The city life vs. suburbia

At dinner last night KT and I were talking about the cultural gulf between Suburbians and city people. In the DC area especially there is a clear distinction between the District people and NoVa folks, and what is especially interesting to me is the rhetoric of fear on both sides. Take my friend Lo, for example. Lo is a nice Midwestern girl who moved to DC for college and never really looked back. For the past two years she's been living in a run down converted 1-bedroom in Eastern Market with two roommates. Lo walks to her job near Capitol Hill, takes the metro and buses when she ventures further than that, and knows the bartenders at most of the neighborhood pubs and dive bars around DC. On the rare occasions when she ventures over to Virginia, she'll tell anyone who will listen that NoVa is scary - the manicured lawns, picture-perfect yuppiness a mask that surely must hide a far more sinister truth. In the District things might not always be pretty, but they're honest, and real.
And then there's Christy. Christy is from a Northern New Jersey suburb, and six years after moving to DC she holds on to that frame of reference as the kind of community where everyone should live, or at least want to live.
These days she lives in Arlington, in a luxurious high-rise with a private swimming pool, a parking garage, and all the amenities you can imagine. She lives two blocks away from the metro station, but drives everywhere both for convenience and because she is very safety-conscious. As a single woman coming home alone, she doesn't feel comfortable outside the protective shell of her car. She comes into the District to socialize at high-end restaurants and clubs and knows exactly whom to email to get onto the guest lists for the hottest parties. Her RA in college once told her that the Green Line was unsafe, and she would never tempt fate by venturing into Columbia Heights. Why subject yourself to the dirtiness of the city when everything is so much nicer in NoVa? It'll be interesting to see what Christy and others like her do when Tyson's Corner eventually becomes more urbanized.
I'm trying to be as objective as possible as I write this, but I have to admit that I'm with Lo on this one. I live in Midcity, that newly-designated buffer zone between Dupont and Logan Circle, largely because when I moved in three years ago it was the best I could afford and as 20-year-old living alone for the first time, I was much more concerned with safety than I am now - or rather, the past three years have ingrained in me an appreciation for the glorious grit of less gentrified neighborhoods like Eastern Market, Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill or NoMa (which I hear is "the next next next U street," whatever that means).
So what is it about the city that feels so right to me? For one thing, my frame of reference is Bourg-la-Reine, a comparatively sleepy suburb of Paris which looks more like residential parts of DC than anything else. It would feel wrong to not have sidewalks overflowing with people of all ages, occupations and colors, and to have anything but my feet and maybe my bike be my main mode of transportation. By age 12 I had the routes and schedules of most of my area's bus lines memorized, and at 13 my friends and I would take the subway into town to picnic in the Jardin du Luxembourg. As a sidenote, I don't get the uproar about letting a 9-year-old ride the subway alone - my parents did similar things to me and considered it a safety exercice.
A major reason people choose to live in Suburbia is that cheaper real estate means you can afford a bigger place. Until I was 14 my parents, brother and I lived in a 1,000 sq ft (100 m2), three-bedroom apartment and it never occurred to me that this could be considered small. Today I live in a 400 sq ft (40 m2) studio with my cat - which I consider perfectly adequate, my Kentucky relatives think is tiny, and my father thinks is huge. Go figure. A French developer would have made two studios out of this space, and young French singles would stand in line to rent them... which actually makes me think of another Froggie vs. Yankee difference - "what you need" vs. "what you can get." But that's for another time.