i will never move back to the suburbs. i will never again live without a corner store. i will die before i detransition and i will die before i airgap myself from society
after two and a half decades in the suburbs, i have lived in a city for six months and i feel so much anger that this isn’t the default experience for non-rural people and so much despair with how much of this beautiful land has been paved into homogeneous suburbs
so many people like me — who grew up knowing nothing but suburbs, whose parents knew nothing but suburbs — never know there’s anything else and it makes me want to weep
the death of third spaces interlocks with this — the only way for me to have access to a machine shop with a lathe is to move to a suburb and put one in my garage, because all the makerspaces died and the state doesn’t think libraries or communal goods are a worthwhile investment. sorry, you can’t have that hobby in the city, you need to dedicate hundreds of square feet of space to it, and our whole society is set up so that you can’t share your tools with anyone. this is like how everyone in the suburbs buys a lawnmower and a chainsaw even if they use them once a year, because sharing/coordination is disincentivized
