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’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.
They built a tower not for God, but for the Internet? Blasphemous!
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.
NYC, watch out!
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.
Less trees. A lot less.
The main drag didn’t grow with the population, so traffic to get across the city is 10x worse.
A gay bar shut down for normal, boring business reasons and not because it was hate-crimed like the gay bar that closed when I was a child.
An attempt was made to make a pedestrian-friendly Entertainment District downtown. They forgot to make any changes to actually encourage and protect pedestrians though. Lots of cute little shops and restaurants packed in an area no one wants to walk through.
Fiber! And laid by the city so no one company can claim it to form a new monopoly. We have not one but competing fiber providers!
The football team is still massively popular, despite the golden years being 20+ years ago. So the change is maybe increased desperation intertwined with the neverending optimism that a new golden area is just a season or two out.
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 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.
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 population is 50 times what it was when I was a kid.
*All the cool places we used to hang out at school as kids are fenced off.
*The big tree that shaded half the yard of the house I grew up in was cut down. The property has been split into 3 separate “apartments” for rent. Everything was repainted and the yard looks nothing like it used to.
*Everything around town has been built up. Most of the empty fields have businesses or houses on them.
*The lake my grandfather and I used to fish at is no longer publically accessible. The lake was choked to death by algae caused by farm run off pollution.
*The main road is paved, has gutters, street lights etc. and isn’t a dirt road anymore like it was when I was little.
*Trains don’t go through the railroad going through town. They haven’t for years so no train watching.
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.
Every time I visit, I know where less and less places are, because they keep closing older places and opening new ones. It really doesn’t feel like my hometown anymore. Last time I wanted to visit the music shop where I would practice piano and have recitals, only to drive by to see that it had been closed for a couple years.
