Best Cities for Asperger's?

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in my experience, gresham seems to be about the most tolerant place around portland for autistics and perhaps that is exclusively attributed to all the work roger meyer has done over the years... also, there is more "diversity" of common folks there... I like gresham, but it can be a scary place sometimes too.

portland yuppies and hipsters do not seem to engage in ANYTHING in an "authentic" way... is what it is.

Maybe Óbidos in Portugal?:

http://www.cntraveler.com/story/obidos- ... vers-dream

https://ebookfriendly.com/folio-literat ... -portugal/

https://ebookfriendly.com/prettiest-boo ... -villages/

Portugal in general is tolerant of differences, same with Spain. My only issue with Portugal would be that I can't stand the sound of European Portuguese.

I'd love to put the world to rights, but I'm a European, and I intend to stay that way, so what better way to be a European than to see an array of countries you have never seen before.

Top 3

Puglia- Italy
Verona- Italy
The Swiss Alps or the Northern Lightz

I'm not fussy, but a river cruise though Venice can surely only take you so far. I'm hungry for the sights and sounds of far away places, but as I say, local authority needs regular assurances from neighbours that they will visit the tourist attractions. One day I will.

I lived in San Francisco for 7 years. I hate that city. I'd rather die than go back to living there, and I'm not exaggerating. You have to be the "right" kind of "different", otherwise it's just as bad as anywhere else. Adults that act like high school bullies and popular kids.
The constant noise, smells, garbage and frenetic energy there was so overwhelming I never went outside unless my Husband (boyfriend at the time) was with me. I couldn't do it alone. I'd have a meltdown or I'd end up so burnt out that I would lock myself inside, turn off my phone and keep all the shades drawn for days.
I LOVED the food and places like The Exploratorium. It has some great features and things to offer. But it's just too much, and so expensive it's obnoxious.

Santa Cruz is interesting. But it's visually too loud for me. There's so much going on it's like a bad painting.

My favorite places are smaller towns outside of the Bay Area. Bodega Bay is one.

In my opinion the best kind of city for any ASD would be a small town with lots of trees surrounded by nature with massive mountain ranges to make you feel protected and the city itself would have to be somewhat isolated from the rest of the country to give that glorious feeling of social isolation and above all peace and quiet.

To me that would be absolute heaven and one day if I'm lucky I might actually get to live in a city like that in Canada. There are many thousands like that to choose from because we're the second largest country in the world so there's lots of space and we have a low population in relation to our size at only 35 to 40 million people.

I lived in San Fran and I also don't think it's very aspie friendly either, unless you have one of those six figure tech jobs and even then, your quality of life is piss poor for the insane amount of money you have to spend to live there.

As for my recommendation, I'll actually would speculate some aspies might like this area even though I personally didn't (since I'm an educated tech worker) : Midland, Texas. Last time I checked, it's the most dynamic economy in the US due to the oil and gas industry : https://www.connect.media/the-most-dyna ... he-u-s-is/

So why aren't people moving here in droves? Well, it's only got 250,000 ppl in the area and it's like a 5 hour drive to the nearest metro with over 1 million ppl (Dallas, El Paso, Austin, and Albuquerque to name a few.) This makes things difficult for men wirh wives who probably aren't a good fit for the numerous 6 figure manual labor jobs. But if you're a single guy without too much education and have been out of work for a while and don't care about having a social life and don't mind leaving your friends and families at home behind, this is probably the best place for you to land a six figure job.

So why did I leave? I moved from San Francisco to Midland after landing a job in Midland after being unemployed for over a year and no employer in any other place would give me a chance. I worked hard for 18 months but then realized that opportunities for advancement in this isolated redneck town were limited, esp in programming jobs, so i ended up bailing out for Dallas.

Yellow Springs, Ohio might work. It's a very LGBTQ friendly town and I've noticed that places and people who are accepting of LGBTQ people tend to be accepting of those who are different in general.

From personal experience I can say San Antonio, Texas is one of the LEAST Autistic friendly cities.

Berlin looks really good.

I suspect it's very much personal. Some people are going to want to live somewhere isolated and quiet, others are going to gravitate to cities with more services and acceptance.

Personally, I'm one of the city types. If I can find accommodation which is soundproofed enough, I prefer to live right in the middle of downtown in a city of at least a million people. Walking distance to nearly everything, usually a better selection of jobs and services and, as people have pointed out, there's a certain degree of anti-expectation when it comes to casual socializing in passing; people are less likely to initiate, or at least if they do it's more likely to be very quick and scripted instead of them wanting to dissect your life and form lifelong friendships because you were standing next to them on the sidewalk. Or because they saw you earlier doing something - anything - and decided that meant you wanted to be talked to.

This extends to commercial establishments, too. Store staff are less likely to recognize you in a city and try to chat; you're just one face in the crowd and you might go to different stores at different times. Plus, of course, the staff have their own lives which are far less likely to include you as a "known local".

Then there are offerings such as by-and-for-adult-aspies groups. They're more common in cities than in smaller population hubs. even if not every city has one.

As for individual locations of appeal... I'm not entirely sure. I heard good things a while back about San Diego, but I haven't checked if that's still the case. I thought about places like Zurich, or maybe some of the Scandanavian cities, but they seem a little smaller than what I'm after.

I actually thought about L.A. for a while. While it's stereotypically one of the worst cities when it comes to a reality-based culture, there are presumably a lot of jobs which are effectively infrastructure for the entertainment industry - everything from carpentry to model-making to animatronics to financial processing. Or is there some kind of expectation that no matter what job you're doing in that city, you're a social butterfly and always 'on'?

Berkeley CA has all sorts of wierdos

I've been living in NYC since college. It has a lot of merit points for me:
1) There are 8 million people here; you will find some people you get along with. It's just math.
2) I don't have to drive. I'm... not good at driving
3) There's no expectation of small talk; it's very impersonal. Everyone minds their own business.
4) Weird people are a dime a dozen. People simply don't notice or care what you do. I'm pretty sure someone could walk naked down the street covered in tinfoil, and no one would even bat an eye.

I think for me, having grown up in a small suburban town where I always felt like the odd man out, it was a relief coming here and realizing, wait, I'm not some unique freak. I can find people here I mesh with if I seek them out, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't say the same of my tiny Connecticut hometown.

That said, it's not cheap to live here...

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Berkeley, CA (ok, maybe I'm biased since that's where I went to college.) It's a bit expensive to live in but still one of the cheaper cities in the ultra expensive SF Bay Area. It's not as crowded as SF but it's also not too difficult to get by without a car (but it's not extremely difficult to find parking if you do choose to live there with a car.) It's definitely one of the more open-minded cities in the US although it's become a little less tolerant of the political right recently. (But you'll still probably have an easier time living here if you lean towards the right than living in a place like West Texas if you lean towards the left.)

Unlike the work, work, work mentality in San Francisco, people in this town actually seem to want to enjoy life.