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Comment by fotta | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic but I love Davis. It has a smaller-town vibe but is close enough to Downtown Sac that one can go over there for a night out. The local politics are more to my lean than anywhere equidistantly east of Sacramento. It's extremely bike-friendly (most students bike around the town). It's also a little closer to the Bay which is nice for day trips.

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Davis is cool if your young. I went to UC Davis and lived there a few years after I graduated. But some of the residents that live there are just something else. Some people hate the college even though they owe everything the town has to the college. I wish it was more affordable.

I lived next to a major university for a decade... I could see how it would be very easy to lose your patience with a university. The core problem is that... you encounter the same problems with students year after year, but they cycle out every so often, so to them, these are new problems.

I found several students passed out in my yard or on my stool steps. Each one was given a medical exam (my partner was a nurse) and a burrito, and a ride home.

I didn't mind the constant parties so much except when i had a kid-- her first year was very tough sleeping and on numerous occasions outrageously loud parties kept her up all night. 2-month-olds don't care if its Halloween or not.

One kid vaguely threatened me saying he had a "party right of way" to do whatever he wanted. I informed him I was a gun owner.

One time a woman directly out my front door was screaming "RAPE! RAPE!" and I felt obligated to interdict.

The ex-wife and I would stay up on nights there was likely to be trouble, having gotten the rhythm of the place after a decade.

That being said, if you kept your wits about yourself it was a really fun place to live, any problems the kids caused were way overshadowed by the vibrancy of the neighborhood.

The nice thing about Davis is it’s still large enough to have suburbs that are primarily families so you don’t end up with drunk kids on your lawn or parties every week :)

> any problems the kids caused were way overshadowed by the vibrancy of the neighborhood.

All that you mentioned looks like features to me, not bugs.

Its just the difference in 10-years of aging. I moved to this hip town to be around the fun, then... you get married, have a kid, start a 401k and life is wayyyyy different. My next-door neighbor was in her late 70s, had lived in the town for 40 years and was old and tired for the shenanigans. I imagine if I was that age I might be as well.

> you get married, have a kid, start a 401k and life is wayyyyy different

isn't that why you would move? Can't expect the world to change to suit i reckon.

i too lived a 10 minute walk away from shoreditch while i was working in the City of London. Every other Friday night are partying and shouting and youths on scooters blasting eurodance on speakers and Saturday mornings are the smell of old beer and vomit. It's not shoreditch if it's not. I too would often partake in the merrymaking with my mates after work until the wee hours. Now that i am older that scene is still not mine to deprive others of.

Davis is a college town, with all the positives and negatives that go along with it. It's hard to judge it objectively as a city.

I hate Davis for those reasons. Minus the bike culture with is the best.

Smells like cows, tiny town, Sac is boring, San Francisco is too far.

Davis does not smell like cows, unless you are in the student apartments by the aggie farm. I don't know what you are talking about.

It doesn’t smell like cows everywhere :)

But when I ride my bike to the campus farm to buy meat, depending on the weather and perhaps other conditions it might smell like cow shit! It doesn’t happen often though.

That doesn’t really bother me. However, one year when I was in college something happened to the tomato harvest that caused lots of huge flies all over the city. I generally like the weather here and all the other sort of agricultural elements, but that was the one gross think I can think of.

'the campus farm' 'the town smells like cows'. I mean..come on.

And cow shit is honestly a pretty mild smell. You only notice it when it's massed up and collected as manure, not just from there being cows somewhere around doing their thing.

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