What makes your location the best/worst place to live?

I live in on Mars. Pros: Quiet, isolated. Cons: Dry, empty, atmosphere stinks. People keep sending space garbage my way. No traffic, no culture but if you like the outdoors, its the place the be. We have the largest mountain in the solar system, the deepest canyon and some of the best snow boardin money can buy. Oh and bring your sun screen: we ain't got no ozone layer or magnetic field to protect you.

MD/DC/VA - Pros:
Diversity - definitely a mixing bowl of culture. Great food.
JOBS JOBS JOBS... probably the least hardest hit by the current recession. Of course, most will require a US citizenship, and a good number also would like a clearance. But there are other jobs..MD actually have a pretty good biotech sector. Good schools (one of the best areas in the country). Smithsonian! (this will spoil you as some of the worlds most prized artifacts can be found here...for FREE!) - other Museums, arts, etc.... chance to see powerful people (hm.. I guess pro or con depends on who you like dislike in politics...). Close proximity to NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlantic City etc..

CONS - TRAFFIC REALLY REALLY REALLY SUCKS, Metro (subway)/public transportation is not as good as other large metropolitan areas. HIGH Prices for everything - SF and SD definitely takes the cake in terms of housing, but I've noticed that food can be had for much cheaper in those cities. Here, everything is pretty pricy. Weather... you get the extremes of both - hot and humid in the summer, and cold as hell in the winter.
Oh, and the current Redskins.

Dallas - it is in Texas. :/

Silicon Valley

Good:
Weather
Family
Apple Computer

Bad:
Cost of living
Traffic
Idiots on the road

Sydney, Australia.

'tis awesome.

Plenty of job opportunities, never drops below 23F even on the coldest winter days (it's currently about 95F... goddamn the Farenheit system is stupid). Awesome nightlife, beautiful city. Within an hour of the city are national parks, beaches, mountains... you name it.

I'd never wanna live anywhere else.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Weather (including Seattle) for this area is very mild, our winters are almost always above frezzing, and summers are never super hot. We get maybe a couple inchs of snow a year. In the winter and spring we get lots of rain, in the summer and fall we have very dry weather.

Traffic is starting to become bad because of groth, Vancouver has doubled in size from 1 million to over 2 million in the last 20 years.

We have every kind of food imaginable, because of our high chinese and east indian population here you can find stuff from all around the world here.

Vancouver pretty much has every thing you need for entertainment, some of the largest malls and movies complexes, and Arcades are here, we have some 24 hour arcades, bars are open until 4 am, Whistler which is a 2 hour drive is one of the worlds most know skillhills outside of Eroupe and supose to be the best skill hills in North America. Lots of large national parks close buy, great camping, in drysuits the surf is decent in the right places. Vancouver is hosting the Winter olympics in 2010, we hosted Expo in 86, we have a NHL team and Pro Football but CFL not NFL. Our baseball team is a AAA which is the feader for the LA Angles or what ever the team is, its in California.

In the downtown core in the westend of the city is the denses place in North America with over 150 000 people living in a few city blocks. Lots of golf. And the best part is your a less then a hour drive from the US and 2 hours from Seattle.

The West Coast is great for the mountains, forests and ocean.

Vancouver has been voted the number 1 place to live in the world 6 years and a row and dropped to number 2 for the last 2 years because of traffic problems.

LOL I can go on forever but I think I said enough

In the summer, my town is great. Beautiful weather, I live on the shore of Lake Ontario and we have incredible sunsets. Lots of history here. There is a ton of potential here, with lots of undeveloped property and waterfront real estate.

In the winter, it's a nightmare. We measure snow fall in feet, not inches. On more than one occasion I have seen 72 inches of snow fall in a 24 hour period.

Also, like many upstate New York towns, the industry has moved elsewhere, and good paying jobs are getting few and far between. Historically our taxes have been way below the state average, but recently, they are rising fast to make up for the short fall that all those fleeing industries left.

