Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I bet.

I suppose it helps not having much of an east side to have to explore, due to the lake being where it is.

Been out on that lake several times too. Hundreds of times, actually.

Chicago's huge.

I bet very few lifers have been to every single suburb in the metro at least once.

I lived in Columbus for 30 years, and only made it to Pickerington a couple of times for example.

Chicago is way bigger than that.

Just last year I discovered myself in a whole neighborhood in Phoenix I'd never seen or heard of.  Probably because it wasn't on the way to anywhere, just a valley between 2 little mountains. 
I was visiting a lady friend who just got pregnant as her son turned 18.  I can't believe she wants to do all of that agian, lol

Obviously the ATL changed a lot since I last lived here in 1972.  The interesting thing to me is how many very sketchy neighborhoods in the city are not middle or upper middle class areas.  I recall North Avernue was a place to avoid east of Peachtree Street.  And the 'burbs are nothing like what I knew.  They just opened a large park west of me a few miles, an area that was sort of mixed light industrial and modest homes now slowly gentrifying.  We weren't all that impressed with the park but it just opened.  Of course, a lot of change over 50 years is expected.  When I'd come back to visit, I'd stay in the 'burbs most of the time.

There is a nice area NW of us called Vinings I'd never been through that we go for lunch on the river after hitting Costco.  The name Vinings sounds sketchy to me.  We also have an area called Cabbagetown that has gentrified.

I bet.

I suppose it helps not having much of an east side to have to explore, due to the lake being where it is.

Badge can’t tell you about the underwater cityscape he built for those who can afford it. Let’s just say, very fancy. 

Had an excellent meal at one of the local Japanese place last night. Not one of those cook in front of you places. Everything is prepared either at the sushi bar or in the kitchen. Fantastic.

This was my dish:

Looks amazing!

You see that dynamic in Minnesota as well. Minneapolis and St Paul (and to a lesser extent, Rochester and Duluth) are very liberal. The 7-county metro used to be Republican strongholds but they have gotten more and more liberal over the last 10 years. And aside from pockets of outstate MN (most notably the reservations and some Farmer-Labor holdouts up in the Red River country), outstate has gotten very "conservative".

I was just thinking about this. You know what other place is like this in a lot of ways?

California. 

I just moved from a blood red state to a swing state. The local politics around me shifted somewhat, but not really. It's just that I went from a mid-sized city in a state without a major metro to a state with two very large metros. Obviously the dilution of suburbs factors in (i.e. if the city center is one way, the alignment of suburbs can shift everything), but in a lot of places, its just a matter of the urban areas being that much bigger and denser, even if huge swaths of the territory go the other way (NY/CA/Illinois are like this). 

It strikes me that in some ways, as much as we like to pretend all these places are highly different, there's a lot more in common than we think. Then again, I moved from one extreme to another, and came away generally finding most people in most places to be mostly fine, even if people like to indulge in what I'd call somewhat childish regionalism.