Do you miss NY now the you have left? (New York: crime rate, look for a job)

[settlepa]

I Moved away from NY and you could not pay me to move back, to expensive, nothing there but high taxes and expensive housing.

[12buttons]

Originally Posted by AJNEOA

When was the last time you were in Buffalo's downtown? Great sports, beautiful architecture and theatres. The train downtown runs where there are archades, theatres, restaurants, bars and museums. I can't think of another downtown in Western NY that has that nice of an area right in the city's center. They have small areas that are nice, but nothing like that.

Yeah, when I lived there I went a lot - it's dead at night save for a few bars on Elmwood with college kids...parking a nightmare and they love to give tickets...empty buildings all over -when was the last time you were there? hertel ave - empty buildings - chippewa area - high crime...

[oktaren]

Originally Posted by 12buttons

Yeah, when I lived there I went a lot - it's dead at night save for a few bars on Elmwood with college kids...parking a nightmare and they love to give tickets...empty buildings all over -when was the last time you were there? hertel ave - empty buildings - chippewa area - high crime...

Not that I like buffalo, but when I left 6 months ago there was a lot of renovation work being done on quite a few of those buildings. I know a few have been turned into luxery apartments, and were rented quite quickly. I wonder how they are doing now? Anyone know?

[FromNY2NC]

I wish I could afford to live in NY and settle.

Fact of the matter is NY is and will always be my home but it's just too damn expensive.

I live in nc now and I always try to conjure up somekind of plan to move back, lol

[I'minformed2]

NC will have the same issues as NY within the next 20 years at the latest....and then where will everyone go?

[GypsySoul22]

I live in Vermont now and it's sort of culture shock only because we are in a small town. Fortunately we did not move just to sit in a small quaint town. About 10 minutes east of here is NH with lots of shopping and stores to rival Sunrise Hwy.

I don't care for the lack of real stores here in our town, but it's darn beautiful. We have mountains as our backdrop, a lovely river flows a few feet in front of our home, and it's clean and green everywhere.

As my husband pointed out, we moved to get AWAY from row stores and a supermarket on every corner.

I'm also shocked at how small and poorly stocked the library is in our town.
I'm used to the library overflowing with the latest dvds, movies, books and more. It's a shame it's only open limited hours, too. But Vermont libraries have to operate on very small budgets.

You can't have it all.

We have a better apartment than we'd get for the money on Long Island--the top part of a house, with big rooms, a porch in front and one off our bedroom, full use of the yard and garage (with one tenant downstairs).

Prices are not cheap here and we'll be hustling to pay the bills. However, my son's new school is nice and small, the staff accommodating, and generally people are friendly and say hello here.

We're still settling in, but once we have jobs sorted out, we will try to join some activities and get involved more with the community.

Good jobs seem scarce here, but then again, after 2001, Long Island had very few jobs worth apply for.

[AJNEOA]

Originally Posted by 12buttons

Yeah, when I lived there I went a lot - it's dead at night save for a few bars on Elmwood with college kids...parking a nightmare and they love to give tickets...empty buildings all over -when was the last time you were there? hertel ave - empty buildings - chippewa area - high crime...

Good way to turn the question around on me, it was brilliant and well thought out........Sure, there are areas that have some empty buildings, but there aren't just college kids and bars in Buffalo. Elmwood is a college-y and bar-y area of the city. Try looking around for tickets to the theatre. Go down and have some calamari at Toro. Stop over at the movies or the archade. Go down to a hockey game at the HSBC arena. So what if they're giving tickets away? There is still a lot to do. There are Bills games, great concert venues, interesting restaurants. The architecture in downtown Buffalo is beautiful. Oh, and I have rarely had trouble with parking. You pay $4 if you're going to a game and downtown is packed. I suppose it just takes a little effort.

[12buttons]

Originally Posted by GypsySoul22

I live in Vermont now and it's sort of culture shock only because we are in a small town. Fortunately we did not move just to sit in a small quaint town. About 10 minutes east of here is NH with lots of shopping and stores to rival Sunrise Hwy.

I don't care for the lack of real stores here in our town, but it's darn beautiful. We have mountains as our backdrop, a lovely river flows a few feet in front of our home, and it's clean and green everywhere.

As my husband pointed out, we moved to get AWAY from row stores and a supermarket on every corner.

I'm also shocked at how small and poorly stocked the library is in our town.
I'm used to the library overflowing with the latest dvds, movies, books and more. It's a shame it's only open limited hours, too. But Vermont libraries have to operate on very small budgets.

You can't have it all.

We have a better apartment than we'd get for the money on Long Island--the top part of a house, with big rooms, a porch in front and one off our bedroom, full use of the yard and garage (with one tenant downstairs).

Prices are not cheap here and we'll be hustling to pay the bills. However, my son's new school is nice and small, the staff accommodating, and generally people are friendly and say hello here.

We're still settling in, but once we have jobs sorted out, we will try to join some activities and get involved more with the community.

