Mar. 12 2010 - 5:34 pm | 517 views | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Five Easy Adjectives — Can You Describe Your City Or Town In Only Five Words?

By CAITLIN KELLY

This is a stitch made from three photos. Taken...

Where the Blue Jays play...The CN Tower in the background.Image via Wikipedia

Can you describe your city or town in five words?

Here are some attempts to do so for Toronto, where I grew up and lived until I was 30.

From the Toronto Star:

Star blogger Tonika Morgan was on vacation in the United Kingdom last week when she was asked to describe Toronto to those who have never visited the city. She struggled to find the words. What she came up with initially was “fantastic, a great mix of people and we have a CN Tower.”

I prefer some of the sardonic comments she got:

overpopulated, underfunded, expensive, polluted, home: Sorry fellow Torontonians, I lived the first 20 years of my life in Toronto and absolutely loved it…… I_think_I_know_all

underdeveloped, out-of-date, expensive, dysfunctional, mediocre: underdeveloped, out-of-date, expensive, dysfunctional, mediocre… codeman

A Little Aliteration: Dysfunctional, divided, delusional, debt-ridden and doomed.… CanadianBiker

1.city 2. with 3.crippling 4.inferiority 5.complex: Sorry, but Toronto is not as relevant as everyone imagines that it is. Sure, it has size going for…… Snas

I left Toronto in 1986 and go back 3-6 times a year to see family and friends, and occasionally, editors.

I’d pick: overpriced, diverse, workaholic, gray (winter skies), changing.

One of the oddest ongoing features of Toronto, and one of the reasons I was happy to leave, is the crazy price of buying a home, certainly a freestanding house. Toronto house lots are often postage-stamp sized and it’s not uncommon, in many neighborhoods, to look right into your neighbor’s windows from barely six feet across a shared alley or driveway. And the prices! It’s “normal” for people to bid way over asking — like $50,000 to $80,000 — not the $5,000 or $15,000 more typical in other places.

I live north of New York City….expensive, crowded, sexist, dynamic, divided. I now live in Tarrytown, a town of 10,000 on the Hudson River: funky, fun, affordable, diverse, historic.

I’d love to hear your five words about where you live.