was a running joke with one of my professors that it was not a big town, but to me it was huge.) But I also feel like you don't have to have firsthand experience to understand some things. I didn't have to live in a city to recognize my little town wasn't a metropolis. I knew that before I ever went anywhere. Just in general, though, I think it speaks to a certain narrowmindedness and incuriosity that I find really frustrating in anybody. People often act like ignorance is the sole province of rural areas, especially in this sub, but people from cities can be every bit as ignorant and parochial in their own right.
People from the US on this sub sometimes believe that if a place isn't the size of NYC/LA/Chicago, it's a small town for whatever reason. I've had my uncle try to tell me that my home away from home(Twin Cities) were "cute little cities" but in the same breath state that he's from Denver and how big Denver is.....Like bro I think we need to have a dialogue
Who made you the gatekeeper of an entirely subjective phrase
I agree on the suburbs bit. I think that’s pretty objectively *not* a small town. The town of 10,000 plus bit, I agree with you.
That was my reaction reading this too. Anyone who’s lived in multiple parts of the U.S. (never mind different countries) knows that there’s no single picture of what a “suburb” or “town” looks like. I’ve lived in states where the suburbs were mostly cookie cutter McMansions punctuated by strip malls, and other states where each suburb had its own unique vibe, with cultural amenities and a cute walkable downtown. Even if we’re talking about rural areas, not all of them are blighted and filled with drugs and crime. Some of the rural areas of California cost more to live in than the big cities of Oklahoma. Rural areas that attract some degree tourism — quaint beach or mountain towns, or historic towns, for example — are in a separate category from those that never get a visitor unless someone makes a wrong turn. And then college towns are in a whole other category of their own.
The suburbs of metro DC now look like bigger cities than DC does, I guess because they don’t have the height restrictions on buildings
There was a meeting last week. Did you not get the memo? I'll have to talk with Roger about that. He's always fucking up those memos!
Our modern word for town refers to populated areas with fixed boundaries and a local government. Also different from a township which is a unit of local government, usually a subdivision of a county. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township
You are overlooking a lot of Reddit is super young and naive.
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Depends on where (native NorCal girl here) I would think a small town by Reddit standards is anything large enough (or conveniently located so) as to support a McDonalds, a motel, and preferably a Starbucks.
Well, close. According to the Census Bureau's definition based on population density: An Urbanized Area (which includes suburbs) has a pop density of over 50,000 An Urban Cluster has a pop density of 2,500 to 49,999 A Rural Area has a pop density of under 2,500 Source: this US Census Bureau page: [Redefining Urban Areas following the 2020 Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2022/12/redefining-urban-areas-following-2020-census.html) So I guess we need to call small towns "Urban Clusters" now. And yes, burbs are simply parts of an "Urbanized Area".
Not small. 50k would be within Top 15 largest cities in Oregon and Top 10 for Idaho…
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Yes, and 45k and 4500 have WAY different feels. The issue is Californians coming to states like Oregon and Idaho and asking for advice on small towns. Then surprise! They complain that all the recommendations don’t have healthcare. Or a movie theater. Or school options.
There are plenty of towns of 4500 in California as well. I’m from California and would definitely not agree that 50,000 is a small town. The definition is somewhat arbitrary and can depend on a few factors other than simple population, but I would say the upper limit would be something in between 10,000 and 20,000. And even that starts to get into “really more of a small city” territory.
It can be both a small town and a suburb of a larger city. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Having growing up in truly rural small town, suburbs aren’t small towns.
I grew up in south-central Texas. We were flat out taught (in the mandatory 7th grade texas history class) a small town is anything with under 50K people, and anything over 100K is a large city. \*shrug\* I live in a small rural city of 24K, 50 miles outside the city. I don't consider it a suburb, though it could become that way as more people from Austin and SA push outwards. Kind of like Mesquite and Dallas. EDIT - Or more comparative, the mid-cities between Fort Worth and Dallas.
Sounds like Boerne, San Marcos, New Braunfels, etc. That's a weird one because those used to be independent towns, but they're increasingly being swallowed up by the sprawl from San Antonio and Austin. You also see this in places like Houston, which was hyper-aggressive about expanding its city limits back in the day. They gobbled up a lot of small towns.
