I know many people will be assholes in the comments bc this is Reddit 🥲 and people need to make everything about them….(looking at the transplants who are gonna take this as an attack even though it’s not)
but I’ll share anyways because I know a few people who feel the same, and I wonder if there’s more.
I have been struggling for the past couple years. I barely leave my house anymore. When I do, it’s the same few places that I know I can take back roads (that will soon enough prob not be back roads) to get to. Luckily, I started a job that I can do online a few months ago, and that’s cut down a lot of my anxiety. I lived in Wilmington because it was chill, laid back, and felt like a small town. I moved to a couple cities in my early 20s, but always ended up back here because I couldn’t handle the city life for long.
Everyone I talk to that’s moved here scoffs at me when I say the traffic/driving is a lot, because they say “this is NOTHING compared to where I moved from”, and I’m like, ok, Well, this is nothing compared to what Wilmington was like pre-2020. Introverted, sensitive people tend to want to live in smaller towns because they don’t like the hustle/bustle & rat race pace of life. It’s overwhelming. Even when I drive home from my second job at 10pm at night, cars are flying up on me, tailgating me, racing to cut me off. It’s just A LOT. My boyfriend, who comes from generations of Wilmingtonians, barely leaves his house anymore too. We both just get too overwhelmed by all the cars and people everywhere. And just the lack of care - cars not stopping at crosswalks, people not following basic driving rules, people not respecting personal space. But we don’t have the means to move somewhere smaller, and this is where our family is.
It feels like we’re being squeezed out of our hometown. A lot of the people we knew have moved away, or moved to the outskirts of Wilmington, that are unfortunately starting to get overdeveloped too.
It’s just an unfortunate, uninvited, massive shift in the place we call home.
Obviously this is because of economic issues our country is facing, and the people who have moved here were priced out of their hometowns. The rich people who moved here to capitalize on our affordable cost of living - fuck yall selfish asses, but the younger people just trying to find cheaper living, I totally understand. That’s why I said, my feelings about this should not be taken as an attack. Everyone across the country is feeling these strains in housing and affordability, and it’s a shame.
Because small town people deserve affordable small towns (that aren’t ghost towns with zero jobs) to have quiet, laid back lives in, and people who enjoy the rat race/fast pace life should have affordable places to live that offer them that. But I don’t see how anyone enjoys the way Wilmington is currently - to me, it’s clearly becoming overpopulated for the size of the town, especially with college in session.
There’s gotta be a tipping point?
