The Advantages and Disadvantages of Living in a Secondary City
This is the city . . .
Some call them middle-tier cities. Others call them fly-over country even when they are not in the middle of the country and despite the primary cities that are.
Still others don’t think of them at all. Or they do so as a weak acknowledgement that, “Yeah, I guess people actually live there. Maybe they have to for work or they just don’t know enough to get out.”
To be fair many in the secondary cities reverse the same condescending thoughts upon those “trapped” in the primary cities. “If they only knew how much easier we have it . . .”
It is also true that suburban living in (around) the primary cities is sometimes better characterized as a secondary-city status. Yet “I actually live in Malibu” isn’t so much a correction declaring “I don’t live in L.A.” as it is specification clarifying “I have access to L.A., but my address is more refined.”
Like in all things, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Each place and each type of place has costs and benefits that are always evolving.
In places like OKC…
You are always waiting around to see if you’ll get the cool things being created in primary cities (e.g., dining from haute cuisine to In ‘N Out Burger, Broadway plays, professional sports, etc.). Granted when Paris got a Krispy Kreme the line was down the street and people camped out for the first “hot donuts now” just like we did 25 years ago in OKC. But perhaps that is more an infatuation with American culture. And Krispy Kreme didn’t originate in a primary city . . .1
We beg visitors to see our tourist attractions while desperately seeking their approval. Primary cities have an uneasy relationship with tourists who they too often take for granted and occasionally despise hoping they will go away.
Real life is all around you, which keeps you grounded. This is beneficial in that you rarely feel out of place or far from home. But…
Real life cannot be escaped easily. No matter where you go, there you are in a secondary city. Primary cities offer much more in terms of escape since they contain a bigger distribution along basically any dimension considered.
We theoretically could copy only the successful experiments from the primary cities. Unfortunately we tend to emulate all the things the big boys do even when we should know better.
You cannot fly almost anywhere without flying somewhere else first. All travel has extra logistical frictions.
We constantly want for recognition and respect hoping to be thought of as a primary city in any way we can get it. As such we take inordinate pride in facts like the shopping cart and parking meter being invented here. However, it is a virtue that we know and take pride in the famous people from here (e.g., astronauts, performers, athletes, statemen, etc.). It relates to other good qualities on this list.
We have a general sentiment that the primary (fabulous) cities, the ones we like or the things we like about them, are magical, romantic, and thrilling places. From where we stand we get to enjoy them in our mind or in our travels without them becoming a forgotten backdrop to our life. These are places where we say of the residents “I can’t believe you get to live here!” Again, this is only applicable to the primary cities and their features we admire—an unfair appraisal since you can’t pick and choose so easily.
As noted above but worth repeating, it is a place about which residents of the primary cities generally say, “I can’t believe you choose (have) to live here.”
We can master our cities, and our particular city always seems like it is ours. As such we are overly protective of it not changing—a detriment.
We are subjects of the big fish in our ponds, but at least we know them and can reach out and exert some influence upon them—there is a fair degree of accountability. The big fish in the large lakes of primary cities are of course still there running things, but without the same accountability. They are subject to competition from other big fish including exogenous forces. The threat to our big fish is populist revolt. The threat to primary cities’ big fish is other big fish. Both games are vicious in their own ways.
Traffic is an avoidable problem. Rush hour is just an hour or so on either side of the work day. When it is over, it is truly over.
Empathy extends farther in a geographic sense and further in a socioeconomic sense. We are all in it together more often, and it doesn’t take as tragic a hardship for us to come together.
We distrust outsiders, and it is all too easy to identity them. This is a negative despite it being embraced as a kind of virtue.
People are “from here” in a way that always welcomes you back. This is a positive despite it breading the outsider distrust.
Subgroup cohorts (i.e., bubbles) are sub-Dunbar (lower than ~150 people) making it impossible to exist within these with any pretext of anonymity. Also, the various groups have significant overlap (tight Venn Diagrams). This aids in the transparency and accountability mentioned above. But it also means the threat “You’ll never work in this town again!” has real teeth to it.
To summarize we value continuity while seeking validation. There is a tension here. We want the good without the bad. We beg for respect but are reluctant to be open enough to pursue it. When we do pursue it, we are too often a clumsy cargo cult.
Still, the benefits our cities offer are underappreciated by primary city residents as well as sometimes by our own. We really do get a mix of not too big with a taste of the big life. It is never quite Goldilocks, but it is also never a place plagued by cracks to slip into as big as canyons with no hope of climbing out.
There are more examples. White Castle and Pizza Hut started in Wichita, Kansas. So maybe this is more perception than reality.