Are You Ashamed of Where You Live?

Um, I thought you lived in White City nowadays. You're not ashamed of it, are you?

RickyT - White City tube is a whole 15mins walk away! So its not really untrue to say I live in Kensington in the absence of any nearer locations... I wished I lived nearer WC so I could get to work on time!

Related point: When I was living in North London, unscrupulous estate agents ('twas there ever a scrupulous one?) would even describe properties in Barnet as 'North Hampstead', so London especially ambiguous when it comes to location. Especially when there's a buck to be made...

It's got a strange funky death vibe since the anorexic died next store. She was rotting in her flat for two days before the smell was noticed by my ever vigilant landlords.

Though, since the crack kid moved next store, it's been a bit dodgy.

(Sorry DG ;-))

"I'm far from being convinced that Romford is unique in its mankiness" I agree you can find the terrifying tribes of replica-kit wearin' queer bashin' Sun readin' wankers who parade the streets in hordes in ANY built up area in the UK. But I digress.

Lived most of my life in Tampa, Florida, which is truly shameful.

Live now in Seattle, with pride and delight. OK, actually Bellevue, which is over the Lake Washington bridge from Seattle and the housing is cheaper, but still pride and delight, all the same.

thats what happens when you forcibly move parts of london to hertfordshire and knock their houses down. - unhappy people. in hemel the other week a bloke got killed with a piece of scaffolding cos he supposedly jumped the queue in KFC. he was dead before he hit the ground.

mind you its highly desirable. our house has gone up from 30000 in '72 to about 400000 now (or the house next door went for that)

i think where you live is extremely important, whether you like it or not. however much you try and put it behind you/forget about it, where you were brought up/born is very important in defining you.

psychogeography, ain't it called?

But I'm actually from Minneapolis and I love coming from there. I like to visit, but I'd never want to live there as an adult.

I am ashamed of where I grew up, though. West side of L.A... more specifically, Malibu/Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades. I'm now around 1300 miles away from there. YAY!

No and no, respectively. I was ashamed of Swanscombe, Kent, my childhood home (think "Thatcher's Essex" but less extreme, also think the deruralisation, if that's a word, of south-east England post- 1979), twice: during the Gulf War when the town's front windows were full of Union Jack posters given away by The Sun, and the following year when it was full of Tory election posters (the last time the Tories got in there) and you could sense the self-satisfaction and disinterest in other people held by those who put them up. I was ashamed of Britain as a whole, briefly, at the time of Hague's lock- all-asylum-seekers speech, the News of the World's naming of paedophiles, and the fuel crisis. I have never been ashamed of Portland, Dorset, my home for the last seven years. Were I from Dorchester or Sherborne I would be grotesquely shy and embarrassed, though.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20090305/tuk-daylight-execution-in-london-sandwic-45dbed5.html

yaaaaay

Holy crap, that's not far from my parents' house.

it's the law of the wild out here

I'm really torn on this. I love our city and our neighborhood, but our next door neighbors are doing a fine job ruining it. Since last September there have been 6 arrests, 2 drug raids, 7 fistfights, a stabbing and most recently, last night, a shooting. It's kinda ridiculous, with this one obvious exception, the neighborhood is pretty much exactly what you would expect in a quiet, older, non-McMansion infested north suburb of Chicago.

i'm ashamed to know mottingham as well as i do

Technically, Mottingham is the next stop down the line from where I live, but it's close enough that I could walk there in fifteen minutes. I don't know a HUGE deal about it.

"Barack the Magic Negro" dude lives not 12 miles from me. So yeah, I'm often very ashamed of where I live.

providence rulez btw

I'm ashamed of living five minutes walk from Gordon Strachan the tactical buffoon!

defend brooklyn against what, is what i wonder

aren't hipsters the ones wearing defend brooklyn gear anyway? again, defend brooklyn against what exactly

defend brooklyn against organic food markets and vegan restaurants?

defend brooklyn against loft-style condominium living?

defend brooklyn against itself, maybe?

just filling in for burt_stanton here folks, RIP

yah that shit is a tightly packd bundle of do not want cultural artifacts

Gentrification.

