anyone else have boomer parents who lived in towns that were once nice for young people, but not anymore, but they just stayed there anyway? is this the standard experience in rural/suburban north america?
this was my experience. I never understood why they lived in my hometown (in southern ontario) until recently i put it together that it was actually cool for them back then. i mean its a nice old heritage town with pretty houses and gardens and local history yadda yadda, but i was like did they really just take the real estate marketing bait? they could afford to live elsewhere, like the city, and i know some people are just not city people but most people want to live somewhere vaguely cool or near the cool stuff in their 20s. like, god, what the fuck is the appeal of living in this retirement town with nothing going on, setting up shop here makes no sense and i always thought my parents, despite the fact i love them, where kinda stuffy and waspy for wanting to live there. because for 25 years of *my* life this place has had nothing going on but tumbleweeds passing through. like seriously the most exciting thing happening would be like, an old timey military LARP fair/parade marching band thing once in a while. but no, my parents are boomer/genx cusp, and in the 80s they would've bee able to go to bars and get a drink for literally $1. recently i got talking about it with them and found out there were all kinds of bars, nightlife etc. not anything crazy like any cool arts scene or whatever, but just a classy, tasteful, lively town for people in their 20s, not a city, but not the middle of nowhere. they were talking about this old lakeside manor where there'd be cocktails and multiple big rooms full of people etc, cool and hip but also under the radar, and then you could just walk to 3 other bars in 2 minutes. however by the end of the 90s a lot of the businesses closed down or the buildings were even demolished, etc, i guess the aging population saw less interest in doing things and they just occupied the houses, and few new houses got built (was so rare to have construction in that town, NIMBY culture etc). the old manor they used to drink at and then wander the streets at 2am, is now just a nice little public park with lots of grass and a swingset. when i think about it, the actual core of my hometown is a nice old timey downtown with plenty of storefronts (which could be bars or music venues etc but are mostly vacant or like, a tailor, a pawn shop, a mattress store) and density, nice globe streetlights, waterfront. the remnants of it are there, or the potential, i can definitely see the vibe. its got the cool indie movie hipster haunt vibe that everyone really wants in their 20s, but its reality is that most citizens there are 70. it has the infrastructure, but no human liveliness. of course the children of those boomers either just moved to the city or ended up weird, sheltered, isolated, etc, whatever other shit we all recognize about odd suburban children who just dont understand their place in the world because "the world" to them is grocery stores, department stores, plazas, malls, big open fields that go on endlessly, and parents house. sorry if this sounds like so obvious, i just put this together myself tho