I also live in Charleston and go to Savannah a couple weekends a year because it really is a cool place. But when it comes to living in a place I would far prefer to live in Charleston. The actual grid plan of Savannah's historic district is superior to Charleston's street plan and I don't think Savannah ever had a building height limit so the taller buildings make Savannah feel more 'urban', but when it comes to jobs and all around momentum Savannah has very little; If there was more going on there it'd probably be the better place between the two. I get why the thought of a tourism would turn people off from living in a place, but in reality, nowadays the same thing that attracts people to visit cities are the same things that attract people to live in a certain city, just look at how Airbnb more less turned every city into a tourist destination.

I grew up in Charleston, an experience that makes me, as an adult, uninterested/incapable of living in another tourist destination, ever.

> an experience that makes me, as an adult, uninterested/incapable of living in another tourist destination, ever.

I also grew up in a tourist destination. There's a reason it's a vacation destination and not somewhere people with a brain actually want to live year round. I could rant for hours about all the things that are terrible about it. I think it suffices to say that when ripping people off for a few months of the year is a large fraction of the local economy it that has a bunch of negative trickle down effects.

Personally, I believe it really depends on the nature of the city / town.

I grew up ~60 miles down the coast from Charleston, on Hilton Head Island. Totally different vibe, beautiful, natural island. The Town of actually made real efforts to manage development and prevent developers from doing the normal land-grab over-development.

I've lived in Charleston for 7+ years and, despite a temporary moratorium, the City of is letting developers raze the city to build more and more hotels with no damned parking. Very little is done to manage or plan development. It's a whole different vibe, and I'm actually going to be leaving Charleston with no intent to return here in the coming months.

My experience in Charleston has really made me appreciate the island I grew up on. Not all tourist towns are built alike.

I did 2 summers in Bluffton and spent a lot of time in HHI when I was in college around 2000. I definitely did not get the vibe you did from HHI.

If you visit, your first impression is that it is very pretty and quiet. When you're there for a more extended period, everything feels very...sterile. Everything looks the same. You can't find anything.

It's also this odd place in South Carolina where if you order tea it's unsweet and if you ask for sweet tea they'll either look at you strangely, give you sugar packets (not the same thing) or say they don't serve it. During the summer, all you see is Ohio license plates.

When I thought I was going to end up working there after college I was going to live in Beaufort just to avoid living there. Grew up in Florence.

That's exactly the kind of town I grew up in (albeit at a more northern latitude). The veneer of quaintness that draws people to the town is very thin, just enough to get them to open their wallets. Beneath that it's all dysfunction and scum liberally sprinkled with less than ethical business practices and corrupt politics that everone's managed convince themselves is normal or doesn't exist.

I've lived in a variety of other small towns and a few cities. The pattern I've noticed is that when a large chunk of the community makes it's living by siphoning a few bucks off of people who don't live there permanently and have no plans to (tourists, university students, commuters) it creates a bunch of incentives for highly (more so than in a normal town/city) selfish behavior from all the local parties (business owners, politicians, town departments, individual property owners, etc) that basically boils down to everyone trying to squeeze every cent out of everyone else and nobody wants to live in a place where everyone is doing that because it sucks. I'm definitely in the "individuals are generally good and trustworthy when left to do their own thing" camp but a couple of the places I'v lived make me well aware of why some people believe that people are untrustworthy by default and need to be controlled.

In the case of tourist towns, the special snowflake image projected on top of all of this is just kind of a slap in the face for everyone living there. You've got your annual town parade for whatever and half the crowd is frowning because they know the backstory to everything they see in front of them. The local business that sponsored the float for a sports team is just doing it because a local offical's kid is on the team and he needs said official to not look too hard at his business. The fire department's 100ft ladder truck is just a waste because there's no more than a 3-story building in the town but the EMTs did a favor for the school superintendent who crashed his car while drunk (legend is that he had to be cut out by the FD and the EMTs recognized him and whisked him away before the cops could make him blow) so he called his friends and put in a good word for the fire department when it came to budget. The reason some of the town officials in the parade aren't behind bars is because the police know that scandals are bad for business and they'd rather just have it to hold over them anyway. The only reason the landscaping material company has money to blow on the nearly new trucks that are towing the floats (dirt moving is a low margin industry so you don't usually see that stuff) is because they have a local monopoly and overcharge everyone they deal with. It's just terrible to live in a place where everything is scummy but presented as quaint in order to fleece the tourists for a few months of the year and that's how most tourist towns become. No wonder everyone does drugs all winter. It wears on you. I suppose if you just take it all for granted or are just so overwhelmed by the quaintness that you don't notice it might be ok but that's just not me.

The cops sweeping crime under the rug was definitely a thing growing up where I did, and the local paper was complicit as well.

I think one of the real differences between a strictly-tourist town and the island I grew up on was that it also served as an upscale retirement destination for Snowbird types such that it has its own thriving economy and year-round population (in the 30,000 - 40,000 range) so it wasn't strictly dependent on tourism.

The surrounding area has also grown and developed into its own area since. Rather interesting to watch the sort-of bootstrapping of the surrounding sleepy town into a thriving area over the years.

In a tourist trap place I used to live, all the crime was committed by hispanics. Non-hispanic names barely made it onto the newspaper's crime blotter. This started getting really weird after a while, once you realized most of the local population was not, in fact, hispanic.

very glad I left, never have regretted it.