I could say some of the same nostalgic things about the major city I grew up in, but that’s not the point of view of a new tourist or even a more recent resident.

The sidewalks of my city went from the charming and iconic bricks that gave the city character to “ugly cement” as well.
The restaurants familiar from my childhood that served the delights of the era no longer exist.(Well, actually, one has morfed from an affordable mom-and-pop paper plate and plastic fork seafood restaurant to a chain of upscale, expensive and chic locations in several cities, that tourists speak of and flock to.)
The parking lots at the nearby beaches are too crowded to enter at the weekends, despite huge fees, and the nouveau riche have pressured towns not to allow the clutter of cars of the hoi-polloi on streets near their seaside mansions.
The middle class and working class have been filtered out by high housing prices, so now only the extremely rich and the subsidized poor can live in the city. Commutes and traffic jams have worsened as workers move further out in search of affordable housing.
Other neighborhoods nearby have changed. Some of those the middle class lifelong residents would never have considered because of crime or racism or poor housing or poor schools are enthusiastically inhabited by the new young residents of the city who have no such memories, not even of city housing affordable to the majority of families who work for a living.

Little of this effects the hordes of tourists who visit the city, or those who come from elsewhere to work for a few days or weeks.
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Note: Those reading here should understand a bit about business licensing in Brazil and how it effects the society/culture. If a “camelo” (illegal street seller) were to be in a US city, s/he would simply trot down to the city licensing board and quickly get an inexpensive permit to sell. There are even city-promoted carts on the streets and in the malls, at a cheap rent, which keeps the merchandise quality controlled and legal as well. Brazil does not make this process, or opening any kind of small business, easy (although some small effort at improvement has been tried very recently). So instead of commending the entrepreneurial spirit, Brazil criminalizes the vendors and uses its police resources to harass such vendors (ostensibly for non-legal merchandise), who must be ready to flee police at a moment’s notice. So when someone makes disparaging and disrespectful comments about vendors “crap” cluttering up the sidewalk, that is the context (to my POV), a persistently hard-working person trying to make a living as s/he can (even perhaps instead of robbing people).