When I lived in Houston in the early part of the 2000s I spent about a year in Gulfton, a heavily Hispanic area on the Southwest side of the city.
I was straight out of college and aside from the airport, I had never really been in the city, so I didn’t know what parts of town had good or bad reputations.
Well it turned out Gulfton had a pretty bad rap. Judging from the looks co-workers gave me when I told them where I was living, you’d think people were shooting each other in the streets in broad daylight. One manager at work even went so far as to circle some apartment ads in the classifieds and tell me that I should seek living arangements elsewhere.
But the apartment complex I was in was really nice, the management didn’t tolerate any crap from the tenants, and they had 24-hour security. You had to show your ID just to get on the grounds.
Granted the area around there is a little rough, and I probably wouldn’t want to raise a family there. But for a single guy in his 20s, the place was just fine so long as you exercised common sense like locking your doors, not leaving any valuables in the car, etc. I never had any problems.
Another co-worker, who started about the same time I did, and lived in the “nice” part of town - she got her car window busted the first week.
Hackney (East London, the English one). Some of it genuinely is fairly dodgy, at least if you fit a certain type - either being a teenage boy or wearing a suit and being drunk. Most of it isn’t rough at all and some parts are positively genteel. Yet it all gets known as scary. TBF, most people here are quite happy with that reputation because property prices are high enough as it is.
I live in Southeast Washington DC.
'Nuff said.
The southern part of Atlanta inside the 285 perimeter. It’s a very large area where there are a couple of bad neighborhoods, but there are also regentrified neighborhoods with half-million dollar houses where there’s little crime apart from the occasional panhandler or car burglary. White folk from the suburbs only enter the southside when absolutely necessary, like to go to a Braves game or take the kids to the aquarium.
I guess I should concede that if you’re unfamiliar with the area, one could easily detour into a dangerous-looking-and-maybe-really-a-bit-dangerous neighborhood, resulting in a nervous half-hour figuring out how to get back to the interstate. But hey, that’s what GPS are for.
Hahaha - if you don’t mind my asking, are you in Anacostia? I’ve known people who truly believed that, as soon as they saw the “SE” marking on a street-sign, they’d be shot dead. Crazy. That said, Anacostia genuinely is somewhat dangerous. Not “set foot there and you’re dead” dangerous - I plan to head out to the Smithsonian there soon - but there’s enough crime to give a reasonable person pause.
For my own example - the Tenderloin, in San Francisco. Lived there for a summer while interning in law school. Everyone I told about it looked at me askance, but I loved the place - nice building, convenient location, and inexpensive curry everywhere I looked. What’s not to like? Granted, there were a lot of homeless people - but there are lots of homeless people everywhere in SF. One of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen was the SF Apple Store on the day of the iPhone launch - people lined up for blocks to buy a $600 phone (with contract!), with dozens of panhandlers begging them for spare change. Sort of made me feel embarassed for capitalism.
I had a friend who was a store manager in Center City Philadelphia. There was another store in the chain out in the burbs. My friend was the only manager in the CC store and was quite young. The store in the burbs had two managers and about twenty part timers vying for a managership job. The suburb managers and the part-timers always trash-talked my friend since he was a ‘kid’ (mid twenties). When you brought up that they could easily have a manager job in the city store they would hem and haw and moan that the city was soooo scary and full of negroes and such. One of them was made to work at the Center City store for a week for an inventory and when the day was done he just waited in the store’s foyer until his wife picked him up. He was afraid to even walk a 1/4 block to the convenience store but instead complained about being hungry and thirsty.
Mind you, this store was in the best neighborhood in Philly only a couple of blocks from Rittenhouse Square.
I was going to mention SE DC, specifically Anacostia. Now I’m afraid to even talk to AnnaLucretia
OK, see, the Tenderloin was my “omg” section of San Francisco. I was staying in the Hotel Nikko only a few blocks away and walked through the Tenderloin, only to see multiple drug dealers dealing openly on the street, not even trying to hide what’s going on. I have never seen that in Chicago so close to a very nice area. I wasn’t afraid of being murdered or anything, but man, serious drug dealing there!
I used to live in Glassell Park in Los Angeles. It’s the home of the Avenues gang… but it was an all right neighbrohood. I used to have to defend living there all the time. Other than the local tradition burning old christmas trees in the intersection (happened too many times between Jan 1 and Jan 15th last year to just be a one-off) nothing really happened.
Until one day the LAPD had a shoot out a block from my apartment and I couldn’t go home for 4 hours because they had blocked off the streets around my building… then I couldn’t really defend it… and then months later 80 LAPD/MARSHALLS/FBI agents swarmed the neighborhood and arrested 20 gangmembers and were patrolling the streets in Cop-carts… I had to move.