Good jobs seem scarce here, but then again, after 2001, Long Island had very few jobs worth apply for.

You sound like you have all the right stuff going for you..clean air and beauty - the rest will come -give it time...bloom where you are planted !

[londonbarcelona]

Originally Posted by homeward bound

Apologies to all those who've read me waxing poetic about NY State before.

Reasons to Want to Return to NY State:

1. VARIETY. NY state has to be one of the most varied states in the nation. Setting aside NYC & LI, Upstate itself is amazingly varied. You've got all sorts of cities with real, distinct, proud, and often still-vibrant histories. Big towns. Small towns. Tiny hamlets. Farmland of all sorts. Mountains. Rolling hills. Rivers of all sorts. Streams. Ponds. Wetlands. Lakes big and small, including two Great Lakes (which are cleaner than they've been in many decades). The Thousand Islands. Canoeing, boating, and kayaking of all sorts. Skiing, skating, hockey indoor and outdoor. Plus most of the state is wonderfully uncluttered--like a New England with lots of elbow room. Don't like where you are, a quick trip and you're elsewhere. And you can stretch your legs and catch your breath on the way. Architecture ranging from gorgeous intact PRE-Colonial to Modernist to built-just-yesterday. A vast range of older, classic, stately homes, farms, commercial and public buildings, and neigbhorhoods. And SO MUCH of it is SO close by. Here in SW Virginia, where we're currently stuck, for example, to get to a decent-sized city we have to drive 45 minutes on an ugly, uninteresting interstate. To get out of our monotonous (and smotheringly dark) mountains and relentlessly run-down and charmless Appalachian towns, you have to drive HOURS, and only one direct (NE) will get out of this incredible (and smothering) monotony. In Upstate, an hour's drive in just about any direction will give you incredible variety, and often put you into a different environment entirely. How far is it from Lake Ontario to the Adirondacks? From Lake Erie to the Western NY Alleghanies? From the Hudson Valley to the eastern Catskills or to Lake George or NYC? How much HISTORY--so much of it so noble, an inspiration of hard work, ingenuity, and FAITH in America itself--is all around and within everywhere you go? Also, since the state has an incredible and--despite all the problems with illegal immigration--an on-going tradition of absorbing immigrants, it also has an incredible ethnic diversity. And much of this isn't a matter of people dividing themselves from others because of ethnicity for long, but, to the contrary, of people pretty soon becoming fellow Americans, and proud to do so. Think of all the Italians, Poles, Germans, and Irish who settled not only in Buffalo, say, but in the towns and country around there, too. No one bats an eye at a rural small town mayor being of Italian or Polish background; no one questions whether being Catholic keeps you from being as American as the next guy. Sure, there are intense racial tensions in the cities, as there are everywhere in America. But by far, most New Yorkers are profoundly pleased and proud to see a black family doing well; they very much believe in the best of the American Way. Their frustration is only when this way is frustrated by fleeing jobs and self-destruction. Likewise, by far, most would judge Arab-American neighbors, say, by the same standard of whether they were good neighbors or not to which they hold everyone, including themselves. Meaning, the best of the American ethic of "Every person their right to flourish" and "Judge poeple by their character" prevails up there. A great and still-generous sense of FAIRNESS, rooted in honoring your own family's FAITH in America's fairness, rules in most of NY State. There's simply too much of a tradition of too many kinds of immigrants--all of them proud to now be American, all of them with a history of contribution--for much prejudice to prevail. The human variety there is no less beautiful than the natural and historic variety.

2. OPPORTUNITIES. I know, I know: NY State's job-loss, especially of quality, move-into-the-middle-class jobs, has been terrible and heartbreaking. BUT you've still got a fantastic State University system, both in terms of its costs to the student and the incredible variety of educational options it offers. You can study ANYthing in a quality school located in just about ANY type of town/city at an incredibly LOW cost up there. And while the elementary, middle, and highschools do depend on your locality, IN GENERAL NY State does a great job preparing its students to compete. And while job-loss has been awful, and the state's finances and gov't. ARE a mess, because of the state's incredible variety, it is possible to pursue a job in just about any field, from testing varieties of apple trees to doing brain surgery.

3. TRUE COMMUNITY & BIG-HEARTED TRADITIONS. In part exactly because NY State hasn't had the fevers of anonymous over-development that parts of NC, Nevada, etc., have experienced; and partly because so many immigrants and their children and grandchildren had/have so good a life in NY State; and in part because NY State simply offers such a BALANCED life, so many places are distinct up there that you can't miss the exceptional sense and variety of TEXTURE, of A PLACE'S CHARACTER, throughout NY State. Add to this the determination of so many NY'ers to sustain the best of the American traditions of volunteerism and local loyalty and honoring their forefathers by keeping up everything from the village green to the VFW all-you-can-eat to the old family home, and you'll generally find an old-fashioned loyalty premised on the Big Heart, which generally keeps that loyalty from being close-mindedness in disguise. Plus, knowing that YOU may need some help when you get stuck in the snow helps keep alive an ethic that you should be eager to help others stuck in the snow. Add to this the way people savor their summers up there, and SHARE those summers during the free concerts in the park, the lolling at the lakeside beach, the tables outside the pub, the church picnic in the park until the skeeters get too thick (that's about 10 p.m. in July!), etc., and you've got a strong set of uniting traditions that fewer and fewer places enjoy these days as the country gets more and more suburbanized, more and more (self-) trapped in the car- and iPod-bubble. Techno-autistic gypsies they aint.