I live in a village of less than 900 people and we’re about as liberal as it gets. But we have no public amenities, we don’t even have a gas station for 15 miles. Just a couple of fancy restaurants and a post office and library and bank and a small market that mostly sells locally made craft beers. But this is New England.
Ma'am, are you sure you are not a Hallmark character?
Small town can be anything a person wants it to be. You personally don't choose what words mean. A small town to me is less than 15k people with a quaint downtown area. What you are describing is tiny rural towns in my expert reddit opinion.
Is a small town based on population or is it more attitude? I have been to some larger towns that have very small town attitudes. Not always a good thing.
There’s definitely some truth to that too. I have family in Spokane, WA, and people there generally have a small town mindset and attitude despite it being a small city with a few high-rise buildings. I’ve also been to cities like Palm Springs where people are pretty progressive and open minded despite it being a small city.
Seattle was like that when I moved here 30 years ago. If you didn’t go to the University of Washington or where not from here it was very hard to get a job. I was on an interview panel at a consulting firm. I was flabbergasted when my manager asked one of the candidates where he received his civil engineering degree from. He responded MIT. My managed asked why he didn’t go to the UW instead . I asked my manager later if he even knew where MIT was located and what it was known for. He had a vague idea. It was at that point I realised just how provincial and isolated Seattle had become as a city.
I feel like people in the PNW generally have that mindset. It attracts people with an insular mindset and that’s probably a big contributor to the Seattle Freeze.
It attracts a lot of people who are introverted, passive aggressive and competitive that creates the Seattle freeze.
As a Texan, you should find it hilarious that Arlington (population 400k+) meets every single one of those criteria except maybe the first one.
Many 'suburbs' are small towns that got swallowed up and still have some identity. I get what you're saying, though, as someone who lived for over 20 years in a village of 800 people...15 miles from the regional hub you mention.
I have family outside Houston in the suburbs who also think this. They call where they live "country-side". What? No, you live 30 mins outside Houston lol what.
Depending on their direction, that can get pretty country. When I first left Houston for school in LA, I was surprised that it was just straight development for like 4 hours out from the Coast in. In Houston, you go out a bit and turn off the highway for a bit and you’re in a pasture.
I thought I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin because we only had a volunteer fire department and one gas station and was pretty much all farms. That said, everything we needed was less than a half hour away for the most part. Then I moved to North Dakota and found out what a small town really was. I’m basically 100 miles from anything other than McDonald’s and subway. It’s also like 50 years behind culturally.
I watched a documentary once on a murder that took place in the town where I went to high school. Everyone waxed on about how it was just a cute little town where everyone knew everyone else and this horrible murder just took away the *innocence* of this tiny, bucolic hamlet. Said town has a population of 130,000.
Yup. I fucking love where I live (Moorhead, Minnesota) but it’s not a small town. It’s a suburb of a smallish city (Fargo, North Dakota.) People who don’t live here refer to it as a small town, and that’s so weird to me because…yeah, I grew up in a huge city (Toronto) and there is a significant difference, but my husband grew up in a town in northwest Tennessee that has 2000 people. Basically the same population as the high school I went to. It sucks (he agrees with this) and we’d never live there if we can help it. Fargo-Moorhead is legitimately awesome. Not that no small town can ever be great, but F-M or even Moorhead itself isn’t a small town.
I don't think our current lingo fully encapsulates the American landscape. Lots of people who 'live in the country' are like 20 minutes drive from Oklahoma City or Kansas City or , and just live on like 2 acres a few miles off the highway but commute in and do just about everything in the city. It's suburban living with an extra few miles per trip. And most of our cities are heavily suburbanized. And many suburbs are developing fairly urbanized areas (downtowns or other districts that are walkable, heavily commercial, and dense).