I like where I live, people think it's rough/dodgy but it really isn't compared to other places I've lived in London, and tbh I'm happy for it to retain that reputation if it keeps the rent down.

it has the whole people not from and who probably have never seen but a slice of the borough obscene street cred grubbing - it has bizarro gentrification waves narcissism of small differences - and worst of all it has that trite weapons fascination

I live in an estate in Somers Town, and it's amazing how something that feels really sketchy on first appearance can grow to seem totally pleasant and safe etc. Still a bit of a dump at times, but no reason to be ashamed.

gentrifried chicken

Other HS sports teams' fans apparently used to chant "We've got Christmas, yes we do, we've got Christmas, how about you?" at games and threw bagels on the ice at hockey matches.

wow

I was born in Oregon 54 years ago. I stayed, so I must like it here. Oregon is a wonderful place. Sadly, I cannot take credit for any any part of its wonderfulness. I just get to enjoy it.

I was born in LA but raised in Santa Barbara, California - I guess it's a pleasant place to grow up, and it's objectively very, very pretty and sorta idyllic...it's not punk rock at all though and I sorta feel like I lost something by not growing up in a big tough city. Europeans are always impressed when I tell them where I'm from...as are adults from worse parts of California, of which there are plenty.

Identity-wise, I sorta associate more with norcal...so to an extent I'm ashamed of my socal roots? I guess I have plenty of general California-pride though.

Oh, to further complicate things - I lived in an small area in-between what is technically real Santa Barbara and what is technically the suburban SB-sprawl city, Goleta. Eventually the city of SB is just gonna claim the area and my grief will be over, but until then I've always had the weird shame of not living within the city limits.

So I guess I have a weird layered lasagna of shame and prie

pride

Not engaged enough with this place to be ashamed of it. I am bored to tears by it though.

i live in new jersey. should i be ashamed?

i surprised myself with my hometown auto-standom on the St. John's, Newfoundland thread

Houston, Texas. The armpit of the Gulf Coast. Statistics will bear this out. Rich, sprawling, fat, tasteless, flyover country with no sense of history, none of the charms of the Midwest, and considerably worse politics. Fortunately, my favorite family members reside in New Orleans, and I spend considerable time there as well.

i live in new jersey. should i be ashamed?

i live in jersey city and have taken to calling it the west west west village. i am ashamed, but because it is a shameful place: it doesn't even grasp at having an identity, only at being convenient. if you live in jersey and it's in a community and it's a real place then you shouldn't be ashamed. but living in places that define themselves by relation or proximity to other places is shame.

that's some total bullshit

despite the fact that it's that convenient to NYC, even people in Jersey City define themselves completely as NOT living in NYC. Even that's an identity.

oops: i should have differentiated between jersey city and parts of jersey city. i think it's true that being not-nyc is an identity, but in some parts of jc the projection of jersey is really skewed: either if you lived here you'd be home by now eight-minute commute posters, or a jersey is the place to be strategy attached to totally lifeless newport commutervilles that exist solely as places for people to conveniently eat, workout and sleep before going to the city.

but this doesn't apply to like almost all of non-waterside jersey city so i was wrong to say so. i'd put jersey city in the aforementioned category of not just being a launchpad. i've lived in a couple of places that forsake identity in favour of proximity and it kinda depresses me.

agreed...portions of Long Island City are like this now as well. This building is so big, has so many amenities, and so close to manhattan, you don't even have to go out in Queens!

But I've also spent time in portions of Jersey City, and I'm not even talking about parts beyond the reach of the Path train, but around Grove St where there's this great diverse community.

I'm kinda ashamed of the city boosters and the "I heart (city where I live)" t-shirt wearers that are mostly transplants like myself. I don't if it bothers me because it feels desperate or contrived or symbolic of educated white people longing for urban authenticity and some sort of connection to their surroundings that I don't feel a need for, or an "I know better" burt_stantonism. I grew up in a dumb small town in the same metropolitan area where I live now, and I loathed the simplistic-slogan-style boosterism, and figured moving to a city, I'd escape that. I think I tend to be ambivalent about a lot of things, and maybe more accurately, critical and analytical to the extent that I find most boosterism, and especially this kind of boosterism for boosterism's sake, to be problematic. I think the fact that I used the word "problematic" probably speaks volumes.

i am well known for obnoxiously talking about how great MPLS/STPL is, but I do it because I honestly have no desire to be anywhere else. I absolutely love it here.

^^^It is great as long as you have a snowplow vassal.

