More on cities

If you go on holiday to southern Spain or the Algarve, one thing you will see a lot of are real estate agents. During the summer they are busy, as well. Few holiday makers can resist browsing in windows, to see how much it might cost to live in the somewhere like the luxurious villa they might be renting, and many take it a step further and arrange some viewings.

I succumbed to that temptation more than ten years ago, and ended up buying a lovely villa in the Algarve, after a very enjoyable year or so of shopping. Once the initial euphoria had died down, I made sure the purchase had very clear goals, and in fact I still own the place and have never regretted buying it even though much has changed in my life since.

This was in my mid forties, and I was already thinking about retiring sometime not too far into my fifties. Capital appreciation was never a goal of the purchase, and just as well as property values rarely do what brochures suggest they will, and in fact the villa has barely held its value. The main idea was to create an option, and to explore what that option would feel like when the time came to decide whether or not to exercise it.

Many people retire to warmer climes, but most don’t have the luxury I had of being able to discover enough about the lifestyle in advance. Instead, a big change is piled upon what already is a major life change, at a time of life when foreign languages and strange bureaucracies are not so easy to cope with as in ones youth. Many end up missing their families and concerned about healthcare as their own health fades, and end up back home, though a number do stay the course and thrive.

As well as getting some of the jarring change out of the way in advance, and hopefully building up a network of friends and activities, I wanted to get a feel for what living in Portugal would actually be like. The answer is mixed. The pleasures of sun, relaxation, and plentiful affordable good food are real enough. I could wile away my days happily enough there. But what have become clear are the limitations of living far away from a city and mass culture.

What I have had the blessing of learning is that, after retiring, life in a big city shares many of the benefits of an easy existence by the sea. True, the climate is far less inviting. But relaxation is possible and affordable good food is even more plentiful in a city. And the culture of a city is a luxury I would struggle to live without.

As I have argued before, many cities have improved over the last twenty years or so. Both London and New York now have the benefits of safety and good mass transportation and are also much cleaner places than they used to be. I remember when I started work having to wash my hands and face really thoroughly after coming home from a day in London, leaving the basin almost black with grime. That is no longer the case, and we can also see the beautiful buildings without their prior coating of black.

There is also something about cities that suit a modern lifestyle, filled with gadgets. I once thought that technology would add to the attraction of Portugal, for example with the opportunity to enjoy quality live concerts at home. That remains true, but technology somehow adds even more to a city life. In our blessed lives nowadays, we crave experiences and pursue deep and specialized hobbies, and also place value on the breadth of our human relationships. That is exactly what good cities offer.

The cities have changed a lot, but what is crucial is that my context for living in them has changed completely. A couple of recent incidents show how. Normally I do my grocery shopping for the family just after the local mall opens at 10AM. I never sit in a queue to get there, I can park near the entrance, I can get around the store in ten minutes and there is no long checkout line. Much of my visit is spent enjoying a latte at Panera. Sometimes, including last Saturday, we need to go there at a weekend. The whole experience is miserable.

Then there was yesterday’s choir practice, an intense affair in the week of a concert that finished a little late. The subway journey home was slow, with delays on the 1 and E lines, and I wasn’t home before 11.30. I was tired, but cheerful, able to reflect on a constructive rehearsal, and not affected today after a slightly longer lie-in than usual. Had I already experience a morning commute and the prospect of a similar early start today, I would only have had negative feelings about the whole experience, and might by now even be thinking of quitting that choir.

My point is that for much of our lives we are time poor and overstressed, and the city shows its worst face to us. On the rare occasions I have to drive at 8am, I count my blessings and wonder how other people cope with that misery daily. A trip to the DMV is invariably horrible, but squeezed into a busy schedule might be enough to ruin my week.

It is not the city that is piling stress upon stress, it is our life circumstance. It is no wonder that two weeks of escape to the sun feels like heaven, and that we conclude that is where we want to spend all of our time once we have the chance.

That may very well be a correct deduction for many of us. Heck, it might still be the right deduction for me, albeit a few years later than I originally thought.

But before we rush into those Spanish real estate agents and splash out on our dream retirement home, we need to be sure we are asking the right question and thinking about our future context not just our present one. It is hard to know exactly what our future circumstances might be, but we can make some educated guesses, and also work to create good options to test things out and minimize some uncertainty.

I got some of this right, but I found it hard to look beyond the city as the scene of stress. Locked into commuting and tired choir rehearsals and horrible supermarket lines, I didn’t take time or ask others to understand what a city life might look like without the dominant time-poor lifestyle from a demanding job.

I was blessed. Of course it is an unusual blessing to even be able to contemplate early retirement and major investments. But I was also blessed in being given life circumstances to explore things further and to change my mind. Now having enjoyed New York for three years I have every intention, God willing, to soak in its wonder for much longer, and maybe even to try London after that.

So next time you are idly reading the details in Spanish real estate agent windows, by all means dream and have some fun. It is a good idea to talk to life partners and kids deeply, and also to ask others with related experiences. This is a tough process and worthy of a lot of thought and time. I thought I was pretty good at this sort of thing, but I made at least one classical, cardinal error. The outcome so far has been excellent, but the thought process was flawed.