My hometown is currently infested with tweakers, mostly places for adults and kids on probation at age 10. As for anything positive about it, it is where the 1975 cinematic classic One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was filmed. Frank Herbert (the guy who wrote Dune (THE ORIGINAL BOOK! And yes it started out as a book) is from here. Maybe not originally, but he became a pretty well onown Salem resident. There's even a shrine to him at what is now known as North Salem High

I think come spring time I'm going to take a trip to see my uncle who still lives in my hometown. I have to get away for a couple of days because I am reaching my breaking point living where I am now.

How far away is your uncle?

Rick Ace Rhodes wrote :

I think come spring time I'm going to take a trip to see my uncle who still lives in my hometown. I have to get away for a couple of days because I am reaching my breaking point living where I am now.

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My hometown has devolved into a crime-ridden hell hole. I try not to go back, sadly my mother still lives there.

He's about an hour and a half away. Up to two depending on the traffic for the day.

Vaporman87 wrote :

How far away is your uncle?

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I grew up on the northside of Houston. My neighborhood was always poor to middle class, but it was like a small town. It just went down hill from the early 80s on. Two main events that contributed was a federal order in 1978 that forced the school district to bus black students to every school in the district and the oil crash in 1986. It wasn't the students being bused, but the perception of it. After the federal order many people moved out of the area which caused a lot of outsiders to move in. The center of it all is a mall called Greenspoint that was built in 1976. It was considered an up scale mall, but it declined rapidly as the apartments in the area became low income.

Here is a video of the mall which was purchased in 2017. There are plans to convert the mall and surrounding area into a shopping and upscale living complex. However the area considers to have stigma of being high crime even though total crime has dropped in the past several years. The reason it has dropped is the crime as moved to other areas.