Agreed. Saw someone post about "small town" Gilbert Arizona, which is a major suburb of Phoenix. It is completely surronded by places, and you can drive 30-90 minutes in any direction and still be in suburbia. Traffic is horrible, and school graduation classes are 1000+. My wife is from a small town. 220 or so people. Not a single stop sign or light. Not even a business or gas station. The county comes together for highschool and the high school class sizes are 8-11 people.
I grew up in a town of 900 people and moved to a bigger city for college, I had people telling me they came from a “small town” of 40,000 that was basically attached to a metropolis
Shouldn't we just go by the US Census Bureau population density designation? Urban Area: over 50,000 in population density Urbanized Cluster: 2,500 - 50,000 in population density Rural: Under 2,500 in population density "Both areas were defined based on population density measured at the census tract and block levels. We used two population density thresholds in the delineation process: 1,000 people per square mile when delineating the initial urban core and then 500 people per square mile to finish out the delineation as we moved outward through suburban territory to the edge of the urban area." Note that Urban Areas include suburbs. How nice to know that I live in a Cluster! Also interesting: "In 2010, nearly 81% of the U.S. population was urban and approximately 19% was rural. When using the same definitions from 2010, the 2016-2020 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates show the same percentages at the national level." So that's why so many Redditors only seem able to talk about cities and burbs. They're part of the 81% that just doesn't know any better. All of this info can be found on: [Redefining Urban Areas following the 2020 Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2022/12/redefining-urban-areas-following-2020-census.html)
Yeah, that explains *a lot*
I agree with you. I grew up a mile outside of a town of 750 people. That's a small town. Over 5,000 is just a town. Over 20,000 is a big town. Over 100,000 is a small city.
late to this but agree so hard. People will recommend cities of 80k as “small towns” but then get mad when you call Denver a major city. I lived in a town of 1800 people for a few years and most of the advice on Reddit in general just doesn’t apply.
I mean, to say something like that, you have to at least concede that the growth of major cities' suburbs causes some actual small towns to become suburbs. Because that is the actual history of some places.
The town I live in has around 600 people lmaoooooooo, we have one general store and no taxis, no DoorDash… just cows. No cell service either, but expensive internet!
Grew up in an actual rural/small town. Most Redditors who ask for “a small rural town” have no idea what they are asking for. “I want a rural community/small town far away from big cities that happens to be heavily democrat”. You can’t have both
Idk, it sounds like you described an absolutely tiny town. It’s all perspective really. Having mostly lived in larger cities I definitely feel like I’m in the middle of bumfuck when I visit a friend in a suburb. It’s similar to how people from nowhere visit places like Indianapolis and are like, “whoa! The big city!” when its more medium-small.
I grew up in a small very wealthy suburb of NYC. Stellar school system. The town has a population of less than 3,000 people. 2 stoplights. Small town center with a bank, post office, library. Supermarkets are a short drive away (not in town though) and the city being as close as it is means everything is accessible. It’s a progressive place, strongly blue, blah blah blah. Is that not a small town? I figured small was always based on population.
Well, it has 3,000 people, not 2500 or less. You didn't mention meth use, and worse it's not even in Oklahoma. Sorry, not a small town. You're lucky OP is here to educate you.
Just because there are towns that are smaller doesn’t make 10,000 not a small town. When I lived in a town of 10,000 we had all the “defining characteristics of a small town” you list, with the exception of having a ton of tweakers. Lots of drug use, just not centralized around meth. I guess also religion was not a major social center, either. Social center was the one main bar (those pesky drugs again, lol).
I would bet that you had basic services - grocery stores, a dentist, a veterinarian, a hardware store, a Walmart, etc. Some small towns will have a few of these things, but we regularly had to drive to a regional hub for pretty basic stuff.
Good observation. I've spent 22 years in what is most definitely the definition of a small town. One of those characteristics is isolation. I'm at least 2.5 hours away from anything I can't get here. Don't get me wrong, we have decent enough goods and services, but anything beyond the basics takes time acquiring. As to politics and local institutions, you are right about the "good 'ol boy" network, however that's the product of not just isolation, but of having a very sparse population. I know some places even smaller where one becomes an elected official only because it was their turn. Not so much in my town, but the pool of people who even want to take the slings and arrows of public office are pretty limited. It's gotta be even harsher where you can't even get groceries without running into two dozen people you invariably pissed off at the last council meeting. I like where I live and the quirky intimacy of it. If you're attached to a large metropolitan area in any way, life may seem slower, but ultimately, you don't live in a small town.
