When my husband and I began to look for our first home almost ten years ago, we never thought of looking anywhere but the city of Dayton. We lived in an apartment in Grafton Hill, and my parents had a lovely old house in Five Oaks. We wanted an old house of our own, we wanted character, we wanted more for our money than we could get in the ‘burbs.
Most of our contemporaries thought we were crazy. But we were thrilled when we found a big fixer-upper on a busy street in Belmont. We had ourselves a “Belmont Beauty”. At first we thought we might fix it up and sell it for a profit, but we soon discovered that we really liked living there.
So we’re still here, nine years and two-and-a-half kids later.
And we still really like living here!
We have super-nice neighbors, both with young kids, who have lived in their homes even longer than we have. We have a double lot, so there is plenty of yard for our kids to play in. Each spring we do something more to fix it up – this year it was a sweet swing set. Next year, we’ll be gating off our driveway – the downside of the busy street we live on being that my kiddos can’t run free like I did when I was a child living on a lazy cul-de-sac.
There are other downsides of living in the city, of course: our old, uneven sidewalks and busy street make it difficult for bike riding and wagon-pulling. But you know what? Neither of my kids seem to think anything of that at all. They have a safe, happy home full of fun, a nice big yard and a big front porch to play on.
And on every spring and summer date that even kind of qualifies as a holiday, they also get a free illegal fireworks show. 
What more could a city kid want?
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