4. FOUR SEASONS. Yeah, I know, the weather can be miserable, the winters draining. (I grew up in Buffalo!) But the fact that the weather IS alive, varied, and a factor in every day life up there is a big part of what makes living in NY State so satisfying. You don't need to hide inside of air-conditioning for four or six months a year--you may not need it at all. In fact, there aren't too many places in the country where, by contrast, you can, and want to, have your windows open for six months of the year. The summers are often superb: warm, even hot, in the day, cooling and cool at night. You put on the warmer shirt to walk in the evening, you're sweating and love jumping into the lake, pond, river, or pool in the day. The seasons, and even the day's cycle of temperatures and moods, give life a rhythm up there. And just how common is this ancient connection with natural REALITY in so many parts of the nation these days? There, it's almost inescapable. In summer, the days are long, the twilights slow, the shadows golden before they're blue and then blacks. It all seems to sink into your bones, where you can draw on it to endure the winters--creating an inner cycle, an inner rhythm rooted in nature, in a reality that's greater than we are yet makes a little room for us. It can give you a calming humility if you'll let it. Drive or bike or walk a half-hour or less out of just about every upstate city, and you've got all the stars your soul could want to wonder about. Droughts are rare, the green is deep, the clouds roll fast on the high Great Lakes winds. Falls may be brief, but with all the maples and birches against all the spruces and pines, they're spectacular, too. I know that winters go on for two months too long, but at least your kids will know what snow is--and at least have the opportunity to discover all the ways that winter and snow can be beautiful and magical. That by itself is increasingly rare in these apparently increasingly greenhouse days. And winter gives you time to warm the body and the family and friendships with cooking, with sitting by the fire with unashamedly over-big bottles of wine or whiskey, with thinking about summer events and fall complexities, until you've got them all straightened out by Spring. And as tiresome as muddy boots and assualted skin can be, there are few simple pleasures like taking your dog and/or your young kids for a walk in the deep and still-falling snow, and coming back home to the soup or stew or chili or curry, that warms so much more than the body when shared. Without the occasionally harsh winter, you can't truly savor the usually gorgeous summers.

5. THE STATE PARK SYSTEM. As if Adirondack State Park weren't enough--still the biggest state park in the lower 48 states--the number and variety of the smaller state parks is just incredible, and the variety of what' within them simply amazing. And since the summers are generally so great, you have more opportunies to do more kinds of things outdoors, in a greater range of natural beauty and uniqueness, than you do in most other states. Try hiking Florida's Alligator Alley. Or paddling across car-thick, highway-blocked Charlotte, NC.

6. THE FOOD. Thanks largely to the ethnic variety noted above, in so many places, it's incredible, and incredibly affordable.

7. PROXIMITY TO CANADA, and the fantastic provinces of Ontario & Quebec. Montreal, Toronto, Canada's Canada's cottage country--you're so lucky to have that within a few hour's drive from most places in NY State!

8. PROXIMITY TO NEW ENGLAND.

9. PROXIMITY TO THE UPPER MIDWEST.

10. SERVICES. Yeah, I know, the taxes can be bad, the state's fiscal mess worse than maddening. But you DO get SOME of your tax-dollar's worth there compared so many states with uniformly lousy schools, non-existent snowplowing, weak/corrupted environmental protections, steep and hidden "fees" that equal high taxes anyway, etc.

11. THE FOOD! (Worth repeating!!!!!!!!!)

I'm from the Buffalo area as well and live like a queen in Scottsdale, Arizona. But....

I HATE BEING AWAY FROM MY BIRTHPLACE!

Your post actually made me weepy. I long to go back home to WNY.

[polishpride716]

I have only been away from Buffalo for 6 months and I miss it insanely. These posts about crime and poverty are absolutely ridiculous. If you wanna see crime and poverty go to Akron, OH or Cleveland, OH. The city of Buffalo has so much to offer, except a wealth of good jobs outside the manufacturing and union sectors, but you can still make a decent living. It is my hometown and I will go back someday to raise my family. BTW, I totally agree with the comments about Syracuse, that place is a hole. I turned down alot more money to not have to live anywhere near that ****hole. Spokane, WA is home for now and the cost-of-living is very similar to Buffalo, but the scenery is about 10 times better, and the job market!!! Go Sabres!!!! God i'm gonna miss those drunken nights on elmwood at Fahertys watching the Sabres.