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Old 10-26-2009, 11:28 PM
 
Location: Southwest Washington
2,316 posts, read 7,790,985 times
Reputation: 1746

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I grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon which has about 33,000 people living there--it's the town that I have as my profile picture. It's pretty isolated, but not really rural until you get outside the urban growth boundary. It is very isolated though, being 4 hours to Portland and 7 hours to either Seattle or San Francisco. I liked the isolation and the proximity to the outdoors and wilderness (still do). The high school I went to had 2,000 students and served roughly the entire urban growth boundary. There was never a lack of activities to keep a teenager occupied.

Overall I really enjoyed growing up there. More diversity (besides ideological diversity that exists there) would have been a great thing to be exposed to, or to have been more connected to the "outside" world, but overall it was big enough to not have to know your neighbors and to have shopping and cultural amenities, but not so big that it had bad neighborhoods or any real crime problems. And when I lived outside the city it was like doing the time warp into a totally different universe. It's a totally unique place for sure...
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Old 10-26-2009, 11:50 PM
 
Location: Houston
2,023 posts, read 4,170,151 times
Reputation: 467
Well, I kind of lived all over Texas. The places that I was old enough to remember where Austin, Lake Jackson, and Burnet. Austin, at the time, was some where around half-a-million. Lake Jackson is about 30,000 and Burnet is about 4,000. My favorite city by far growing up was Austin. Lake Jackson was OK and I despised Burnet. I also lived in Corsicana, TX (about 40,000 people) and was born in Dallas, but I was too young to say how I feel about those towns. I don't plan to ever live in a city smaller than 750,000 again.

Last edited by wpmeads; 10-27-2009 at 12:01 AM..
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Old 10-27-2009, 07:50 AM
 
Location: West Michigan
3,119 posts, read 6,565,754 times
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I grew up near Clarksville, Michigan, population 360.

We actually lived about 3 miles from town on a gravel road. So I technically didn't grow up in a town at all. It was pretty rural. A few small farms, a lot of randomly-placed singlewide trailers. A lot of low-income folks, although we had a nice 15 acre hobby farm. You could definitely drive a few miles away from where I lived into different parts of the countryside and find places that looked a lot "wealthier" (relatively speaking). My friends used to make fun of me for living in a trailer park because there were so many on my road. We could have used SOME sort of zoning laws!! Heck, the "big time" farmers from nearby Lake Odessa would even make fun the poorly-run farms near me. You know it's bad when your rural area is being made fun of by other rural areas.

Did I like growing up there? Yup. My high school included a few other small towns and a huge geographic area, so we managed to scrape together 800-900 kids to fill the high school. Plenty of fellow teenagers to provide a good social life and keep things interesting. We had a decent mid-sized city in Grand Rapids that was only a half-hour drive, and Detroit and Chicago were both within 3 hours if we wanted to experience the "big city."

I would definitely raise a family in the area (not in the exact same spot, but a nicer spot within the school district). NOT a good place to be if you're in your 20's and single, though.

The best thing about a community like that is the close-knit nature of it. If you grow up there and develop deep, lifelong friendships and know a ton of people in the area, young and old, there is really nothing quite like it. And there's always something to do. But I think it would be tough to relocate there as an outsider. Without the social network that builds up over time, it might seem like a lonely, boring place.
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Old 10-27-2009, 01:08 PM
 
634 posts, read 1,442,665 times
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I was born in a West Texas town with a population of approximately 100,000 people at the time. It was and remains somewhat provincial, staid, and identifiably conservative. The best thing that ever happened to me was moving away from there at age 12 to live with my father. He lived in Austin, I moved there to be with him, and for that time I was grateful to get away from what surely would have been a somewhat stifling social environment. From time to time I have come into contact with some of my cousins who still live in that West Texas town and am shocked at the level of insensitivity and ignorance they often display about certain things. I can only imagine how much more drab my life would have been had I not escaped. Even so, I have outgrown Austin and am eager to make my move. At this point I have a "been there done that" attitude when it comes to all things Austin, but can see how others coming small Texas towns or those with families coming from overpriced coastal locales see themselves settling here. It's just no longer my cup of tea.
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