Thoughts about rich/poor city/country dynamics.

I mentioned in a previous post about how we used to live in a big city, and then we moved to an even bigger city, and then we moved to a small town, and now we live in an even smaller, tiny village of 600 people.  Mostly in that post I wanted to hash out my own thoughts about why I preferred city living to rural living (and by rural I am including the predominantly agricultural based economies of the towns I have lived in, not just off-in-the-bush type living).  But actually there are other urban/rural dynamics that have occurred to me over the years that I think put me in a minority.  There are a lot of assumptions made about urban living or rural living that, just from a personal perspective, have not rung true for me.  One of these is...

image from The Graphics Fairy

The city is expensive.  The country is cheaper.

Now, in some ways, yes, the city is more expensive and the country is cheaper.  In some ways.  But a lot of it depends on your lifestyle and despite the fact that most of my opinion is anecdote based, I am still going to share it.

So, when we lived in the second Big City, a city of multiple-millions of people, we had a small, one bedroom apartment.  We were newly married, two cats, no children, and it worked for us.  The apartment, like all apartments, had positives and negatives.  It was small, and older, damp and not well lit, but it was in a great location in a shared house with the landlord who was lovely.  It had a good sized walk out to the back yard, which we also had access to whenever we wished.  The landlord was prompt and efficient, we didn't have a car but the apartment came with parking if we had guests over, we were close to public transit, and nearby were several grocery stores and so forth all within easy walking distance.  There were no laundry facilities on site, but there was a laundromat about 5 minutes away and without children to make it challenging we didn't mind going and sitting beside our washing for an hour with a book and a coffee from the local shop.  We walked to the library, which was big and well stocked, and to our church, both within a maximum of 20-30 minutes at a meandering stroll.  The apartment was not, don't get me wrong, a great apartment.  But it was an okay apartment in a great neighbourhood.  

We moved from the Great Big City to the first smaller town.  That town had approximately 4000 people.  We moved into, again, an apartment.  And again, this apartment had pluses and minuses.  It was better lit and it was bigger.  There were small windows around the house but the front living room window was nice and big.  All of the rooms were larger in size and there were more of them - there were two bedrooms in this apartment plus a third room used as storage.  This extra room was important for our family because this is the apartment we brought our first child home to.  It also had hook-ups for a washer and dryer, though we didn't have a dryer at that point.  From a negative view, though, the apartment didn't have a yard, it had a very awkward layout and also ancient carpeting and therefore a problem with mold.  Although the apartment was bigger, the neighbourhood was not as nice, the neighbours were not as nice, and the walk to access our church and grocery shopping was long.

What you may find interesting is that those two apartments were the same price.

The smaller apartment in the big city in a nice neighbourhood close to everything, and the bigger apartment in the small town in a not nice neighbourhood far from a lot of stuff.  For us, there was no price difference in our rent, although when it came to utilities, we did see a marked difference - the bigger apartment was heated with electric baseboard heating and the price to keep it warm was astronomical - several times the heating cost of the small, better insulated city apartment.

Image from The Graphics Fairy

The area where housing costs really seem to show a big disparity is if you are buying a house, which we haven't done anywhere we've lived.  In the areas we've lived in, in the country you can get a lot more house for your dollar than in the city.  That being said, some cities cost half a million just to break into the housing market, while others have houses half that price, and depending on where you look and what you want in a place, the country can often cost nearly what the city costs.  But I would say it's accurate to state that generally, in a set locale, the equivalent house in both the country and the city would show an increase in value in the city.  

In the two cities we've lived in, we've had access to public transit and not kept a car for that reason.  In the small town we lived in we didn't have a car either, and found it a challenge.  In the tiny village where we live now we have always had a car and frankly would have trouble surviving without one. 

I've heard people say that the cost of yearly public transit is close to the cost of maintaining a car but I can't possibly see how that could be true.  Once you factor in maintenance, gas, insurance, and any sort of upgrades, even if you do a lot of this yourself, it is significantly more to own a vehicle.  I took the opportunity to look up the prices of a year's worth of monthly unlimited ride passes in three Canadian cities.  Here you go:

In Toronto, Canada's largest city, an adult could have a monthly pass for $151.15.  The total for the year would be $1813.80.  

In Vancouver, the cost is $177.00 a month, or $2124.00 a year.

In Ottawa, $116.50 will get you unlimited monthly fares, or $1398.00 a year.

This is just the most expensive, regular adult fare.  If you qualified for any other sort of discount - low income, senior, student, etc., then obviously your fare would be lower.  At least one of the cities also offered a discount in the monthly pass fare if you bought the year's worth of passes at one time.  Even in the most expensive of these cities (and these are three sizable Canadian cities, with populations of 2.93 million, 675,218, and 994,837 respectively), the cost of keeping a vehicle would drastically outweigh the cost of a year's worth of unlimited rides.  This is true right up through getting multiple unlimited ride passes, at least for us it would be.  Gas where we live is a lot more than in Southern Canadian cities, and our grocery store is a 90 minute round trip away.  If we travelled into the city 2.5 times in a week, we would need to refill the car, and at our local gas prices, that would be half the price of that monthly bus pass right there.

Now in terms of food and household supplies, I've found the price differences to be a mixed bag.  When we lived out on the East coast of Canada, the cost of 4L of milk was close to $8.  Here in central Canada, the cost of 4L of milk is under $4.  In fact, almost everything was more expensive out there!  I have found when buying stuff that the city is almost universally cheaper than the country and I assume the reason behind this is the simple fact of lower prices with increased competition.  If there is one store, that store costs more.  If there are two stores, suddenly there is a competition for your money.  Multiply that by a hundred and suddenly you have the stores in a city.

I've had people tell me that this sort of understanding wouldn't work for them.  That their work is in the country and therefore living in the city is more expensive, or that the price difference is drastically higher or lower than I have experienced.  Or that 'things have changed over the years' ( I find this one odd, since 1) my experiences spread over many years and 2) my experiences are Still Happening Now.  Not all in long ago reminiscences.).  I understand, not all people have the same experiences.  If you live in South Africa, maybe cities are different.  If you live in Hawaii, maybe houses are different.  If you live in the Yukon, maybe food is different.  Absolutely.  In MY experience, though, the arguments for urban/rural living from an economic perspective have been skewed; cities are often just as inexpensive, and very frequently MORE inexpensive in almost all categories, than rural living.

As long as you don't buy a house.  :-)