For a good idea about what it's like here, read the book The Last Good Chance by Tom Barbash. It's set in my town, although the author changed the name of it to Lakeland in the book. Ironically, I picked it up in the bookstore, having no idea that the story takes place here. I figured it out in about the first ten pages though, it was that spot-on.

for the most part, see the above post about vancouver....some differences though:
rain - victoria gets about 2/3 of the precipitation vancouver does
nightlife - not too much here, a bit more of a laid back town for those looking for something a bit quieter (like me)
traffic - certainly not as bad as most cities, but we've a few trouble spots
isolation - it can be a pain sometimes to get off the island...at the mercy of ferry schedules and capacities
jobs - this is a gov't and tourism town
housing - most people find it very expensive, rental availability is below 1% at the moment

Um there are lots of rentals in Victoria as I go there every week, at least with Apartments, on Gorage Road almost every building has suits open.

Victoria is a nice city to visit, sucks to live there. But one nice thing is Vancouver and Victoria are very close together

yeah, there are rentals, but the ratio of availability *is* about 1% which drives the prices. i own my place so it doesn't bother me though!

close to vancouver, but with the georgia straight between us it makes sure we don't just become a suburb of vancouver, which would be an awful thing.

I lived in Victoria for 5 years and one of the biggest complaints was the cost and time it took to get to Vancouver, Victoria gets boring very fast. Going to a Canucks game was impossible unless you spent the night in Vancouver. Rental prices are very good in Vic, I found places for 450 a month 1 bedrooms, the average place in Vancouver is 550-700 for 1 bedrooms.

Nice qualifications but where to you live?

i just spent the last four years in boston (well, cambridge, close enough).

pros: awesome mix of people thanks to the bajilions of college kids in the area. good food if you ask around. nice movie theaters, public transit works. chinatown isn't sleazy, has good late night restaurants.

cons: T shuts down shortly after midnight, walking home from chinatown to cambridge sucks. expensive in general, and especially in rent. many blasé 20somethings hanging around with little purpose in life, gets old. weather is harsh in my feeble seattle-bred opinion.

I live in Perth, Western Australia (or P, WA for macroy)

Pros:
Great weather, great beaches, laid-back lifestyle, good roads, clean air.

Cons:
Bugger all jobs, people being laid-back to the point of coma, redneck attitudes, poisonous stuff and things wi' big nasty teeth.

Land of the Easily Amused:

Pro:
-great weather
-not too crowded
-clean air
-next to a large body of water
-beautiful people
-bike friendly
-random run-ins with famous people

Con:
-high cost of living
-not much open 24/7 (people need to recover from all that laughter)
-beautiful people
-random run-ins with famous people

Mackay, North Queensland, Australia, Earth, ect, ect.

Pros: Great tropical weather, (apart from some humidity in summer)
Very friendly people
Moments from the Whitsundays
Great beaches and reefs
Really nice place
Has every thing that you need


Cons:
The "You aint from around here are you boy" attitude to new people (I moved here a year ago from a place near melbourne.)
Some Red Necks
One Mac dealer that knows nothing about Apple
Country music

Horrible, horrible, horrible traffic. Did I mention hw bad the traffic is?

That and the bad, bad, bad public schools in DC is what is making me leave the area. I would come back here after I go to graduate school but the situation will be worse by then.

Look at his location. Potomac, MD of the MD/DC/VA triumvirate. A pricey suburb just outside the priciest part of DC.

The main downers here are the weather and ludicrous amounts of tax we pay to the government, and our infrastructure is falling to pieces and public services are probably beyond repair. Other than that, it's good

Southern Ontario

Pro's:

Very few natural disasters (only the odd tornado, which usually isnt even that large)

Nice scenery in the country

Fairly clean in the the large city's

Always a fairly short drive from a major city (london, TO, windsor, hamilton, niagara falls etc.)

No fear of terrorist attacks

OHIP

much much more, but I take too much for granted.


Con's:

Winter

Our lakes are polluted

Gas prices

Can get boring if you don't live in a large city.




Chris

I guess I should mentiono my pros/cons for the Washington DC area:

Pros:
- I have job security out the whazoo. A good feeling.
- My immediate family lives here. Nice having them around.
- DC is a great city. Young and not too fastpaced like NYC. Museums.
- The people

Cons:
- The weather. Like said we have extremes. HOT summers. COLD winters, neither of which I'm a big fan of.
- Traffic. I hate my morning commute, even at 6 in the morning. If I skip the morning workout and leave at 8...the commute is a nightmare.
- I'm getting tired of the same old scene.
- Politics galore
- The people
- I'm becoming more and more of a DC drive. It's time to go.
- My new car doesn't like the poor road conditions

Okay, enough b*tching. Thanks for the great responses. Keep 'em coming. I've been to most of the places mentioned so far, except Australia. The Croc' Hunter has me spooked though. Too much sh*t down there the size of a quarter that could take my life in a matter of seconds. :-P

New York City:
Pro- You name it, it's here. Best food going. Sports, museums, events, shopping, concerts, "culture," history, etc. out the yin-yang. All types of people here, too. You can never be bored here. Amazingly clean and safe for such a large city (it's nothing like the TV/Hollywood stereotypes would have you believe).

