Even more brutalist buildings.
We have crackheads now
Long before I was born, my town was a working class mill town, steel mill, tire factory, textile mills, etc. the steel mill is still there, but it’s not a big feature of the town like it once was.
Even up into my lifetime, it was still essentially a working class town, nothing wrong with it, perfectly safe town, walkable, convenient to pretty much every major highway, public transportation, major shopping areas, etc. but it just had a little bit of a reputation for being kind of a slightly lower class town compared to a lot of its neighbors.
Within the last decade or so it’s kind of exploded, property values have gone through the roof, lots of cool bars and restaurants, a whole bunch of new high rise apartment buildings, etc. It’s attracted a lot of yuppies and priced a lot of the old families out of the area. It’s also created some significant traffic and parking issues, with new apartments and such bringing in more people, and people wanting to come into town for the bars and restaurants and such the infrastructure just isn’t there for that many cars.
I can’t afford to live there anymore, but with my parents and relatives who still live there not getting any younger, sooner or later I should be able to snag up one of their houses, my sister already managed to snag my grandmother’s house for herself.
Like all cases of gentrification it has its plusses and minuses. The bars and restaurants and other new businesses are pretty great. Getting priced out of the town my family has lived in for over a century kind of blows, even if I have a roadmap laid out in front of me to get back. Some of my favorite cheap dive bars are no longer very cheap or divey, which is a bummer. The traffic can be a nightmare when you have to deal with it. The character of the town has definitely changed, there’s a definite difference in attitude between people who have deep roots there, own homes, and intend to spend the rest of their lives here and the newcomers, landlords, house flippers, renters, etc. who don’t have any real attachment to the town.
The biggest problem I have with the gentrification here is that if all the housing is expensive, the city will suck because the people who work here can’t live here. We still have all the little places for now, all the restaurants and coffee shops and the pay is not good here (for all jobs) compared to similar sized cities elsewhere. Like, do we really want cops to not live where they work? Do we expect people to commute to work at the fast food places and grocery stores, the bodegas and botanicas?
They have fiber internet now. I grew up offline, had to fight for every improvement from 56k modem to ISDN to DSL. Now their internet is faster than mine.
A village nearby my hometown got fiber for the church and installed directed wifi antennas on the church tower to solve their internet problems
They built a tower not for God, but for the Internet? Blasphemous!
Blasphabulous!
They’ve reinvented confession for the modern age
Technically you do not confess, but the Big5 internet monopolists track your every move like a vengeful god would do.
A few nicer houses, the crappy highschool is gone, many of the businesses remain unchanged.
deleted by creator
Loads of renovated parks and buildings, parts that used to be sketchy have mostly improved, the town center has become richer, while a lot of people who grew up here have moved to the suburbs.
It’s tripled in population. We’re up to about 3,000 people now.
deleted by creator
No more Blockbuster
Everyone I know got older.
A massive outlet mall opened, in a small city who’s biggest attraction previously was WalMart. Now when people ask where I’m from, the response I get to telling them is “oh the place with the mall?”
Also, I’ve heard the school district is pretty good these days. Unlike when I was there and my high school had one of the lowest graduation rates west of the Rockies.
The population has tripled, downtown is no longer dead on weekends, housing cost has increased by a factor of 25. Crime has dropped precipitously, we went from one of the toughest areas in the country to average. No improvement in public transportation so traffic is much worse. My kids did not know the boredom that leads to hanging out drinking in empty lots, there aren’t many empty lots anymore.
Some previously wooded area is now suburb. A craft store was replaced by a thrift store. There are a few restaurants downtown that weren’t there before.
There are probably others but those are the ones I noticed.
My hometown was in Canada’s top-ten communities in decline for years. These days, it’s got two-thirds the population it used to, the streets are full of deer, and quite a few farmers’ fields have turned into forests. Almost everyone my age that I knew moved away long ago. Going back is always shocking.
I think the most notable change is that the main hospital in my hometown was moved to the outskirts of the city. It used to be closer to the center but they moved it, possibly because it’s bigger now and they needed more space to work with.
They also tore down the old courthouse and replaced it with one that, at least from the outside, looks smaller. Some of the supermarkets have also move locations and there are some new stores that have taken the old locations.
