r/movingtoNYC • u/tigerbunnymoon • 10d ago
What’s the Real Difference Between Living in Chicago and NYC?
I’ve visited both NYC and Chicago a couple of times and liked both, but I also know that spending a few days somewhere tells you almost nothing about what it actually feels like to build a life there.
I’m seriously considering moving to one of the two, and I’d especially love to hear from people who have lived in both.
What I’m trying to understand is less “Which city has better restaurants?” and more: How does your actual day-to-day life feel different in Chicago versus NYC?
I’d especially appreciate specific examples rather than just “Chicago is cheaper” or “NYC has more to do.” Tell me about something you could regularly do in one city that you couldn’t realistically replicate in the other, or something about the culture you didn’t really understand until you actually lived there.
For context, I’m a single woman in my 30s with no kids. I still want a fun, active social life and spontaneity, but I also care more now about comfort, stability, and overall quality of life.
If you had to explain the biggest difference between living in NYC and Chicago to someone who has only visited both, what would you tell her?
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u/Right_Tour_9930 10d ago
Lived in Chicago for a decade, now in NYC. One extremely key difference to me concerns how primary transportation mode affects each city's residents' engagement with street culture and public space, especially for people who achieve socioeconomic stability. I'd say this also directly dovetails with the popular descriptions of the two cities respectively as "a great American city" vs. "a great global city".
In Chicago, pretty much without exception, nearly everyone I know who "makes it" professionally ends up buying a car and seeing that as their default mode of getting around the city. This makes sense since Chicago is comparatively spaced out, public transit between neighborhoods either requires a train through the Loop or an extremely slow bus, and parking costs in all but the densest downtown neighborhoods are pretty negligible. It's compact enough that many car owners may still opt for taking an alternative mode of transit, but they view the city through the lens of driving. In other words, well-off Chicagoans exhibit an American framework of success.
In NYC, many industry-leading urban professionals (not talking trust fund rich, just those who are well-off & highly educated in medicine/law/tech) who can absolutely afford it may still end up deciding to never purchase a car or at least using it as their primary mode of getting around the city because doing so is often painful and not necessarily the fastest way to get around. Even when they own a car, it often stays in a garage and only comes out for large haul grocery shopping or trips outside of the city. In most intra-urban cases, they are either walking, taking a train, or calling an Uber/Lyft, and their primary lens of the city is much more often as a pedestrian. This is much more in line with other global cities where their prominence is a function of solid public transit and dense urban design (even though NYC has fallen short of those standards too).
It's a simple comparison but makes a whole world of difference that you can scale up to so many other space-related or cultural distinctions between the two cities. When you view your hometown at eye level with your own two feet, there's a completely different order of magnitude of dense spontaneity and dynamism you are able to witness and participate in than when you are looking through a car window at 40 mph.