BUT thousands of people live there just fine everyday.
See, the edge of the TL near the Apple Store is fairly cleaned up, but there are some legitimately bad parts. Ferret Herder’s stories don’t strike me and exaggerated or unlikely at all. Like a lot of SF, it goes block-by-block.
Speaking of SF, there’s been this dumbass movement the past few years to rename the Divisadero corridor “NOPA,” which is short for NOrth of the PAnhandle. Disregarding the fact that IT’S NOT NORTH OF THE PANHANDLE, it’s basically a lame attempt to get white people to move into a historically black neighborhood. Too bad, because the people of the Western Addition have built in into a great little area- with its blemishes- but all the NOPA yuppies are gonna proudly take credit for the inevitable gentrification.
Apparently, I’m angrier about this than I thought.
It is technically another city, but to hear some people in Ann Arbor talk about it, taking a step in Ypsilanti is like taking your life into your hands. Awhile ago here on the SDMB someone asked for advice about living in Ann Arbor and a bunch of people were like “DON’T LIVE IN YPSI OMG YOU’RE GONNA DIEEEEEEE.” (This may be slight hyperbole.)
It was crazy. I mean, Ann Arbor is definitely the nice of the two towns, but Ypsilanti is hardly some kind of hellish warzone ghetto.
Ypsi seems to be like an average college town, with it’s good sides and bad sides. A coworker of mine almost got mugged while he was out jogging there, and there’s some crime on EMUs campus, but I wouldn’t think of it as being any worse off than a place like Kalamazoo or Canton or something.
As for my town, there’s a stretch of neighborhood across the street from my old high school called “Shacktown.” I have never gone in there save for once or twice when visiting my friend when I was younger. It has improved slightly, but you still couldn’t get me to go inside of it on my own free will.
We used to live in an older, more run-down neighborhood. Once a lady got stranded with her vehicle alongside our road and, reluctantly, asked to use our phone. She was then getting trouble rousing whoever it was she needed help from, so we offered her to leave her car parked in front of our house overnight. She refused, saying she had to find someone soon because the area was so bad and her car would get jacked.
We lived there for seven years and heard of no crime there at all.
Locals avoid north city (anything east of Goodfellow Ave. and north of Page Ave.) like the plague. Its not like I’d recommend walking down the street at two in the morning, but the have a unreasonable fear of it is ridiculous.
I don’t know from Kalamazoo or Canton, but it seems okay to me. There’s crime in Ann Arbor, too. I know: I get an email about every single crime reported in the campus area. There’s usually at least one or two a week. Someone got mugged just last week. (Although that is a little more serious than most of the crimes reported in these emails.)
I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to think New York City is more dangerous, in general, than it is. This especially applies to the Bronx, which sort of got ingrained in a lot of peoples’ minds as Urban Hell due to the crime problems of the 70s and 80s. This isn’t to say the South Bronx doesn’t have a lot of poverty, but its hardly a place you wouldn’t feel safe walking down the street in. Harlem (which is in Manhattan) also has a bad reputation – I point out to people that Bill Clinton’s office is here (and indeed, this was considered a big indicator of Harlem’s having “arrived”).
As NYC continues its upward mobility, I suspect this will change. In 20 years, nobody will be able to afford to live there 
People from the northern suburbs sometimes have an irrational fear of even downtown or Midtown, let alone more south from there.
I used to live on 13th Bay st in Norfolk Va. There was a murder in the building behind mine, and the bikers that lived kitty cornered across the street liked to shoot out transformers, and there were hookers and drug dealers around but I never had anything stolen by a stranger, and was only verbally assaulted once.
My roomie moved out with a bunch of my stuff, so i was robbed by a ‘friend’ and once when I was walking back from the beach across the main street to get to my duplex I stopped and used a pay phone, and a couple guys in a shitty red econobox car started to follow me slowly asking how much i charged and other ‘professional’ questions … and parked in my driveway and pounded on my door. I answered with a gun and they left me alone …
But really, I didn’t have any real trouble in the area at all …
I live in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, and many of my friends refuse to come to my place at night now. 
It’s no worse than Montreal’s NDG or Verdun, which is where I and many of my college friends lived because it was cheap.
I live outside Albany NY, and there are two Neighborhoods that have a certain reputation. Hamilton Hill (Schenectady) and Arbor Hill (Albany). I guess they are rough neighborhoods to live in, but they’re more just impoverished neighborhoods. People I know refuse to even drive through these neighborhoods for some reason.