Miriam Axel-Lute is the former news editor for Albany’s weekly paper and is now a full-time freelance writer, editor, and consultant focusing largely on urban issues.

When my family decided to leave the New York City area, I was the reluctant one. I didn’t want to become car-dependent. I didn’t want to end up in an all-white cultural backwater. Despite my own longing for a little more quiet and a lower cost of living, I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be someplace smaller. But we were looking for a place all of us would be willing settle long term and raise kids — and happy as we’d been to be there for a while in our mid-20s, New York wasn’t it. But neither, certainly, was the burbs and I didn’t want to be isolated in the country.

We looked at a number of cities in the Northeast, wanting to stay within range of family and the upstate New York folk music community. We selected Albany and moved in the Summer of 2003. Even though we felt good enough about the decision to commit to the move first and start looking for jobs afterward, I still sometimes wondered if the compromise between our big-city and no-city inclinations was going to be one that made everyone happy or nobody happy.

As it turns out, it’s much closer to the former. Nowhere is perfect, but I have found that my experience of smaller city living has really been more about a better (for my family) urbanism rather than a weaker urbanism. For example:

• In New York, the closest I could afford to live to my office was a crowded 45-minute subway ride. In Albany, I had my pick of several great neighborhoods that gave me a 15 to 20 minute walk, with an option to take the bus in nasty weather.
• In New York, I had to plan hours ahead to go see a movie, especially a popular one, to find a place that wasn’t sold out and get there on time. In Albany, I live a couple blocks from an independent theater and I can decide 10 minutes before show time to see something and not miss the previews. Plus, I can buy locally made chocolate cake or banana bread at the concession booth.
• I can do all this in a neighborhood where I could afford to buy a house on a writer’s income, and where I also have access to a hardware store, a bakery, two pharmacies, etc.–not just art and cafes.
• We did get a car, but we get by easily with one for three adults, and there are days when we only move it to be parked legally (and that doesn’t involve circling blocks for hours). From the center of a smaller region, it’s much quicker to get out to nature—20 minutes tops to rolling countryside, 30 to full woods, even in rush hour.

The famous “Smalbany effect” means that walking around one of our First Friday arts events is a little like walking into a social gathering in a small town—there’s someone you know everywhere you turn. But the art is too varied and cluster of venues too dense to be anything but urban.

I also agree with one friend of mine, who was raised in Brooklyn, who says “You can be yourself here. You can go to the supermarket without doing your hair. People are friendly walking down the sidewalk, but not in a forced-smile kind of way. Life here feels real, without being too overwhelming.”

While being acutely aware (as a journalist and resident) of Albany’s many challenges — and the challenges of our sister cities — I have become a bona fide small-city booster. (My daughter, who is now 2, knows all the local shopkeepers from her daily neighborhood rounds and can say proudly “My city Al ban ee.”) And in the months after I moved here, I met others who were moving to one of the Capital Region’s cities from Boston or New York for the same kinds of reasons.

And so I jumped at the chance to work on the PolicyLink report on smaller industrial cities, To Be Strong Again. As I worked and learned more about what people were doing in other small cities—out of the limelight, and often against tremendous odds—I joked that while some people dream of making a tour of European capitals,  I was starting to fantasize about a road trip with stops in places like Binghamton, Scranton, Flint, and Youngstown. Knowing the potential strengths of places like this makes the quest for solutions to the very real aftershocks of deindustrialization, shrinking population, and fiscal crisis that they face feel that much more urgent to me.

I hope that the report is just the beginning of an ongoing conversation in which people concerned with urban revitalization and equitable development recognize that all cities are not created equal—and that’s a good thing.

Tags: miriam axel-lute, reurbanization, smaller industrial cities, to be strong again, urbanism

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