As most of you know, I recently got married. My bride moved in with me, but we have been actively looking for a much smaller town than the one I’ve lived in for the past year. We decided on a specific area of Alabama and have been visiting towns and judging what the real estate market looks like in each. And, as you can imagine, we’re looking at crime statistics and demographics. I’m a realist, and I know how the crime statistics break down. I’m not going to apologize for that.

My wife and I focused a lot of our attention on one town and made several visits. The street that had a very nice coffee shop and restaurant also had a lot of abandoned stores. We asked someone we met from a couple towns over if they thought the town was dying because stores looked to have been closed for some time. The gentlemen told us that the town has been that way for 20 years. Hmmmm.

On our next trip there, we had a list of houses that were for sale. We entered addresses into the GPS and started exploring various neighborhoods. With it being a small town, we didn’t have far to go between addresses. What we noticed was many very nice houses outnumbered by ones that looked like they could be used as the set for Sanford and Son. “What the hell is going on here?”

We decided the town was neither dying nor growing, but if we had to guess its condition in 10 years, it would be worse. That town is either going to die or someone is going to step up and “gentrify” it. Counting on a group gentrifying it, to me, means it’s going to die either way. Left alone, it will probably get worse. But if the “Left” gets involved, it won’t be a place we’d want to live either. In my experience, gentrification is almost never done by the Right. You are free to disagree in the comments, but that’s the problem.

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