Drug dealers abhor a vacuum

We had a couple of brief, shining, glorious days of hope when we heard last weekend that the local version of Nino Brown had finally been arrested and evicted. The sun came out, birds were singing and no shady characters were parking next to our house for 10 minutes, dumping a year's worth of fast-food and malt liquor containers on the street, and then driving away with their drug of choice.

Alas, our joy was short-lived. Somebody else has taken up the niche in the ecosystem that was occupied by the old dealer, except that the new one apparently operates in a more mobile fashion: instead of dealing out of a house, he walks around the neighborhood all day, handing out "candy". In retrospective marketing-speak, I suppose it was naive to consider that an area with such high brand-name recognition and concentration of consumers would not immediately draw a willing supplier. 

I suppose the upside is that we should still see a net reduction in undesirables on our street because now they have to find a moving target.

[And the nerd in me wonders whether, if you assume that people on average drive 20-30mph, the average block in our area is about 50 yards etc, there's some optimum speed and route that he can walk in order to minimize the amount of time his customers need to find him.]