My wife and I met at workin a large eastern metropolis with a an idiosyncratic urban core that has gradually 'gentrified". When, four years and one divorce later, we married, we agreed to never live farther than a $15 cab ride from work. We raised a kid in the city (horror of horrors). We lived in a highrise apartment with a doorman, and my stepson's backyard was a six acre park that fronted our building. He walked to school, took a cab or biked to his father's and had memberships in the museum (walking distance) and the science institute (within walking distance). we bought our first home, a 12-wide Victorian worker's row home, when my stepson went to college. After my wife's health crashed, we moved into a highrise condo, where her acupuncturist, her physical therapy coach and the orchestra are within two blocks of our home, and she can walk or cab to any location she needs access to, a major convenience as she no longer drives. She can, and does, attend magnificant free lectures at the public library, about a mile from our home. The building we live in is its own voting district and has eight sub-zipcodes attached to it. It is its own small villiage, one where my wife, healing from the ravages of a ruptured brain aneurysm, has fashioned useful friendships and healing alliances.

The tradeoff? The private school for my stepson prepared us well for college tuition, but public shools were, simply, out of the question. Period. Three cars were stolen from in front of our quaint Victorian row home, the backyard was ransacked, and on one special evening, we returned from a charity ball to find an inebriated street person using our vestpocket backyard as a pissoir. we had a security system that would wake the dead, and we had lights on syncronized timers at all times. Our "safe" condo, with a three person security team at the front desk 24/7, was ransacked for jewelry during a long weekend away, the burglers brazenly using my wife's shopping cart to make their getaway with the loot, moving, apparently, thorugh the fire stairs, as the omniscient security cameras revealed - nothing. I grow accustomed to conveying, with the nuance of the simplest body English, that I am unavailable for being an "easy hit' for the persistent panhandlers that work our affluent urban neighborhood, especially late at night......The nearest non-trendy supermarket (the ones that do NOT offer bargain prices on the pate of the week....) is miles out of our neighborhood, and we plot accessing it with extreme advanced planning. As an alternative, we shop at "convenience stores" were the price of toilet paper represents a commodity investment, not a utility purchase. We pay for parking for friends who visit us, as we live in a part of the city where the concept of onstreet parking is utterly laughable. It is all 20-minute dwell zones.... Our condo has at least one false alarm a week, and we live on the "quiet side" of the building, where the only street sounds are police and ambulance sirens....... constantly.

So it all has tradeoffs. I wouldn't live anyplace else, especially now, given my wife's limitations of mobility. We now keep one car, I walk to work, she walks and cabs everywhere, and we have innumerable resources delivered to our door. Living in the suburbs would imprison her, pragmatically speaking. But - it comes at a price.

So, HFM, think carefully about the tradeoffs. There are always, always tradeoffs. In the suburbs, you will be trapped by the automobile, in the city, you will be trapped by high costs, proximity to crime and the challenge of living in a densepack.