Metros With The Nicest Collection of Suburbs 2023 (California, living, best)
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A difference between NYC and Philly (and Chicago, I believe) is that wealth in the NYC metro is more evenly divided among North Jersey, LI and CT whereas in the Philly metro the wealth is largely concentrated in the PA burbs. The South Jersey burbs are also less developed and less historic in character than the PA burbs overall (and far less so than N. Jersey). I believe there's also more of a North-South divide in Chicago with most of the wealth being concentrated to the north and northwest of the city.
North Jersey has always had a perception problem--similar to Brooklyn 30-40 years ago. I think this is in part because many people only see refineries and salt marsh on the Megabus from DC or wherever and they conclude that much of the area is a vast urban wasteland. But it's full of tony suburbs similar to what you would see on the Main Line or along Chicago's North Shore.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 05-15-2023 at 05:54 PM..
Probably driven by people who have been to Arlington or Alexandria a handful of times (at most), while ignoring the rest of the metro
Post #11 offered a perfect explanation as to why NYC should be crushing this poll.
Having grown up near and lived in the DMV suburbs for a short stent as a young adult, I can tell you that they don’t even belong in the conversation of being the nicest collection of suburbs. The poll results with DC leading is Exhibit A as to why you can’t trust any information coming out of this site as actually being factual
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
What does that mean exactly? DC has a lot of newer developments in places like Largo and Rockville that were built around metro lines in the last 15-20 years while older cities like NYC and Chicago have suburbs that were developed along transit lines over 100 years ago.
Much of North Jersey's suburbs are considerably denser and more walkable than anything in Montgomery County or NOVA (outside of Alexandria). You even have towns like Montclair where if you're lucky you get the transit, walkability and possibly even a view of the Empire State Building from your living room window.
A close friend of mine from college is from Montclair so I'm hip. Montclair essentially would be a section of Arlington or Alexandria, and likewise in either of those you can see the Washington Monument from rooftops. People diminish Arlington like it doesn't have like 6 urban TOD nodes to itself, by either glossing over it, or naming it only once. It's only getting more built out as is. You can literally type "transit oriented development" into Google search and find the wiki page where the first pic is of Arlington, VA.
Whoever that prior poster was mentioning the drab buildings in Crystal City from the 60/70's also left out the fact that they're all coming down for new 30 story modernized high-rises as we speak, and the urban fabric is changing once they re-align Rt. 1 making it an urban BLVD. What has long separated the DC suburbs from many places is the pace at we see flaws or deficiencies get addressed, and additions take place, creating a sense of newness pretty regularly.
Me personally outside of JC, Hoboken/Weehawken, or Cliffside/North Bergen all in that same general area, I wouldn't take most NNJ suburbs over at least the beltway DC ones, but to each their own. It's not hyperbole that say outside of NYC most cities "collections" cannot top scale or TOD presence of Bethesda, SS, Alexandria (all of it), Arlington (all of it) on.
I think NYC suburbs certainly can make the case for overall best tho regarding the overall collection, especially when encompassing the entire metro, so not a runaway for DC there.
A close friend of mine from college is from Montclair so I'm hip. Montclair essentially would be a section of Arlington or Alexandria, and likewise in either of those you can see the Washington Monument from rooftops. People diminish Arlington like it doesn't have like 6 urban TOD nodes to itself, by either glossing over it, or naming it only once. It's only getting more built out as is. You can literally type "transit oriented development" into Google search and find the wiki page where the first pic is of Arlington, VA.
Montclair is farther away from Manhattan than Arlington and Alexandria are from DC, so I'm not sure how they would at all be comparable. The better comparison to Arlington/Alexandria would be Hudson County. But I intentionally omitted them from my previous posts since one poster said he was omitting Cambridge since it was an edge city and not a suburb in a traditional sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by the resident09
Me personally outside of JC, Hoboken/Weehawken, or Cliffside/North Bergen all in that same general area, I wouldn't take most NNJ suburbs over at least the beltway DC ones, but to each their own.
You're focused on the most of urban of suburbs, some of which (Alexandria) are not even true suburbs. Alexandria is actually older than DC itself. NNJ has high density "suburbs" but it also has a network of more mid-density (5,000 to 10,000 ppsm) walkable towns, which are virtually non-existent in the DMV. Once you leave Pike and Rose, or drive away from the National Harbor, you're basically in Big Box Suburbia where you can't walk to much of anything from your house. Places like Pike and Rose were basically built to provide a walkable option in the midst of Big Box Suburbia. The closest thing you have to the NJ burbs in the DMV is probably Del Rey or Takoma Park but they're small and not that dense overall.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 05-16-2023 at 06:24 AM..
A difference between NYC and Philly (and Chicago, I believe) is that wealth in the NYC metro is more evenly divided among North Jersey, LI and CT whereas in the Philly metro the wealth is largely concentrated in the PA burbs. The South Jersey burbs are also less developed and less historic in character than the PA burbs overall (and far less so than N. Jersey). I believe there's also more of a North-South divide in Chicago with most of the wealth being concentrated to the north and northwest of the city.
