Why Americans Think Cities Are Supposed to Be Miserable

And what Paris reveals about how wrong that is

There’s a reason Valencia keeps showing up on those “best places to live” lists.

That kind of day-to-day life doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s not a fluke.

It’s the product of choices.

Political choices. Urban planning choices. Cultural choices. Choices about who gets prioritized and what cities are actually for.

To best illustrate and understand this, it helps to compare what many Americans expect city life to feel like with what city life can actually feel like. Because Americans have been conditioned—over decades—to associate cities with a very specific set of problems.

I grew up wondering why most of my family had never been to New York City, even though we lived Upstate. Or wondering who these people were who lived in Toronto or even the cool parts of Buffalo on the rare trips we’d make there from my hometown of Niagara Falls.

The city was a place to visit if you wanted to see a show or a sporting event—or if somebody you knew decided to have their wedding reception in Downtown Buffalo.

Nobody in my family ever entertained the idea of living in a city—nor did they have much to say about the people who lived there. Cities were one big mystery to avoid at pretty much all costs.

This wasn’t unique to my family. It’s how a lot of Americans think about cities, whether they realize it or not.

Cities are dirty, dangerous, and stressful. Full of traffic, homeless people, noise, dysfunction, and hard tradeoffs. Maybe fun to visit for a game, a concert, a nice dinner, or a long weekend in the comfy confines of the Skydome Hotel.

But actually live there? Raise a family there? Build a life there? That was a very different conversation that never happened—until I moved to San Francisco in 1999.

To be fair, a lot of American cities have done a fantastic job earning that reputation. It’s difficult to convince someone who sees very real problems sensationalized repeatedly on Fox News that many urban neighborhoods in large and medium size US cities thrive. Not in the same way European cities do, but close enough for this part of the discussion.

Regardless of what you see in cities now or have been told about them, they’re not inherently broken places. They’ve struggled because the United States spent decades disinvesting in urban life while subsidizing escape from it. In fact, it’s really pretty incredible how cities have thrived—how they manage to keep capitalism running in the US—given what they’re up against.

Everyone seems to want cities to fail. And if they don’t say it openly, they have an odd way of showing their support through actions that favor bad city planning and suburban investment.

Cities—and the vibrant urban neighborhoods that somehow cut through in otherwise dead cities—are resilient places.

Buffalo is a simple example.

The Bills play in Orchard Park.

The main University at Buffalo campus is in Amherst.

Think about what that means.

Two major institutions that could help anchor energy, tax base, housing demand, businesses, and day-to-day life in the city instead reinforce the pull outward. They could have been built in the city, but the suburbs effectively won the contract.

This is how a lot of American metros evolved.

You hollow out the center. Spread everything across the suburbs. Design daily life around private automobiles. Then act surprised when urban life feels compromised, inconvenient, or chaotic. When all you have is one “cool” neighborhood—in Buffalo, that’s Elmwood Village—where people live, often making the decision to put down roots and raise kids.

When this becomes the norm, this is how you’ve become conditioned to think about cities.

After enough time, what’s really pure and unadulterated dysfunction stops looking like dysfunction.

It just starts looking normal.

That’s where Paris becomes such an interesting case study.

Because if American assumptions about cities were true, Paris should be exhausting.

Instead, millions of Americans flock there every year and treat it like an amusement park.

And I don’t even necessarily mean that as an insult.

We saw it constantly during the first half of April.

Guided cheese tours. Groups marveling at things that should be completely unremarkable in any civilized society.

The ability to walk out of your apartment, stroll down a vibrant neighborhood street, drink a coffee, eat a quality baked good, sit outside, watch life happen around you—all without getting in your car, pulling into a parking lot, or participating in some soulless and exhausting suburban ritual Americans have been taught to accept as normal.

That’s the thing.

Most Americans don’t look at Paris and think: Why don’t we live like this?

They look at Paris and think, wow, what a fun place to visit.

Like it exists in some alternate reality.

Another dimension only reachable by airplane for the exact duration of your approved vacation.

Then it’s back to “normal” life.

Back to parking lots, drive-throughs, and treating basic urban functionality as novelty.

And that’s exactly why places like Valencia keep ending up on “best places to live” lists.

The conversation isn’t really about whether you’re less likely to get mugged, stabbed, or shot. It’s not about whether the government remembered or even cares enough anymore to clean the streets.

Those are baseline expectations in a functioning society.

The distinctions happen elsewhere.

Valencia is by the sea.

It has Turia Park.

It’s easier.

Paris has more intensity, more density, more grandeur.

That’s the actual comparison.

You make that comparison and decide what suits you best—not whether you’re willing to tolerate gross dysfunction in exchange for access to urban life.

That’s the difference.

The comparison isn’t gross dysfunction versus slightly less gross dysfunction.

It’s between functioning systems making different tradeoffs.

European cities and American cities often aren’t even competing on the same playing field.

Once you understand that, you start asking much better questions about where—and how—you actually want to live.