25/06/2025
Like any social media space, the Quad Cities sub on Reddit can be a depressing place, but there are occasional redeeming interactions that make it worth checking out. This week someone asked, "What is one thing you dislike about the Quad Cities no one really talks about?" I kind of stream-of-consciousness ranted out the following, but I think it does accurately portray my feelings about the QC's lack of community pride, so I'm sharing it here.
𝐖𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐦 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬.
People think we don't deserve nice things, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for them when anything bad happens. You can see it all over this thread. "We shouldn't have more parks, because there are homeless." Having a better quality of life for everyone, and trying to address the national problem of homelessness are not mutually exclusive. This also causes us to accept less, because public officials are like, "It's just Davenport, we should just accept what we can get."
People who have barely traveled think things are terrible here. I've been to 30 states, and haven't discovered an obviously better place to live. There are places with better amenities or higher quality of life, but they tend to have insanely high cost of living. I can live here and visit the Rocky Mountains every year, or I can live in Denver and work 60 hours a week to break even, and barely get to visit the mountains. Living here I can visit Chicago any time, but not deal with Chicago freeway traffic every day.
People that have lived here forever take for granted everything we have going for us. The whole phrase "bridge to nowhere" implies that the Mississippi riverfront is nowhere. People come from around the world, or pay 10s of thousands to go on Viking cruises to see the Mississippi, but to us it's just "the river." We have a PGA golf tournament. There are only 36 of those, and we are something like the 135th largest metro in the US. I'd certainly call that punching above our weight, not to mention the whole charity per capita aspect of it. The Figge is an extremely impressive art museum for a metro our size, but it gets ignored by most in the QC. We have a waterski show that rivals anything you see at Seaworld or wherever, but most people don't even know about it. The QC makes a ton of money off of tourism, but many locals don't think anyone visits here.
On the other end of the spectrum, people in Des Moines think that they live in the best metro in the world. As annoying (and wrong) as they are about it, overly positive thinking works out a lot better for them than overly negative thinking does for us. When people are proud of their hometown, that feeling rubs off on visitors.
But to wrap this up, I think the whole "We don't deserve nice things," attitude towards quality of life improvements is the worst consequence of our low self-esteem. Quality of life is everything in the modern world. People who work from home can live anywhere. If we make this a great place to live that also has $160k nice homes, we don't have to constantly chase the next manufacturing plant or data center. Companies come where people want to live. If we don't build amenities because we have other problems, that's just asking to head into a death spiral.
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