I&#x27;m not pnathan, but I grew up in the suburbs and am never going back; my spouse and I have raised our kid in the city for several years now.  Why didn&#x27;t I like it?<p>- The sameness.  Every house on the streets where I grew up looked virtually identical, as did the neighborhood where I bought my first house.  It took owning a house in the &#x27;burbs to remember how much I didn&#x27;t like the cookie-cutter aspect.  Doubly so for the fact that virtually every suburban neighborhood built in the past 20 years has an HOA, which I detest.<p>- The distance.  Going to <i>anything</i>, even just a Wal-Mart to get groceries, meant a minimum of 10 minutes just to get out of the &quot;residential area&quot; and make it to the &quot;commercial area.&quot;  The one corner store we had was usually under pressure from the city government and nearby residents to close down because of, allegedly, too much traffic.<p>- Minimal cultural differences.  Yes, my hometown had a Western Days Weekend and an Old Town District but that was it.  The town where I bought my first house (this was a bad idea, in retrospect) didn&#x27;t even bother with that.  Everything else in both places was strip shopping centers or Wal-Mart or paved six-lane roadways to get people out of town to the big city for work and then back into town to get to sleep at night.  Going to do anything, like a zoo or museum or a baseball game, meant a half-hour minimum drive.  There are lots of suburbs in north Texas, let&#x27;s say, that exist solely for zoning authority.<p>You mentioned being outside and being kids.  The city where I live now, Seattle, has a massive parks system.  My tiny house on a tiny lot in the city still has about 1,600sqft of outdoor area to play in and a huge tree.  Even the apartments we&#x27;ve rented have a courtyard and are near to parks and sidewalks and places to play.  It&#x27;s great for people whose kids are outdoor types; mine prefers to be inside with books and puzzles and computers.<p>What I like about raising our kid in the city: Exposure to new and different ideas; most cities aren&#x27;t self-selected to be the same as each other.  A varying cityscape that isn&#x27;t just the same houses feeding to the same street and to the same businesses.  More cultural and entertainment options are close at hand.  Being able to live in a more environmentally sensitive way (my kid doesn&#x27;t want to learn how to drive and prefers to take transit and has made compost and recycle separating into a game).