"Goodbye, Suburbs" (single page view) is a great article on how some urbanites who move to the suburbs cannot but help moving back to the city, for all the right reasons. Here's a video to accompany the article.
Loneliness...
Once settled, Ms. Hillen, a stay-at-home mother, embarked on a fruitless hunt for companionship. "Out there, you have to work at being with people," she said. "In a year, I got one play date for my kid. We joined the Newcomers Club, and the day we put our house on the market, they finally called. You'd go to the library for a reading and there would be no one there." She added, "You're a lonely, desperate housewife with nothing to do."
Even the playgrounds were desolate. "And on the rare occasions there was somebody there and you struck up a conversation," she said, "they would literally move away. And they didn't encourage the kids to play together. We were so shocked."
Lawns...
I go home and there's, like, people doing their lawn every five minutes. They seem like normal people but they spend, like, hours working on their lawn.
Kings and kingdoms...
Every day when I came home, I would say to myself, 'I really am a king and this is a castle, and who do I think I am?'
Charming suburbia...
"You go to these little towns and they are very charming and sweet and have all these cute little shops," said Brian Lover, who put his West Orange, N.J., house back on the market just three months after moving there. "But I think when you live in these areas full time, those neighborhood shops aren't so cute. And those neighborhood restaurants that look so great, you know how bad they really are."
The sucking suburbs...
With their baby in tow, the couple stalked the parks and Gymboree classes in nearby Montclair, figuring "that's where we'll find the city people and the cool parents," Mr. Lover said. "But there wasn't anyone we could find a core to. It was all air." As for the city people they'd hoped to meet? "They were city people, not anymore," he said. "The suburbs have some way of sucking the city out of you."