Note to people going o_0 over anti-Semitic sports cheers directed at my school's teams, much as I wish we hit 'em back with Hava Nagila, we had 'that's all right/that's OK/you'll be working for us someday' to fall back on in these situations. Mostly we LOLd. Also it's hard to undermine the confidence of people who ironically refer to selves as the Frozen Chosen.

i am ashamed of my hometown/state (greenville, sc) because it is continually in the news for being incredibly narrow minded and fucked up (lovely gov. mark sanford, a catholic priest who said all parishioners voting for obama were not of right mind/spirit to attend communion, bju, people suing victoria's secret over underwires lacerating their breasts, stupid blue laws, etc.).

i am not really ashamed of where i live now other than when people come to visit i have to be like 'ok walk through the construction wasteland' and my apt. is ugly, but aside from my street, i really like my neighborhood!

I spent the first half of my childhood living in a nice upper-middle class neighborhood in D.C. Then my family moved to a nice upper-middle class neighborhood three blocks over the D.C. line in Maryland. This was a source of great shame.

I grew up on Long Island. I should really just end there re where I grew up but there is actually some great stuff about LI that I will rep for - beached, proximity to NYC, Northfork etc.

I live in Boston which I think get unfairly categorized as boring which it isn't. If anything I get defensive about it because I think a lot of people have the wrong idea. The neighborhood I live in was once one of the city's worst and many people still think of it that way. I love it here though. It's diverse, safe, affordable, two stops from the middle of downtown and has amazing skyline views. People who don't know any better often grimace when I tell them where I live but I really couldn't care less because it's one of the city's best kept secrets.

Was never really ashamed or proud of where I live until that snooty MD dis from Super Cub.

my post was pretty obviously self-deprecating and lol at my misplaced teenage feelings of inadequacy, but if you want to get all butt-hurt about it that's fine. For the record, I think Maryland (in all its diverse forms) is an interesting and commendable place.

there's this writer named j03l k0tkin who's originally from brooklyn and now lives in the san fernando valley (valley village, to be exact). he's well known for being ardently pro-suburban, pro-sprawl, car-culture championing, urban-density hating, very conservative. as a native (and proud) brooklynite who now lives in the SFV (pretty close to valley village, actually), i'm ashamed to have anything at all in common with k0tkin. i love it here in los angeles, but for totally different/antithetical reasons. i think it's okay to want the city you love to be part of the 21st century.

i heard him speak once at a conference. at the end, he gave away signed copies of his book to the planning students in attendance, many of whom were first-years and didn't really know his work. i refused to take one, and the other students thought i was weird and stuck up. later, back in class, our professor was all "j03l k0tkin, gawd i hate that guy." i felt vindicated.

St. Louis - Was maybe ashamed some when I lived there due to Missourian stereotypes... but now I'll always consider myself a St. Louisian

Manhattan Beach - upper class neighborhood. ashamed, everyone assumes you're a snooty, spoiled, rich kid

Lawndale - don't care

California and Los Angeles in general - proud, also when i go back to the midwest girls are for some reason attracted to this, so that is good.

and re k0tkin, the fact that he's a boomer (a child of the "white flight" epoch) makes his shit harder to swallow.

I find pro-suburban, pro-sprawl theorists to be very interesting...even though I agree with 0% of what they say, they're often giving a not-completely-retarded explanation of the point of view of a LOT of americans.

maybe so, but i would love for that point of view to be A LITTLE more open-minded and not so paranoid about what "change" means. i do think we have a shot at this under the obama regime! it helps that the environment is the way it is and the economy is the way it is. a perfect storm, etc.

light rail = limit dependence on foreign oil/fossil fuel AND save money on car expenses!

(and reduce traffic by making smart land use decisions)

I love where I live right now, but Baltimore is a weird city in which civic boosterism is mandatory precisely because it's a very sketchy, barely-holding-it-together shambles in certain respects.

http://mnanamara.com/WOMEN_IN_FISHERIES/upload/Image/clew%20bay.jpg

that's be a 'no'.

so pretty.

well, in the interests of openness i should admit that it was like that when i got here.

OMG that's pretty. gulp.

"my post was pretty obviously self-deprecating and lol at my misplaced teenage feelings of inadequacy, but if you want to get all butt-hurt about it that's fine. For the record, I think Maryland (in all its diverse forms) is an interesting and commendable place."

wasn't really serious dude, but thanks anyway.

lol follies of the upper-middle class lol youth.