Actually, it looks like for the first quarter of 2010, Chatham (South Side) has the most violent police beat. (Which is just south of Grand Crossing.)
Mainly true for San Francisco too, but that’s because the hills are bedrock, so when the ‘big one’ hits, those houses will be left standing.
Although as I said in my earlier post, pretty much the whole of S.F. is ‘tony’ (if by ‘tony’ you mean ‘ridiculously expensive’). YMMV, of course.
Fair point, Kyla. But the rich hilly bits are white…
I lived in Point Richmond for a while and it’s a bit sketchy.
In the Cape Town example, the areas on the hills and mountain are really, really gorgeous. Those areas are expensive for the same reason beachfront property is typically quite expensive.
Agreed, on both counts. But I love to trot out the Meskerem murder/suicide thing, especially when I’m taking friends from out of town to eat there. 
I sometimes suspect that I’m not a very nice man.
Well, of course. That’s a problem you’ll (presumably) run into in any large city, though. Lousy nukes.
I was really surprised to read this…it doesn’t tally at all with my impression of St. Louis.
Out of curiosity, when you say ‘the south half’, what are you referring to? Do you mean the suburbs (like South County, Sappington, and Chesterfield?) The suburbs around the city of St. Louis are indeed almost exclusively white- as many others have pointed out, gentrification is definitely a factor around here. Some of these suburbs are in the county of St Louis- but no one here really considers them part of the city of St. Louis.
Downtown itself…I don’t know. You see white and black people everywhere you go. Maybe you see more black people than white?..I don’t know, I think it depends on the neighborhood. When I think of it, it sure doesn’t scream ‘most racially divided’ to me.
I’m sitting here trying to think if I’ve got some sort of blind spot to this. I don’t know.
As to the hell hole question that was posed, I can speak a lot more confidently: no way. Downtown St. Louis is not a place you would feel unsafe in if you’ve ever visited an urban area before. The transportation is pretty clean, if limited; there are so many major tourist attractions downtown that the place is kept in clean, relatively safe working order. On a day that a major sports game is playing, the whole city is filled with fans, heading in leisurely throngs towards the stadiums. There is a huge amount of diversity in restaurants, and some nice cultural institutions as well, like the Black Rep and the City Museum. Yeah, it’s a smaller city, but a pretty cool one.
Also, in the Cape Town example, the Cape Flats are sandy and some parts are subject to frequent flooding in winter.
Not really. The rule of thumb I heard most often is “East of Troost Avenue.”
In Dallas proper, the bad part is south and southeast of downtown.
When I was in high school in the late '70s, we took our horses down to the State Fair grounds late Friday nights for horse shows over the weekend. 15 years later, that part of town became so bad that the police wouldn’t drive through there on their own. I think it has calmed down a lot since then, but still nothing like when I was a kid.
Drake
West of downtown, but east of the suburbs, you got your St. Louis City. Soulard, Tower Grove, Shaw, Dogtown, the Hill, Carondelet, to name a few examples. I was only talking about the city, not the county. And not downtown either, but the residential neighborhoods. Downtown is part of the aforementioned racially mixed narrow band across the middle.
Really? This is outside of my personal experience, but a friend of mine grew up in South Central and we’ve had a couple of rather deep conversations about our backgrounds and frankly, she seems pretty traumatized by the experience. (I’m using her words here; she’s of the belief that inner-city life is literally a violation of human rights.) I don’t know that she experienced daily violence or anything like that that would mark a neighborhood as “bad” to an outsider, but growing up in a place with very few economic and cultural assets seems to have left a really permanent mark on her psyche. We’re both grad students in one of the top programs in our field in the country, and rather than feeling proud of her accomplishment in getting out of the situation in which she grew up, she mostly seems troubled and upset that she doesn’t fit in with her classmates and that no one understands her experiences. Very people she knows went to college. I don’t think she knows anyone that went to grad school.
I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the stuff mentioned in this thread is from the perspectives of outsiders who happen to go into these neighborhoods, saw that there wasn’t any visible violence, and decided that it wasn’t that bad. But from our privileged point of view (hey, I’ve wandered around the Tenderloin and Richmond myself, nothing bad happened), we’re missing the problems that people who actually live there have to deal with, and may be dismissing legitimate problems that they have to suffer through because we “know” that those neighborhoods aren’t “that bad”.
In closing, I’m kind of drunk and may regret this post in the morning if it turns out not to make any sense. I feel like you should be impressed at how awesome I am at typing while drunk, though.
I came in here to say the bad part of Los Angeles is most of it. But I suppose if you had to focus on one area, former South-Central (now officially called South Los Angeles) is a pretty good bet.
Dubai doesn’t really have bad parts - I’d go anywhere by myself at 3am with no worries. The nicer areas are Jumeirah and Umm Seqeim along the southern coast, and the poorer areas include Karama which is a bit more northerly and inland.