North Jersey has always had a perception problem--similar to Brooklyn 30-40 years ago. I think this is in part because many people only see refineries and salt marsh on the Megabus from DC or wherever and they conclude that much of the area is a vast urban wasteland. But it's full of tony suburbs similar to what you would see on the Main Line or along Chicago's North Shore.
Can't +1 you through the system, so doing it publicly here.
The difference between the New York part of New Jersey and the Philadelphia part can be summed up in two words: Geography and railroads.
The railroads that emanated from Philadelphia saw no real need to develop dense networks in rural southern New Jersey, while the railroads in northeast Pennsylvania's anthracite coal country all sought to get their chief cargo to New York to the east. And as those railroads (Erie, Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, Central Railroad of New Jersey) built lines to NYC, and as railroads connected NYC and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, Reading/B&O), suburbs began to develop around their intermediate stations, while not much developed around the much smaller South Jersey railroad network. There are some South Jersey communities not named Camden that have histories stretching back a while: Burlington, Moorestown, Haddonfield (the toniest of the South Jersey suburbs), Merchantville. But the real urbanization of South Jersey didn't begin until the opening of the Delaware River (now Benjamin Franklin) Bridge in 1926, and North Jersey had a huge head start by then.
Your point about New Jersey's perception problem is interesting: What you see from the train headed into NYC from points to the southwest is different, and less nightmarish, than what you see from the New Jersey Turnpike headed there. But it's still more urban and less suburban for much of that trip, and that probably also colors people's perceptions. Were places like Montclair or Bloomfield or Morris County on the main line between New York and points southwest, I'll bet people would view North Jersey differently.
Since I brought up railroads, however, I'd also like to address the point made about the Washington, DC, suburbs. Most "railroad suburbs" are almost by definition "transit oriented," for they developed commercial centers around the train stations and their densest development is also located close to those stations. The commuter (I prefer "regional") rail systems that fan out from Boston, New York and Philadelphia have a constellation of such towns along them — and as most East Coast denizens know, Philadelphia's wealthiest suburbs have a collective name that comes from the railroad that built them.
The difference between DC and the other cities of the Northeast comes from its growing into a huge metropolis later than the others did. I noticed as a teenager visiting DC for the first time in 1971 that it had only one community I would describe as a "railroad suburb": Silver Spring, Md., which had a B&O station at the edge of its downtown. Most of the rest of Washington's suburbs had developed either along the District's suburban streetcar routes or along the thoroughfares that carried cars into and out of the city.
But even then, Washington was planning to give its suburbs an "urbanity retrofit" in the form of the Washington Metro system, which is a sort-of hybrid: an urban circulator within the District (with some holes) and a commuter rail network, only running at rapid transit frequency, beyond it. I later learned that Arlington County (which comprises the former Virginia portion of the District of Columbia along with part of the city of Alexandria) began planning for Metro as far back as 1961, rezoning its commercial thoroughfares for higher density where the subway would follow them. Thus did DC develop something new: Railroad cities for the Auto Age like Arlington and Bethesda (I use "city" here because their commercial districts are definitely urban in form in a way the small-town suburban downtowns in much of the rest of the Northeast are not). And the Metro injected steroids into Silver Spring's small-town Main Street as well.
Thus the suburbs of DC now look different from their Northeast Corridor peers as a result. Sure, there are still things they have in common, such as auto-oriented edge cities and strip-mall roadside environments, but the mini-cities that grew up along the Metro don't have too many analogues further up the Corridor (White Plains, N.Y., is probably as close as they come).
Having grown up near and lived in the DMV suburbs for a short stent as a young adult, I can tell you that they don’t even belong in the conversation of being the nicest collection of suburbs. The poll results with DC leading is Exhibit A as to why you can’t trust any information coming out of this site as actually being factual
Yep. I lived in Reston, Fairfax County, VA for a couple of years and absolutely hated it. Very sprawling and low-density and autocentric, yet Reston was somehow supposed to be one of the hip, urban(ish) suburbs of the DC Metro Area? I now pay FAR less to live in the heart of Pittsburgh, a walkable thriving major city, and I couldn't be happier.
Yep. I lived in Reston, Fairfax County, VA for a couple of years and absolutely hated it. Very sprawling and low-density and autocentric, yet Reston was somehow supposed to be one of the hip, urban(ish) suburbs of the DC Metro Area? I now pay FAR less to live in the heart of Pittsburgh, a walkable thriving major city, and I couldn't be happier.
I can sorta see why DC is leading. If you're thinking about the "nicest average suburb," then DC would probably come out on top since there is a lot of "nice" new housing in clean, pristine new-ish developments outside of the Beltway. You're not really going to find a cluster of 3,500 sq. ft. townhomes built circa 2014 with an artificial lake in the middle and a little town square complete with a SoulCycle, Five Guys, Potbelly, Sweetgreen and Bank of America ATM machine in Chicagoland or in the Philly burbs.
DC might be unique in that it offers the Sun Belt-style suburbia many people are accustomed to along with a semi-decent dose of inner ring, old school streetcar era suburbia.
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I now pay FAR less to live in the heart of Pittsburgh, a walkable thriving major city, and I couldn't be happier.
