Head to Amazon, Target, or Walmart to get your own Hunt a Killer board game! | The US is UGLY. How did this happen? How did we get this suburban sprawl that ...
I’d argue it’s not as extreme as you might think it is. I live just down the road from a town that only exists and grows, because it’s next to a major interstate. Population less than 17,000 but I swear there’s enough fast food places that the whole population could go out to eat at the same time. They all complain about not being able to find help yet there’s always at least one fast food place under construction. There’s a suburban sized mall sitting empty because all the businesses moved to strip malls. Two Super Walmart buildings; one of them is a megachurch now.
There’s empty strip malls too but they keep building more. There’s almost zero effort put into efficient traffic flow. Then you go past the interstate retail hellscape and it’s a weird mix of people in houses that look like upper middle class suburbanites, and single wide trailers whose owners look like they’re one car repair expense on their Kia from being homeless. They focus solely on growth; meanwhile, the town, and the region is shrinking. And businesses bitch that they can’t get anyone because “nobody wants to work”.
The town I grew up in is like that, too.
Just stop anywhere that has a bunch of restaurants listed on the interstate signs, it’s the same story in all of them. Faceless corporations dumping food places where they can.
And that doesn’t even get into the TIF scam all these towns are using. One local town declared an area full of well-kept lawyers’ offices as “blighted” and was going to let the lawyers use TIF to build new offices. This after decades of handing out funding and promises of no property taxes to retailers. Gotta grow forever!
I’d argue it’s not as extreme as you might think it is. I live just down the road from a town that only exists and grows, because it’s next to a major interstate. Population less than 17,000 but I swear there’s enough fast food places that the whole population could go out to eat at the same time. They all complain about not being able to find help yet there’s always at least one fast food place under construction. There’s a suburban sized mall sitting empty because all the businesses moved to strip malls. Two Super Walmart buildings; one of them is a megachurch now. There’s empty strip malls too but they keep building more. There’s almost zero effort put into efficient traffic flow. Then you go past the interstate retail hellscape and it’s a weird mix of people in houses that look like upper middle class suburbanites, and single wide trailers whose owners look like they’re one car repair expense on their Kia from being homeless. They focus solely on growth; meanwhile, the town, and the region is shrinking. And businesses bitch that they can’t get anyone because “nobody wants to work”.
The town I grew up in is like that, too.
Just stop anywhere that has a bunch of restaurants listed on the interstate signs, it’s the same story in all of them. Faceless corporations dumping food places where they can.
And that doesn’t even get into the TIF scam all these towns are using. One local town declared an area full of well-kept lawyers’ offices as “blighted” and was going to let the lawyers use TIF to build new offices. This after decades of handing out funding and promises of no property taxes to retailers. Gotta grow forever!