I hate articles that start out this way but in this case, knowing the truth up front is going to save you a hell of a lot of heartache and headache. Trust me.
My husband and I are entering our 3rd year of living downtown and while we have grown to love it, to the point where we feel we are at the very epicenter of the universe – it took some serious getting used to. Kinda like gravity.
What pulled us downtown was the beauty, the convenience and for my husband, the trees. Broad, yawning tendrils of lushness coating the street up and down was about enough to make us set up camp. Luckily we managed to secure a home on our favourite downtown street and promptly moved in.
Moving downtown poses its own set of physical laws. First – no driveway. For many this would be a deal breaker but at the time my hubby worked from home and my work was about a 3 minute from our front door. Not quite enough time to even get the ipod started up and into a song before reaching my destination. In essence having no driveway posed no problems until we finally got a car, then two. Now we are in a constant battle of Russian Roulette with the hockey crowd to ensure we are not lugging our groceries three blocks home.
Don’t get me wrong, we are trying to be green and we understand the luxury of having two vehicles is both rare and ever so smugly irresponsible. That being said, we both drive a distance in opposite directions to work now and carpool with co-workers as often as possible.
The next most difficult part of living right downtown is, well, the riff raff.
Now, okay – so don’t immediate assume I am some two-car owning snotbag who doesn’t understand socio-economics and hasn’t developed a sense of right and wrong here. I think we can all agree that riff raff comes in all forms and I am not talking about the poor souls looking for somewhere warm to sleep. I am talking about the wealthy students out drinking their faces off downtown and then stumbling home and landing on our front lawn. We have had full on domestics on our porch and have called the cops no less than 10 times in 3 years.
It is never the lovely hockey fans, it is never the ice skaters or the River Runners, it is always and almost without exception, the drunks headed home from the bars – that make living downtown difficult. We have had our car broken into (to steal $2 in change, cost us $300 in repairs, thanks guys!), we have witnessed first hand our neighbours cars being broken into, we have had drunks knocking on our door at 2am lost, we have had knife fights on the corner by our bedroom window. It is nothing less than hardcore downtown, and while its always exciting, sometimes its nice to know that if you want to sleep – you will be able to.
We lived dow
ntown Toronto before as well, we are not wimps, we are not unaccustomed to night noise. But in the big smoke it is constant and settles nicely into a dull hum, like background music to your everyday life. Guelph is damned quiet. So when that perfect blissful silence we’d been seeking for years is interrupted for a “Hey Man, you can pee on that car man!” at 4am on a Sunday night – it is far louder than any other noise on earth and shakes you out of your skin.
Finally, a balance between your car being vandalized and the convenience of being 5 minutes from your favourite pub sets in. You relax, you go with the flow of foot traffic and the ebb of Saturday morning market runs. You settle nicely into a routine of walking to the shops and find game in the search for two parking spaces a day. You learn to accept the rude awakenings and keep the police on speed dial. You share in the mutual hatred of idling cabs morning noon and night and delight in the annual frog crossing shared by the whole street come spring. You appreciate the downtown life. You get so used to it that the thought of moving to a cookie cutter house farm makes you feel ill, and you come to terms with the fact that having no driveway means never having to clear it of snow.
It may not be for everyone, but hurtling towards our third year of living smack in the centre of it, the downtown life is one worth investing in.
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