When I was 11, we moved to a small town. That was fun. You could walk everywhere, everybody knew your parents were.

Grew up in midsized cities in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Oil field brat!

Summers were spent with family on farms and working cattle ranches. Best days of my life were riding barefooted on the tailgate of a pickup with cousins dodging cow patties in the soft sand! 😂

I grew up in a university 'city' that grew from @20,000 when I was born tabour 50,000 when I was 20. What had been rural areas not far from town became shopping malls and suburban type sprawl.

The university and the growth brought in a very interesting diverse population. We had opinions literally from around the world. We left that area recently and I sure miss the divergence of population.

2 small Hopi Villages on top of 2 desert mesas.

The French side Swiss village my uncle w my aunt retired to. (gifted vacation for me) About 800 - 900 pop.

The town had two taverns one of which had a Friday night fish fry. It became world famous as people came from many countries and states for that event. By the way, you also spoke English.

It’s even smaller today, and not just because I left.

Bus ride to school was 45 mins each way.

Our “town” had a school, post office, gas station and a general store. A legit general store, two story building with an old rough wooden floor.

My siblings and I could walk for miles through forests, definitely trespassing on peoples’ property. No one cared.

We lived across the street from a lake and our neighborhood owned a lot on the lake so we could go down and pull our canoe into the lake and paddle around.

It’s changed a lot since then. Many more homes. More schools in the district.

I left there for another state for my high school years. Big city, great high school. I’m glad I did because I doubt i would’ve gone to college if I’d stayed.

Jones Beach was the highlight of the summer for me!
I loved the ocean, the pool, and even their hot dogs!

We'd drive out there, parents, my sis and I once (maaaaaybe twice on occasion) a year. Sometimes w extended family.

The pool (rarely), the roller rink (3 times?), shuffle board (a lot, I liked it), and of course, The Ocean: waves, and sounds! Carrying the rented beach umbrella. The soud of the point digging into the sand. My parents could both swim. Sand castles, sorta. 😄 Walking along picking up smoothed beach pebbles.🥰

I even went later in my 30's by subway to the LIRR, then dedicated bus to one of the parking lots. One time I went for the all you could eat brunch. Yum.

We also might have parked in the same lot bc of the path we took. There were before we got to the bathhouse on our left (facing the ocean) we'd pass the lovely pine trees with those long 4 inch needle clusters. Those pines "spelled" B-E-A-C-H-! to me! 🥰 🏖

Thank You!

My dad was in the Navy so we moved a lot. Small to medium towns in Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, California, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. My parents bought a house in a Southern California beach town next to a Navy base in the mid-50s and when he retired from the Navy we moved there in 1966. It's a nice place to live and grow up in. You could walk to the beach, the base, and just about anything you needed in the 60s and early 70s you could buy there. In the summer, the weather is mild with temperatures in the mid-70s to low 80s and in the winter the temperature is around low to mid-60s. We are constantly ranked as having some of the best weather in the nation. I bought a condo there in 2002 and when I retired I moved there and have been here since 2004.

plus boondocks - Air Force Brat, y'know. Born in Superurbania - Nassau Co. NY (Mom never forgave the Yankee Government for that and always assured people when my birthplace came up that I was conceived in Montgomery, Ala - TMO, Mom! Love ya anyhow!) Have lived in small towns in France and Oregon, suburbs in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas, boonies in the Mojave Desert and Texas, and after all that, find my small farm town in Arkansas to be just right! It's even got Dems like me in it!

About 80,000 people when I was a kid. Roughly twice as big now.
We moved to a smaller town (6-7,000) just before we got married and have been there since. Still not rural, though.
So, we lived here about 2x the amount of time in our "grow-up" city.

It was four blocks from Lake Michigan, so we spent lots of time at the beach. In many ways, though, it also was a village. There were lots of kids back then. Mostly we played with our contemporaries, but sometimes kids of all ages participated in impromptu games of running bases. We rode bikes through the neighborhood, and had to be back home when the street lights came on.

It was a great place to grow up. I'd still live there, but the house prices and real estate taxes are nuts because its desirability.

