Well I used to say "Not in my neighborhood" Nice little suburb of a small Kansas town. My neighbors themselves are in poor health and elderly but generally a nice couple- They bring by cookies and I help them bring in groceries or scrape ice off of their windows. My neighbors son (25yrs old) moved back in with them. He is a bad seed. Then his 55 year old wife, and a couple of kids, moved in too.

The son has caused nothing but grief for the block-- cops every so often- yelling and screaming outside all the time- Driving crazy up and down the block, in piece of crud cars with no mufflers and parts literally falling off in the street. Once I had a "chat" with him in my yard (with baseball bat in tow) because he thought my shade tree was a good place for a drunken nap, and my yard was a good place to barf. Just what my family needed to see coming home from church @ 11:00 in the morning!

Well finally the Son is put in jail for 5 years-- He gets in trouble in Prison and the gang bangers send their friends to rape, beat and attempt to murder his wife-- outside in the yard between the 2 houses. More late night cops and Ambulances. But mostly just a general feeling of insecurity in my own neighborhood.

So now we are back to locking the doors, locking the vehicles, and ensuring nothing important is left outside- Arming the Alarm system-- Like we did when we lived in the city--and my child understand why she can't run in the sprinkler by herself in the yard anymore. The main reason we moved here was we were wanting a safe environment to raise my little girl.

It's just sad that I thought I had a "safe place" and it all changed.

Not to many more years and the house will be ours- but now I am not so sure I want to live here "forever".

 

Sorry to hear that Chad but to let ya know there is a few houses here in Dawson that are for sale. And Dawson is very Quiet and very small town.

 

That is bad. It is impossible to get completely away from that junk. Even small towns like Dawson can end up with that.

 

Our neighborhood has similar neighbors, and what's worse is the police live across the street from them.
Our neighbor to the east of us and her husband are divorcing, last weekend he knocked down her mailbox and broke into her house. She had a restraining order against him, sad thing is, I liked him, he seemed like a really nice guy, it was her that I though was weird.

 

Wichita decetive lives to the north of us.

 

When my family lived in Southeast KCMO our apartment complex was 95% black and 5% everything else, well turns out that on the 3rd floor of our building was home to no less than 3 meth labs.

Well a deal went bad or something and someone decided to torch the bushes beside the building thus lighting the whole place on fire.

So we moved to Grandview in another apartment complex which when we moved in was 40% White 30% Black and 30% Latino. As the years went by the demographics changed massively to 10% White 50% Black and 40% Latino in fact the night that my father and I had pulled the last of our stuff out of that apartment and moved it to Olathe, There was a very large gathering in the parking lot outside of our apartment which by the end of the night turned in to a mini turf war in which 14 people where shot with 6 dieing later on.

When we moved to a Duplex in the "right side of the tracks" part of town there was a very small apartment complex across the street which was mostly Latino with some white families there, not long after we moved in did a large group of Brazilian families buy out a bunch of nearby duplex's and evict the current residents (Latinos) so more Brazilians could live there.

While fairly calm comparatively Olathe SWAT was called in twice in the 5 years we lived there one time we had two medevac choppers come by for pickups.

Thankfully it looks like my family has moved into a area that for now is staying demographically stable and thankfully quiet probably because we are next door to 2 schools and 2 churches and have a lot police patrols in our neighborhood.

The point of all this is to show that demographics are the biggest thing when it comes to an area changing for better or worse and by my experiences in all of my 23 years of life its usually race demographics that start everything so I'm not being racist, but I am not denying what I have seen.

 

The demographics of Dawson is farmers and Rednecks who like to drink and hunt sometimes both at the same time.