What sticks out to me, in hindsight, is how much of the development that happened in my early childhood. I remember the large empty track of land next to the highway that was turned into the local mega-mall. I remember the highway itself transforming from a simple flat two-lanes-each-way stretch all the way into downtown. Now its a six-lane overpass that’s getting another expansion. I remember the old community swimming pool that’s been expanded into a sprawling Aquatic Center. And how the half dozen different church denominations have been consolidated into one big Catholic compound. We have this enormous City Center that was just an abandoned parking lot when my parents moved in.
I also remember how the neighborhood had been comically, painfully white. Way back in the 90s, the town was effectively built on White Flight from the inner city, so it was mostly business and engineer families who’d abandoned downtown. We had a few big immigrant communities, primarily East Asian in character. But Latinos and Black families were kept beyond the county line by a combination of notoriously racist policing and white nationalist affiliated developers and real estate agencies. But all of that lapsed over the subsequent decades - now we have a much more mixed and more minority-affluent population. Hell, we have an East Asian County Judge, which is something that the elderly white now-minority had been fighting tooth and nail for decades.
I have no idea whether I’d say the area is better or worse. Racism hasn’t really gone away, it’s just much more of an Iranian Expats hating on Indian Expats thing that I’m not involved in. The fact that there’s still a ton of money being pumped through the city doesn’t hurt. But we still have a lot of greed and corruption and clichishness. There’s definitely a noticeable divide between the older and newer parts of the town. And we even have some apartments now, instead of just single-family homes as far as the eye can see.
What sticks out to me, in hindsight, is how much of the development that happened in my early childhood. I remember the large empty track of land next to the highway that was turned into the local mega-mall. I remember the highway itself transforming from a simple flat two-lanes-each-way stretch all the way into downtown. Now its a six-lane overpass that’s getting another expansion. I remember the old community swimming pool that’s been expanded into a sprawling Aquatic Center. And how the half dozen different church denominations have been consolidated into one big Catholic compound. We have this enormous City Center that was just an abandoned parking lot when my parents moved in.
I also remember how the neighborhood had been comically, painfully white. Way back in the 90s, the town was effectively built on White Flight from the inner city, so it was mostly business and engineer families who’d abandoned downtown. We had a few big immigrant communities, primarily East Asian in character. But Latinos and Black families were kept beyond the county line by a combination of notoriously racist policing and white nationalist affiliated developers and real estate agencies. But all of that lapsed over the subsequent decades - now we have a much more mixed and more minority-affluent population. Hell, we have an East Asian County Judge, which is something that the elderly white now-minority had been fighting tooth and nail for decades.
I have no idea whether I’d say the area is better or worse. Racism hasn’t really gone away, it’s just much more of an Iranian Expats hating on Indian Expats thing that I’m not involved in. The fact that there’s still a ton of money being pumped through the city doesn’t hurt. But we still have a lot of greed and corruption and clichishness. There’s definitely a noticeable divide between the older and newer parts of the town. And we even have some apartments now, instead of just single-family homes as far as the eye can see.
Time moves on, I guess.