The current generation of kids who live there now can enjoy almost a village life even today. If their parents can part them from their screens, of course.

Lived in the northwest side neighborhood Logan Square. When I was 17 we moved to
Roger's Park on the far north side. We were a 2 block walk from Evanston and about
1 block from the lakefront. I've lived in the northwest suburbs since 1979.

Frankfurt Germany in a 3bdrm high rise there were 7 kids on the same floor as I and 46 in the complex

Well, somebody has to be from there.

close to Jefferson Hospital. Grew up in Duquesne, after 8th grade we moved to North Huntington., Married lived in duplex in South Park. Now here

...developments.

It informed my adult life.

I'm seeing it again, at the end of my life, in New Jersey.

into Mega Homes. I used to take my son to visit a sheep farm when he was little. We both loved it. Now it is mega bucks homes.

My parents always moved on just ahead of the hard core gentrification. It was as if they'd see an expensive new car parked in a neighbor's driveway and say, "That's it! We're out of here!"

I was born in the city. I lived in three different places before kindergarten. When I was in the third grade we moved to a bankrupt suburban development surrounded by open spaces. That was nice, me and my siblings wandered far and wide. Then the housing market exploded and there were new developments everywhere, all the new houses sold to white people growing fearful of the city, many of our favorite wild places falling to the bulldozers.

My parents didn't like these people and my dad got itching to move to Spain, which we did. He didn't consider that Franco was still in charge there and that my mom had no respect for authority and wasn't even able to feign it when pompous officials came around checking up on us. My dad couldn't sleep one night after an uncomfortable exchange between one such official and my mom so we packed all our stuff in the car and left for France in the middle of the night, unfortunately leaving all our money in a Spanish bank. Eventually we landed in Britain where Barclay's Bank allowed my parents a negative balance until they got my parent's money out of Spain. We lived in small town Britain for a year.

When we moved back to California my parents bought a small farm surrounded by citrus fields. Alas that place was starting to fall to the developers too. It's all hobby ranches for very wealthy people now. My parents made some profit selling that, but it was before property values there really started to escalate, from the low hundred thousands to millions.

I wasn't there for that, When I wasn't in forced time-outs from college I was wandering all over the west as a crazy person, or sleeping on my brother's sofa in his house by the beach, all crashed and burnt, waking up at dawn to scream at the ocean.

I love other cities I've visited: San Fransico, Philadelphia, Boston. Hope to still get to visit Chicago.

We lived in the 2nd northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, the western side of Washington Heights [like, "In The Heights"]. Moved northward along a small avenue, till we were 6 blocks from the very big, lovely Ft Tryon Park (and The Cloisters) with a view up the Hudson River. You could see hawks hover. Gorgeous garden before the fort (Tryon).
In the dense woods going down to the river there are supposed to be...
.
.
.wait for it....
.
Wild Turkeys!!! 😄
I find that hilarious! And pretty darn cool!

Lived later on in Brookyn, near Grand Army Plaza. Now about 14 yrs in The Bronx.

We also spent a lot of time in 2 Northern NJ towns with our cousins as kids, tweens, teens, about our late 30's?
As kids there were woods, and a creek in one town - eventually built up, about 2 blocks back from our relatives house.
So we got a good taste of suburban life.

in a neighborhood about 2.5 miles from the city (downtown), less than a mile from my elementary school and my high-school, houses close together, a lot of kids to play with, neighbors knew their neighbors, their names, occupations, etc, even many blocks away.

Our next door neighbor wanted us to actually call him 'Neighbor', so my siblings and I knew him only by that name for a long time.

A block away we had a public pool, a public park with tennis courts and crafts in the summer, a playground, a small baseball field, and the big high school baseball field, as well as stores, ice cream shops, restaurants, a library, a gym, a bowling alley, and a post office.

We walked or rode our bikes everywhere and sometimes rode the bus downtown to shop at Sears or Penneys or to see a movie.

My dad worked at the factory a few blocks away and would often ride his bike to work.
My mom didn't have a job until I was in high school.

