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.)
What I think needs to start happening is for groups of people to come together and build intentional communities in and around college towns and small and mid-sized cities in blue States. There’s not enough housing to how is these people in the traditional big cities in the States but if a bunch of people were to all move to the same place we can make new big cities complete with all the amenities and culture one expects and places like Southern Illinois and Eastern Washington and Oregon
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