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.
We got a stop light and the gas station changed families. The stop light took me by surprise and I nearly ran it the first time.
We have crackheads now
It’s tripled in population. We’re up to about 3,000 people now.
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Lots and lots and lots of empty places.
At least half of the retail space is basically dead.
My old shopping mall filled the half-empy food court with a climbing gym for kids and a massive video arcade, which is cool. It’s more like a flea market than a mall now because the storefronts that are occupied are all local retailers.
Oddly enough, the old cookie shop in the mall is still going strong and making the same great stuff. Apparently that place is timeless.
Every small outdoors place I grew up playing in have been razed to build more detached homes.
The city is originally small, with 2 main roads crossing each other. With all the new influx of people, it is impossible to get out of there in a timely manner by car or bus.
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Less trees. A lot less.
its about half condo townhouse but when I was young I would be surprised if it was 10%. Conversely so many mcmansions. Way more businesses especially restaurants. They are like one step away from allowing bars when before it was dry. Oh man the flagship pool is basically a waterpark now. so jelly of the kids. crime certainly higher. In recent times guns have been fired in town which when I was young you never even heard of a police officer firing a gun. of course catalytic converter thefts. Muggings and carjacking has happened. Growing up some teens firing of fireworks was crime. Gas stations requiring prepay. This excersise is sorta bumming me out now.
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.
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.
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.
The only change I think anyone would notice is the town got big on graffiti art. It’s everywhere now.
My town let some kids go around and paint stuff where graffiti usually pops up. Zero graffiti. They do a little upkeep so it doesn’t fade and I haven’t seen tags in a decade.
Gentrification and weed. When I was growing up, there were large swathes of town where you just didn’t go after dark. Now they’re all brand new office and lab space punctuated with dispensaries every couple of blocks.
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.
