What is City Life? - by Andrew Burleson - Free Range City

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What is City Life?<br>Examining a cultural divide

Andrew Burleson<br>Apr 07, 2026

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Today I want to share an observation as a seed for future posts. The thought is simply this: Americans don’t have a shared understanding of what “City Life” is.<br>Since we met in our early 20s, my wife and I have always lived “in the city.” The cities we lived in were quite different, with Houston on one end of the spectrum, San Francisco on the other, and others in between. But, in each place, the locals would have agreed that we lived “in the city,” and we and our neighbors would have called the experience “city life.”<br>My friends and neighbors in Montrose (an inner neighborhood of Houston) had more in common with, and lived more like, my friends in NoPa (an inner neighborhood of San Francisco), than the people in Katy or Sugarland. Similarly, the people I knew from Fremont and Campbell had more in common with the people of Katy and Sugarland than they did with the people of NoPa or Montrose. The big difference between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Houston area is that SF has dozens of “city” neighborhoods, and Houston has only a small handful. But in both places, a small minority of the land area is home to “city life,” and the large majority is suburban.

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In America, there’s a fundamental divide. You either live City Life, or you don’t. More importantly, you either have lived City Life, or you haven’t. And the majority of Americans haven’t.1<br>Now, I’m identifying myself as a “city” person here, so I want to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with being a suburban or rural American. My goal is neither to criticize anyone’s preferences, nor to promote my own.<br>This may all seem banal, and I suppose it is. But I find that it underpins a lot of the conflicts we have in the country around issues of housing, transportation, and land use. It’s a cultural divide, and this cultural divide is enormous.<br>I know this divide is enormous because I experience it all the time, and so do all the “city” people I’ve known.<br>This plays out in conversations with other people. Suppose you meet someone at a local event, it’s very common to ask where the other person lives.2<br>Suburban people will say the name of their municipality, the suburb they live in. City people will say the name of their neighborhood.<br>In the Denver Metro area, a suburbanite would say “We live in Arvada,” or “Aurora,” or “Littleton,” or some other municipality. A city person would say “Cap Hill,” or “West Highlands,” or “Baker.”<br>As a city person, if you go first, you will find out immediately if the other person is a suburbanite because they won’t know where that is. But, and this is important, there are many city people who currently live in the suburbs, and you will find this out too.<br>If you are talking to a suburbanite, the conversation goes:<br>“I live in Park Hill.”<br>“Oh, uh, where’s that?”<br>“In Denver, kind of between City Park and Stapleton.”<br>“Oh is that, like, by the airport?”<br>“Oh, no not that far. It’s near the zoo.”<br>“Oh, that’s nice. I love the zoo.”

If you are talking to a city person, the conversation goes like this:<br>“I live in Park Hill.”<br>“Oh nice, do you go to Honey Hill a lot? I love that place.”

If you are talking to a city person who no longer lives in the city, the conversation goes:<br>“I live in Park Hill.”<br>“Oh, I love Park Hill. We’re in Westminster now, but I used to live in Congress Park.”<br>“Oh, that’s great, I love Congress Park.”<br>“Yeah, we miss it. But you know, we needed more space, and we just couldn’t afford it anymore.”<br>“I know, it’s hard. But Westminster’s nice, y’all have that new Alamo Drafthouse, right?”<br>“Yeah, it’s not bad, I love our house.”

There’s another conversation we’ve had a few dozen times. Imagine a contractor we’ve hired to do something on our house.<br>“I’m surprised you live downtown with kids!”<br>“What do you mean downtown? This isn’t downtown…”<br>“Oh, this is all downtown to me. Don’t you get a lot of problems? You know, with crime and everything.”<br>“No, actually, this neighborhood is really safe, we’ve never had a problem.”<br>“Oh, really? Still, I just don’t know how you deal with all the traffic and no parking.”<br>“It’s really not a problem. I don’t drive that much, and there’s never traffic anywhere I’m going.”

This kind of thing plays out in any number of variations.<br>For many years after my wife and I were married, our extended family members would assure us that living “downtown” was probably fun while we were “young” but that we’d want to move out to the suburbs once we had kids. As readers of this newsletter know, we intensely feel the opposite, that we want to live in a city neighborhood especially for the benefit of our kids via the added freedom and independence they experience.<br>I could give dozens more examples like this, but I think this is enough to illustrate my point.<br>What we’re talking about here are two...