That’s what the implementation of a communist utopia gets you...
Nice places eventually rot and turn into dung heaps.
The last thing you want is to see your community hailed in the media as one of the ‘nicest places to live.’ Every dingbat in the country will make a beeline to you’re town expecting bread and honey. Then they’ll sit around growing bitter and jealous and start wrecking and overwhelm the voting roles. Then come the politicians, promising good things at our expense. They strip away the laws that maintained public order and chaos ensues. Then taxes go up as the tax base shrinks.
I suspect all of that has already occurred here and they’re onto then final act: the college and certain well-heeled alums get together and pay the city politicians for official sanction. Ever seen a city politician that will turn down a bribe? They want to get the hell out of there too!
They buy out, condemn, or (I suspect) hire antifa to burn out the businesses and in there place build neat stacks of rabbit hutches with a substantial “commercial district.” Then the process begins anew— only next time the neighborhood will look like post-soviet Romania.