Make Amarillo Great Again? Here’s One Thing We Can Do.
Amarillo can catch a bad rap. No, really, it does. When you look on Reddit or other forums like that, when people ask about the city it gets absolutely crushed.
Sure, there are a few people that come to the rescue and defend the city, but the amount of "stay away", "nothing to do here", etc. comments I see are astounding.
Being someone who has lived in the suburbs of major cities my entire life, I can say with confidence that moving here was a major adjustment for me. It's not that it's a terrible city, it's just far smaller than any place I've lived with no major city around it.
One of the things I've noticed though is there IS a way to make the city feel better and maybe give it a better rep when it comes to people asking how Amarillo is to live. That would be simply cleaning up the city.
When I say clean up the city, I mean just that. There are a lot of places in Amarillo that are just flat-out dirty. Any time you've got a city with multiple spots like that in it, it's going to catch a "dirty" label.
When I say dirty, we're talking about older buildings with signs that look like they're just as old as the city. There are a lot of neighborhoods that aren't kept up very well and just have trash floating around them. The alleyways in the city need to be maintained MUCH better. I know the one behind my house is a disaster, and there are dumpsters everywhere for people to place their trash.
If Amarillo essentially got a facelift, I think the narrative of what Bomb City is would change nearly overnight, and it could also help lower the crime rate in the city. Just something for the next Mayor to think about.