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Miami for sure. The city proper isn't boring at all and has tons going on, but the beaches and more popular, upscale attractions are all located in surrounding towns.
I've said before that South Florida in general has IMO an ideal layout that I wish more American metros had: lots of small municipalities with their own infrastructure. The central city isn't spread so thin and functions more like a big neighborhood.
Since you're including "living," then there's tons of them, especially in the Rust Belt. I'd rather live in suburban Baltimore than Baltimore proper, for example.
Washington DC proper is far more desirable than Baltimore, but even then, it's struggling to keep jobs and wealth from moving to the suburbs.
How is it struggling to keep jobs given the population has grown 15% since 2010, maintaining that pace by growing 2% in 2023? People tend to move where there are jobs or where they were hired to work which would indicate with a rise in population, a rise in job opportunity. The latest unemployment rate in DC was 4.9%, the lowest it has been since 1989, and very low considering within DC's population of 700K are 100K college students. DC's Median Household Income is 102K, on the rise yearly of late and nearly reaching the historic high of 106K back in 2019. So in other words there is no "struggle" there.
I think my title is fairly self explanatory, but let me give an example:
I was in a Connecticut forum on another platform and the people were complaining about Hartford. Most of the people were saying that it was better to live/work/play in places like Middletown, West Hartford or Wethersfield than to do that in Hartford itself.
Hartford is kind of a boring city, with a downtown that is dead after 5pm and parts of the city that have very high crime rates, so it makes sense than the surrounding towns/cities feel the need to make up for what Hartford lacks.
Can you think of any other MSA that are similar?
I realize this is blasphemy on C-D....but this is probably most metro areas in the country. The only examples I can think of where it would be the opposite would be NYC and then a few of the metro areas where the majority of the population lives within the (largely suburban in development) city limits. Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Jacksonville, etc.
Other than the example I gave, I can't think of one place where I would rather live in a suburb than its core city. Not even Los Angeles.
Well that's you, because all we have to do is look up data regarding where people who can afford to live anywhere actually live, and nine times out of 10, it's the suburbs.
Yup, this was my first reaction, the OPs question is backwards. US city cores usually suck compared to their suburbs.
This is going to be completely subjective. Saying "cores suck compared to their suburbs" implies an objective fact.
In most cities I would want to live in, I would prefer to live in the core. Does that mean that others will have the same philosophy? No - plenty would also prefer suburbs like yourself. That doesn't immediately make either of them 'suck'.
Of places I have spent significant time living, I preferred the core to the suburbs every time.
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