Con- Some people just don't like the hustle and bustle. Also fairly high cost of living, but there are lots of high paying jobs, so it may not be an issue depending on what you do.

Ditto all this.

Edited: But you would know this, living in Arlington. (to milf)

MD/DC/VA Usually refers to the DC metro area. But I do live in Potomac, MD - about 10 miles from DC, and right across the river from VA.



DUH, Milf.. . Nice that I gave you a bunch of info that you already know.... hehe. My bad.

yeah I ditto'd yours and then read that he's in Arlington! D'oh!

being close to my family makes where i live the best place to live.

Um, I also live in New York City, and have been living here since 1997, but it seems that I've had a somewhat different experience. Although there are some pros, the cons are fairly significant, too.

Pros:

• many people everywhere with iPod's
• The Apple Store SoHo
• never-sleeping city
• the financial capital of the United States
• the fashion capital of the United States
• a theater capital of the United States
• home of Times Square
• many different ethnic groups
• many ethnic restaurants
• many, many skyscrapers everywhere in Manhattan
• the subway works 24 hours per day
• many Broadway shows
• many museums
• The Statue of Liberty
• The Empire State Building
• The Chrysler Building
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• The Guggenheim Museum
• The Sony Building

Cons:

• 9/11/2001
• frequent terrorist threats
• within fifty miles of the Indian Point nuclear power plant that could flood NYC with lethal radiation if attacked
• unreliable public transportation
• crazy traffic
• crazy taxi drivers
• crazy bus drivers
• many crazy store clerks with a "Hey, YOU! Either buy NOW or leave NOW!" attitude
• many crazy people who are only interested in how much money you are worth
• many rude, frowning people everywhere with a "Hey, YOU! Get outta my way RIGHT NOW!" attitude
• long hours with little pay
• dirty subway platforms with no heating or air conditioning
• lots of theft (Somebody stole my Handspring Visor Deluxe PDA last November in an Internet caf�!)
• no rent control for most apartments and businesses
• many over-greedy landlords who suddenly raise the rent by 300% and drive stores out of business and people out of their homes
• 8.75% sales tax
• about 30% income tax
• $300/meal ultra-expensive restaurants whose overpriced dinners sell out
• homeless people everywhere
• near-impossibility of an average-ability person to rise from rags to riches here, because the rich control the city
• unstable job market
• almost everybody leaves the city during every extended vacation
• poor people peeing across several cars into the car door gaps during the rain (I have personally witnessed this in the Upper West Side several times!)
• high cost of living

I used to teach English in Tokyo, Japan, but teachers there earned between two and three times what they earn here, and only paid 6% in income tax!

Now, I'm trying to move back to there, to Osaka, Japan, or to Sydney, Australia!

--DekuDekuplex

Boston, Massachusetts

Pro:
Four Seasons
Mass Transit
Medical & Educational Centers
Mountains to North
Ocean

Con:
High Cost of living
High humidity in summer
High taxes

Truthfully, I hesitate to post on this topic because I think I live in paradise and really don't want to share it! First, a disclaimer: I am a 100% Swedish-American, so what I think is great weather may be the worst thing someone else can imagine. I am in Duluth, Minnesota.

Pros:
Clean, clean air
Clean abundant water
Lake Superior
Brutal, exhilarating winters
Endless forests, lakes, rivers
Wolves, bears, moose, otters, eagles
Honest, socially conscious people
Open, responsive government
Cheap housing

Cons:
Too many deer
Hockey, hockey, hockey
No decent Mexican food
No jobs
Summer tourists
Ten days a year over 80 degrees

As an aside, my favorite place to visit is New York City. It is like Disneyland for the literate.

Gary Olson
Duluth, MN