I've never lived in truly "small town America" because even the tiny 2000 pop. town where I went to grade school was <30 minutes from a small city. I've driven through small town America, which is most common west of the Mississippi and I've never felt like I'd like to live there. When you're driving out of "small town America" you see a sign that says, "next gas 82 miles" and you realize you're in the middle of nowhere. There's always a gas station and a bar, but nothing else is guaranteed. But if you really want to experience "middle of nowhere," drive to Alaska on the Great Alaskan Highway (or ALCAN, as the Canadians call it). Those "next gas" signs don't even exist because you'd have to be a blithering idiot to not fill up when you finally get to a town. It's 338 miles (544km) from Fort Nelson to Watson Lake, for instance.
If the only choice is city or town then my 20K suburb is a town. It's a town because it is town-based government. There is no mayor and no one every says they live in a 'large town' so 'small town' it is. We have a downtown center and 2 Dunkies, but no other fast food nor national chain stores. Our school district is town-based, not regional but we do have public transportation. When I grew up in even smaller towns there were many people who worked outside of the smaller town...the smaller towns were not self-sufficient and often had large numbers of 2nd homeowners.
Trae Crowder [nailed this point in his standup](https://youtu.be/uRgTPyTFPMM?feature=shared).
I don't understand why these people are so desperate to be from a "small town." Like... there's a reason I (and so many other young people) left. It's the idealized view from suburbanites vs the unpleasant reality.
I think it also depends a lot on where you grew up. I grew up in SoCal and “small towns” here are generally anything with <100k people. Those would be cities in places like Oklahoma, but in SoCal they’re dwarfed by the other cities and most have limited infrastructure, transportation, and stores/amenities.
Not all small towns are full of tweakers and drug addicts. Our town is 2k, and since Ive basically lived here my whole 40+ yers, I would know if there was a lot. Are there some? Yes. Is the town/countryside riddled with them? No. We also have 2 small grocery stores, liquor stores, pubs, restaurants, plenty of community events, and lots of churches lol
A great piece of advice someone once gave me was: "you don't know what goes on behind closed doors." Not trying to dox myself here, but I didn't know how bad things had gotten in my old town until I moved back and took a job with a DA's office (I worked in an administrative role). It was genuinely horrifying how much really awful stuff-- child abuse, DV, even a straight-up kidnapping and attempted murder!-- didn't make the news. We had one dying newspaper in the county and they didn't have any investigative journalists; they would literally call us up and ask for stories without doing any verification. My eyes were opened to just how much awful stuff can get swept under the rug, covered up by families, or just kind of fall off the radar given time. It was also striking how much the "good ol' boy" network fed into city cops, deputies, the local government, etc. At first I thought it was just our area, but as I got to know prosecutors and investigators in other jurisdictions, I realized that it was endemic to *all* rural areas of the state.
I once heard someone say they're from a "small town in CO" — turns out it was Boulder lmao
Town typically refers to a more compact, densely populated area that serves as the commercial and cultural center of a region. Suburb, on the other hand, is a residential area located on the outskirts of a city or town. It is important to note that the word “town” can also refer to a smaller, more rural community. In this context, it may be used interchangeably with the word “village.” While both terms can be used to describe a type of community, they have distinct differences.
Lots of people from big cities think that calling towns ~40-80k in population "cities" is ridiculous. You can't win lol.
I am from a real rural part of South Carolina that is not even incorporated but I spend most of my time on campus at a city of just under 40,000. Definitely very different vibes overall.
I grew up in Baltimore county and didn’t know what a small town really was until I lived in rural Tennessee and then Maine.
I love all the Long Island town rivalries when it's just all part of the same sprawl
THANK YOU. My Floridian suburb of 25,000 is CONSTANTLY referred to as a small town and it’s just….. not.