In Memphis, the North side of town is the roughest, but the whole city has a lot of crime and one must be careful there. Some areas around the airport are not that great either. Most of Memphis is awash with drugs, including crack cocaine and meth. There are gangs who weren’t there 10 years ago. There are now Hispanics, most who are illegals, with some, especially Salvadorans being gang members (like M-13 etc.) terrorizing other Latinos. A legal Mexican immigrant was murdered by a Latino gang member for money recently. Mexican/Hispanic places get knocked over a lot in Memphis because the criminals know that a lot of people are illegal and going to the cops might mean detention and deportation.
In Jackson, Mississippi, a lot of neighborhoods west of I-55 highway were the working class and poorer areas. The middle class/wealthy people lived in the east and the north of the city. The whites, like in Memphis have moved to the suburbs. Really, all in all, Jackson is not a bad town. Like Memphis, just stay away from the drug element and one will do fine.
I think people are scared of crime because they see it all the time on the news and on the internet. The facts are that most people are murdered by family members, “friends”, acquaintences, jealous girlfriends/boyfriends, or someone in a relationship. Murders also happen a lot between strangers looking for drugs or other trouble. The random stranger abduction murder is still rare.
Robberies usually happen in places that is easy to rob or places with a lot of money. Convenience stores, especially at night are easy targets. It is always good to travel in groups of people at night. Thieves and muggers want to find easy targets. Women by and large are smaller and weaker than men so they are a target. People who are from out of town and are unfamiliar with the area are targets. People who show wealth are targets because they are usually soft and weak and can replace what has been ripped off, which justifies to the robber why a particular person was robbed.
The demographics of an area also shows where most crime is. Poor areas have more crime simply because the people there cannot get work that will support them, with many selling drugs or stealing to help themselves out of poverty and I think as a personal “F U” to society. The demographics thing is an 800 pound elephant in the middle of the room shitting everywhere that is being ignored, because it is not politically correct to point fingers at ceetain segments of society.
Lessee…I escaped Philly a few years back, and it’s easier to define the good neighborhoods than the bad 'uns. Society Hill and the historic district are still relatively good, as are the South Street area and Fabric Row (south 4th St.) and most of the Northeast. Philly, though, is another of those places where you can go from safe to slum in the space of a block or two; for example, 12th and Pine is nice, where 13th and Walnut can be hazardous to your health after dark. Interestingly enough, a lot of former slum area in South Philly (4th and Washington and south) has gone from slums to nice new semi-detached homes, while the Point Breeze area (west of Broad Street, south of Washington Ave) is a war zone. West Philly outside of the University City area is mostly rough, and a large chunk of North Philly/Fishtown/Kensington is referred to as ‘the Badlands’ with good reason. The Oregon Avenue corridor isn’t too bad, and the Riverview section (waterfront from the Ben Franklin Bridge south to the Walt Whitman bridge) is OK for the most part.
On the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, Camden used to be legendary as one of the worst slums outside of Newark but, at least along the river, is improving. Outside of Camden, most of South Jersey is OK, with the exception of the Inlet area of Atlantic City, which is the historic slum and hasn’t really improved much over the last century.
-MMM-
I really don’t know where people are getting this. Compared to thirty years ago, the incidence of crime in most of L.A., as in most other major cities of the country, has gone down very significantly. That is, if you mean “crime” specifically, and not just areas inhabited mostly by renters, near commercial streets, and not at all like the tracts of spacious single family houses in Encino, or neighborhoods hidden miles away in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills.
Recently on CNN I heard some commentator saying that crime topped the list of national issues, and that’s patently ridiculous. Chicago is currently the exception that proves the rule; in the news items about the crime wave there we frequently are reminded of the contrasting situation in other towns. If by “bad” you mean dirty sidewalks, the occasional beggar, and graffiti, well, I’ve seen those things in every other city I’ve ever been in. On the other hand, if you mean the peculiarities of geography and climate that make L.A. different from other places, that’s a different issue and I would tend to agree with some of those complaints.
Regarding my earlier remarks on South Central, I don’t mean to discount its crime problem completely, but I despise the sort of people who are so paranoid they won’t, for example, go to the Exposition Park museums even on a sunny summer day, because it’s in South Central. Nor would I care to take a long walk there after dark, and I would consider taking a bus under those circumstances to be a dodgy proposition. But the trains have always seemed to be well policed, and I always felt safe on them.
I call your Newark and raise you Juarez.
Generally the further south you go in Seattle, the less desirable it is. South of downtown feels like a totally different place from north or east of it (west is the water).
The general consensus in Oslo is that the less affluent eastern part is somewhere you need to look out. Bygdøy and Frogner in the west are super posh, and the first person to take me and some others on a tour of the city warned us “not to cross this bridge after nightfall” as we walked into Tøyen, east of downtown. And then we saw all the immigrants, of course. Gotta love homogeneous cultures. :rolleyes: Great food and bars there though.
I assume this was asked out of curiosity and not practicality, cause I will say, for both of these cities, I have never once felt threatened. In Oslo, it was perfectly safe to walk all up and down Tøyen and Grønland after dark, which I did on several occasions. Those may be the worse neighborhoods, but walking there is like not getting your favorite flavor of pizza.
The bad part of Detroit, where I lived until recently, is pretty much the entire city.
Here in Seattle, the bad part is in the south.