City Planning

Every medium size town seems to have two centers. The first and most obvious is giant and new. It's well engineered for parking and convenience and consists of huge stores like Fred Meyer and Lowes mixed with Taco Time and a few more local franchises. The other being small and often hard to find consists of antique shops, bookstores, and cafes that would look familiar to any SF hipster.

I tend to think of small rural towns in a particular way. It seems that once a town gets over 10,000 it shows (on the surface anyway) a lot of similarities with other like-sized towns not only in its big box stores but in its general hip-ness as well. You could cut four blocks out of Redmond for example and put it in Portland or SF and no one would know the difference. I bet that dastardly fellow The Internet has a hand in this.