This is actually a great analysis of Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies, and why their plots frequently center on 30-something year old women who abandon their successful big city lives to move back to their home towns and marry the handsome “boy next door.” It seems to be a very popular fantasy among the network’s primary audience, conservative women aged 50+ (70% of the channel’s viewers.)
This is basically gentrification, but politicized (I don’t mean that in a bad way). Follow the Target, Home Depot, and Starbucks store openings, and you’ll see where your vision is already happening. Or closings for where they tried and it didn’t work out. I mean crime, yea, crime. They close for crime.
I’m not really too concerned about gentrification tbh since we’re past the point where anything’s affordable. I could see the argument when previously cheap neighborhoods were getting made too expensive for the residents to live there, but now you can’t find a house in fucking compton, CA of all places for under $500,000 that doesn’t have illegal wiring or mold problems, and rural areas and small towns aren’t much better either post-covid. we just gotta build and keep it out of the market