My mom and dad eventually sold their house and moved about 8 miles away to a rural area with a subdivision. I lived there for a while until I got married.

no services-playgrounds. pools, buses, etc. nothing within walking distance. Neighbors kept to themselves. I had wished we stayed in the steel mill city/town we lived in earlier.

Michigan. Awesome swimming in the summer, lots of woods and quite a few kids to play with. Winters kinda sucked what with all the Lake Effect snow blowing off of the Big Lake, but we still had fun. I envied the kids that lived "in town" (about 5 miles away) because they had actual sidewalks where they could skateboard and walk without the danger of being hit by an 18-wheeler going up M-66, lol. Went to a one-room school grades K-6, there were 5 kids in my class, all boys but me, and there were about 30 kids total. We could ride a nearby farmer's horses any time we wanted as long as we could catch them in the fields, lol, which is where I learned to ride bareback. I still love it. Looking back, it was pretty cool.

suburb. Down the road from us were late 40's early 1950s houses. Up the road from us waa mostly farm land. Including my family's land. My grandfather had been a farmer, but after he died, my Dad wasn't interested in farming so he opened a water delivery service. He did, however, rent our barns & fields to a farmer up the road.

Then in the 1970's the hospital board decided they needed to build a new building about a mile down the road from us and not too long after the State decided to build a bypass so it was easier and faster to get to the small city area.

Then everything changed. The majority of farmers sold their land and housing tracks started springing up left and right. Some of the wealthier doctors built mini mcmansions. Mostly they're farther up the road, but it still ruined the peace I grew up in.

Now a days, the rich folk drive their Porsches about 90 miles an hour down the road, despite the speed limit being 45. We had to tear down our old house and build our new one farther back from the road because a young guy lost control of his SUV and hit our house. Then several years later a drunk woman just missed hitting it again.The traffic is non stop, morning, noon and night. There are only a few acres left including our ten that remain mostly untouched.

Sorry to go into such detail, but it's been such a radical change. I think I and one of the neighbors farther up the road are probably the only ones left of the early core families. It's kind of sad. I miss the peace.

Morgantown ,WV, It is nearly done. Houses were bought and torn down. same as the farms. Sad.

through fifth grade, then moved to a small city (around 50,000 population) about a half hour away, where I still live today.

But in a newly built (in the 70's) sub-division (I know it doesn't fit the stereotype, but there are a lot of them, even in eastern KY). The town only had about 5,000 people. We needed to use a car but if we ended up behind 3 or more vehicles at a stop light "traffic was TERRIBLE".

drove.

But now that I think of it we had a K-mart and a Pic Pac groc store next to the neighborhood. Us kids always ran free after school and in the summer so if someone's family was out of something they would send one of their kids to the store, who would call a buddy or two to go too (not necessary, just more fun). Picking up Dad's Maalox is exciting in groups.

Lived in Lexington MA 'til I was 10. Very much suburban and very patriotic! Home of the original Patriot's Day! Walked to school, but anything else really required a car.

Moved to a small town in NJ (10,000). About one square mile. When I was there, there was just an elementary school (1st-7th). And high school was 8-12. Poor no-name eighth graders. Had to wait a year to get that "Freshman" title!! The rec center had roller skating every Friday night and the park had a couple tennis courts and a big wall that folks would play handball, solo tennis and whatever. There was a siren that would signal for the volunteer fire department (one of our teachers was a ff and would take off if the siren sounded.) And that siren was tested every night at 7pm. The de facto alert that it was time for kids to go home.

BUT.... this small town was just across the George Washington Bridge. We were minutes away from NYC. (My dad taught at NYU) I think I was 13 or 14 when I was allowed to head into the city by myself. A train ride all the way down to my dad's office on Washington Square.

Moved into the city for a job and stayed for 4 years. Loved living in Manhattan!!

Finally moved to Denver... which feels very suburban to me.

Grove Hall, Boston

The neighborhood was transitioning from Jewish to Black when I was born.

Didn't need a car until I had to reverse commute to a job in the suburbs.