It doesn't have to be a negatively or positively way, but when someone says "I've lived here my whole life and I've never seen xyz," I'm just saying it's possible (probable?) they dont see it, because they don't have an outside perspective.
Another problem for "natives" is imported stupidity. You might not notice a general behavior shift in your general area if its newcomers mostly causing it.
Examples might be my new back door neighbors. If you polled them or otherwise measured say, just an example, their "commitment to green energy" right now, and used it as an indicator for our area... It'd be off the charts. They're hippy-dippy 30-something's who just moved for the first time to a rural area, and when I explained that their water comes from a well and the pump requires their house electricity to be on... and that we have power lines blow down out here in winter storms... they babbled for ten minutes about how they're going to put in "solar or wind someday".
Yeah. Fine. Do you have a generator? No? Okay, I'll be expecting you as you trudge through three feet of snow to come borrow one next winter. I have three. If one of those isn't operational, you'll get to fill up water jugs and hike back.
So... That's just an example to illustrate that looking at an area, sometimes there are changes going on the folk who've been there for decades, just don't notice.
I'm sure there are areas where the "non-imported" folk aren't racist and haven't associated with a new crowd that is.
I'll give an example that's regarding racism.
Our Latino population in Denver tends to be very insular. Especially the large number of illegal immigrants. It's the language barrier mostly.
This hasn't changed in my lifetime, and anyplace West of I-25 over near Federal Blvd generally centered on Downtown, has always been a majority Latino community.
What seems to be changing over the years is the overall view of the Latino community, somewhat as slave labor... this was not the case when I was a kid.
And here's what I suspect. It's due to the massive in-rush of Californians to Colorado during my adulthood.
They truly do look down on the Latino community far more than old-school Denverites.
Government isn't helping. Latino gang violence in a few places started to rise dramatically, until DPD started randomly beating everyone. Seriously. DPD has major problems. At least they're Equal Opportunity beatings... They beat on everyone.
They imported some California LE personnel there too, methinks.
Pretty blunt, and I'm sure some Californian will take it poorly, but that's what I've seen here.