Granby is pretty factionalized as it is. You have no idea as to how factionalized. Especially given that most of the factions lie as to their intentions and goals. Add refugees to the mix and it gets even more divided with a City Council made up of refugees trying to loot Granby of what little there is left from the shutdown of the lead and zinc mines in the late fifties and the fact that there isn’t much left.
The problem with economic refugees is that they seldom, if ever, want to allow the natives to live as they have been on straitened circumstances but must try to change it back to the very places they have destroyed. But Granby ALWAYS wins in the end. At the end of the day Granby has the human capital left from the sheer fact that the best and brightest can do far better for themselves in Neosho, Joplin, Carthage, Monett and especially Springfield. The best and brightest come back as changelings, half of them benign or even good, but some twisted and vicious like the previous mayor who centralized everything — fire department, police farce, the parks, even the Granby Cemetery — destroyed the only checks to his unaccountable power in the fire department, elected city collector, TIF Board, and even the Cemetery Board. Few, if any of the Granby City employees live inside Granby, when it used to be that city workers had to live inside and pay taxes to this municipality. Dissent was ordinanced away and the main dissenter, myself, arrested about a dozen times and threatened with arrest for ridiculing the corrupt mayors and City councils and employees the past three years. What you have is a system in which the refugees like yourself found common cause and ground with the absolute worst & greediest & stupidest of the natives to loot Granby even more.
There is a reason that a house in Granby is at least a tenth the price of a similar house in California, and 60%, if that, of a house in Neosho.
There is a reason why a native woman put in $109,000 in building materials and her new house inside Granby is worth only $75,000.
There is a reason why there are no Schubert-Mitchell $250,000 McMansions being built within the city limits of Granby but plenty of them outside Granby.
There is a reason why former mayors and councilmen and even city employees brag about no longer living within the Granby city limits.
There is a reason why I was able to buy old properties for pennies on the dollar simply because they were within Granby because the heirs to the old people who died didn’t want to live in Granby.
Now if you do move inside Granby and like most of the others before you once you get a bellyful of Granby decide to sell out then do so, but you simply cannot expect me to go along with your inevitably wanting to get a Neosho or Monett kind of price once you decide to move on so you will have enough money to get out of Granby and so agitate the corrupt City Hall to do so against the interests of those who live here and have no intentions of moving to do so. I don’t have a problem with you moving just outside Granby since it means that you won’t be adding to the main Granby problem which is its City Hall. Everyone living just outside Granby knows all about Granby and they don’t cause Granby people any trouble any more than people living in East Berlin caused West Berliners any problems. But the odds of you as a refugee coming to Granby and not being some sort of zombie or parasite wanting to bite me or the rest of the natives who love Granby the way it was pre-1987 in the neck are mighty slim or none, and I think Slim — if he ever existed — has just left the room. Refugees and zombies are so predictable because their needs & wants & hungers are always the same so they inevitably act the same.
The biggest reason for continuing Granby poverty and decline is because of its corrupt and idiotic City Hall and why the best thing to do is to dis-incorporate the municipal corporation, sell off the city utilities and let it go back to the County, which while corrupt at least doesn’t want to get involved in Granby poly-tics. Then it won’t matter about City Hall corruption because they won’t have a corrupt police farce to enfarce theys’ [s]will. Until private property rights for all are restored it makes no sense for making more than the bare minimum of effort to advance your property inside Granby. You can’t tear out that rotten single-wide from the Truman Administration because you need it to replace it with another used double-wide unless you are on the City Council. Dis-incorporate Granby and there will then be all manner of reason to build a Schubert-Mitchell McMansion or maybe even a Burger-Shack.
Granted, while I do not know you, I’m sure not hearing anything different from you that I’ve not already heard from the scores of refugees before you, so I think I won’t be manning the welcome wagon any time soon.