Allen and places like it used to be perfectly good small towns. Now, thanks to white flight, Allen is on its way to being just another paved-over stripmall.
What the hell, let's just pave it all over. Who needs grass, trees, and bluebonnets anyway? More donut shops, oil-change places, and Wal-Marts -- that's the secret to happiness, isn't it?
You'd think so. Maybe when the sprawl reaches the Red River, the former residents of Dallas will finally figure out that we should have stayed and fought for our cities. By then it will be too late.
I don't blame you personally. I underatand why you moved to Allen. Real people don't move to Dallas anymore if they can help it. Only druggies, immigrants, preverts, gangbangers, and losers who can't escape still live "in town". To the average American, the cities don't exist anymore. Instead, they move to one of the paved-over prairie "cities" out on the fringes. That's mainstream America. To most people, living in a fringe city on the edge of a decaying metropolis is normal. To most people, exurban living is the only way real people live. Exurbia is Reality.
But it's not. It's a fantasy -- an illusion based upon cheap land, cheap construction, and cheap gas, and made possible only by the existence of immensely-expensive taxpayer-supported freeways. But the cheap gas is gone, and someday the cheap land will all be gone too, and the nice, new freeways will be traffic-clogged and decaying, and the open countryside of exurbia will be covered with the same ugly parking lots, dry cleaners, and dollar stores that the residents left behind in the Old Place. When that fantasy finally evaporates, maybe Americans will realize that you can't escape social problems by moving away from them, because they follow you wherever you go.
I did my time in L.A.: five years. I wouldn't move back there for anything. Texas is my home, and I will by God stay here and fight for it, because I like it the way it was. Unfortunately, the way it was is disappearing. Houston and Dallas are miniature versions of L.A. now, complete with gang warfare, SigAlerts, and corrupt government. And why? One big reason is because people who move here from out of state to "escape" don't really want to escape at all, because to escape means to change your way of life and live some other way. Instead, they come here for our low taxes and cost of living and bring their politics, lifestyle habits, and way of life with them -- and with these, the taxes, congestion, overcdevelopment, and other problems that turned their original homes into hellholes to begin with. And soon the cities and towns of Texas become miniature duplicates of wherever they came from.
I'm not putting you down personally. I know you came here looking for a better life and with the best of intentions. But as a native Texan I beg you to forget the way they do things in California. We don't care how they do it in California. America doesn't need another L.A.; we already have two San Franciscos (Austin being the second one) and we don't need any more sprawl. As a nation we need to quit running, move back into our g.d. cities and take them back from the g.d. idiots who ruined them. The alternative: more freeways, more strip malls, more suburbs left to rot and ghettoize as the white flight juggernaut rolls on.
It's too late to save Dallas, Plano, or Allen, but there's still some prairie left; there's still some Texas left. So when the brown folks start moving in and the traffic gets as bad in Allen as it was back home, please resist the urge to move out to Farmersville or Sherman or Krum wherever the sprawl goes next. Please stay and fight for your city.
Welcome to Texas.
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but fighting is'nt really viable option. We always seem to be outnumbered, Millions of us, only one of them in a courtromm and we lose again. But now that I have a mortgage, I have little more to get my back up on. Very thoughtful comments, BTW. It would have been great to somehow show our parents what the future held in store for us here.
Great post.
I enjoyed your post and agree with you.
I'm a native in an exurban county.