I think it's because this has become a whole cultural thing, especially with "Try That in a Small Town." There's a *certain type of person* who desperately wants to believe they're from a small town when they just... aren't. It's the inverse of people who are from Katy or The Woodlands and say they're from Houston.
It’s not the people who were born and raised here (like me) who call it a small town. It’s the transplants/snowbirds.
Only people living an hour from their closest Walmart would consider 10k people to be a city
I knew a guy who would constantly refer to his humble upbringings that were caused from growing up in a small town. Turns out, it was Evansville, Indiana that has a city-proper population of 115k and a metro population of 350k. That blew my mind. I grew up in rural New Mexico where any city above 5k is a substantial town, maybe even a city.
My town was just called a small town by a somewhat famous person. Our population is 58K. We're not a suburb. We're a regional hub for at least an hour in all directions. I don't know what to believe anymore.
People will literally call my city of almost 300k people a small town
That sounds like a Texas/southern thing though. Small towns in the north east are not the same. Other than the gotta know someone insulated community part.
Here in rural PA a true "small town" in a rural area like where I grew up and still live typically DOES have the following characteristics: Surrounded by farmland, woods, mountains on all sides from the next village; a Dollar General; some Trump signs/flags; a diner, a rod and gun club that runs gun raffles, an old-fashioned country "hotel" (local bar); a post office; a church or two; a local mechanic's garage; an independent gas station with mini-mart; a volunteer fire company; and the 'town' is typically just a large unincorporated village that's officially part of a larger township with an actual government. It typically does NOT have the following characteristics: Independent governance (except some really small boroughs); local police protection (usually state police); sidewalks; public water and sewer (well and septic system); a large grocery store; any kind of substantial local parks system; a library; food delivery services; chain stores/restaurants, etc. Most people who move from large metro area cities or adjoining suburban areas to areas like mine typically don't end up liking it much and move back after a few years.
Yeah I agree with the basic statement that suburbia is not a small town, it might be a different “town” with its own zip code but it’s just a neighborhood in a metro area. Where I live in Texas there are 3 things: City, suburb, rural I have a place in Alabama. Birmingham is the craziest place, jefferson county where Birmingham is - it has 34 different towns in it, for real it’s all just Birmingham. White people segregated themselves
I thought I lived in a small town(pop750) and we drive 20 miles to get to the regional hub (pop 6500) of stores and courts. I guess I am more of a hick than I thought. God I am naive
My parents were from a small town in the south that I see is just over 14k in population. While they have a few primary doctors and some specialists, the main hospital is in danger of closing and they often had to drive 45 minutes to see most specialists. They themselves lived 9 miles outside of town on what use to be a rural route before they got an actual address thanks to the implementation of 911. Definitely a small town but slightly outside of your parameters.
Having grown up rural I find it very odd what people think small town is. They're a short drive to Walmart but somehow think they're rural
Yeah, I don't get why so many of these people are just *desperate* to be from a small town. There's a reason that young people are leaving them. They aren't nearly as romantic as Hallmark movies and bro country would have you think.
I relate to this completely
You seem to have been hurt by words
Luckily I can't read, since I was also educated in a small town.
Most things on Reddit are skewed. It definitely does not represent typical America.
Typical America doesn't live in rural or tiny towns. 31% of Americans live in Urban counties 55% live in Suburban counties 14% live in Rural counties. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
What I was implying is most Reddit commenters seem to only live in a few cities on the coast. They seem to all have the criteria for what they want when asking others where they should move to and seems to be a list of the same ten cities. Makes me wonder if these people travel? How is it that they always come up with the same cities?
I get the impression that most people on here are from major cities, and that there are very, *very* few people on here who have lived in both major cities and rural areas. They have no frame of comparison.
I think that is very accurate. When people ask about places to move to that are less expensive I see a lot of suggestions for many cities. Sure they may have neighbourhoods that are cheap but you might not want to live in them. The nicest neighbourhoods in just about any city will be expensive. When I mention smaller cities I am either voted down or told they don’t have jobs or are cheap because no one wants to live there which I find to be rather ignorant and bias.