About a year ago I was at a dinner party with some friends that live in Oakland, off Lake Merritt. They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal!
Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th.
I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.
>>> They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal!
In high crime areas when you first experience it, you're pretty shocked. As time goes by, it just becomes part of the landscape and part of your life. You learn to live with it.
When I lived on the South Side of Chicago, it was the same way. When I moved in, I was constantly harassed for money by panhandlers and such. I saw people get shot, junkies lying in alleys, all kinds of stuff that make you numb to life in the "big city". I never had a friend who lived in Chicago who hadn't been robbed, mugged, beat up, raped, car broken into, apartment broken into or been in the middle of a drive-by. To a degree, most people felt it was a badge of honor living in such a dangerous place, experiencing these things and living to tell about it.
> To a degree, most people felt it was a badge of honor living in such a dangerous place, experiencing these things and living to tell about it.
The phrase 'badge of honor' strikes me as a phrase unlikely to be used by someone actually at a high degree of risk in a crime-ridden neighborhood. So just how different is the experience for different demographics in a high-crime locale? How divorced from a real, perpetual threat are these 'badge of honor' stories?
Disclaimer this is difficult to cite appropriately because the DoJ & Bureau of Justice Statistics sites are down due to the federal shutdown, taking lots of data with them. Also, it's a HNews comment, which means I'm writing quickly about something I don't actually know much about.
First: parent's comment mentioned the full range of crime, which it's useful to tease apart - violent crime (simple assault), serious violent crime (rape, robbery, aggravated assault), and property crime (car stereos).
As a 20s-30s professional white guy in San Francisco, just about everyone I know has an anecdote or two about scary situations. I know people who have been threatened or worse at gunpoint (very recently!), at knifepoint, and at fistpoint (surely there's a word for that). But statistically, most physical violence my demographic experiences are anomalies. We might live and work and walk in high crime neighborhoods, but we're rarely targets.
Even rape & sexual assault, in which 80% of victims know their attacker, is much more likely to victimize people with <$40k income (and the rate of violence increases the lower income gets). [1]
Other kinds of violence are less likely than rape to victimize acquaintances (50% robbery, 60% aggravated assault), but most of violent crime victims still make less than $35k. It isn't evenly distributed. [2] Put simply, most violent crime occurs between people with lower incomes who know each other. None of this should be too surprising.
Next, property crime. The rates of violent crime and property crime are highly correlated. However, property crime is more equal opportunity. Property crime is more likely to be committed by strangers and target across income groups. [4] So while I'm at relatively low risk of physical violence while walking down scary streets, parking a car or locking a bicycle is much higher risk.
Now, all of this gets more complicated when we consider a large transient population like SF has, but the gist is that more transients leads to a higher rate of burglary, larceny, and robbery than would be expected of an equal population increase made up of other groups, but not necessarily a higher rate of violent crimes unrelated to taking property. [3] The clumping of violent crime by demographic stands.
So, in a sense, I'm agreeing with you - scary neighborhoods do just become a 'part of the landscape'. But only for some of us. This 'landscape' and 'badge of honor' way of experiencing crime is a privilege to those who, relatively speaking, don't have much to worry about. For medium- and high-income individuals with limited or no social ties to other people in the neighborhood, living in a high crime locale is a minor economic problem (potential property loss) easily offset by low rent. There are a whole lot of other quality of life issues correlated with high crime for which I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting to move away from, but the mean streets aren't equally mean to everyone.
The first step to making your city not a crime-ridden violent shithole is to stop treating it like a badge of honor.
NYC is like this to some extent, but not nearly as extreme as the Bay Area.
Reminds of this choice quote from the Onion: "In addition, 3 million New Yorkers reportedly left the city because they realized the phrase "Only in New York" is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a naked man take a shit on a park bench is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience."[1]
The Bay Area is much worse in this regard. It's the sort of place where privileged rich people treat objectively terrible, horrible as some sort of rite of passage. There's some kind of sick, perverse pride in living in a 24-hour The Wire episode.
There is an attitude, a bohemian attitude, a beatnik attitude... that it is more free to live with the junkies and the prostitutes and the gang bangers than to be hiding away behind some gate.
This is what is ultimately being destroyed in San Francisco. A real understanding of what it means to be free.
People used to put up with the same violence in NYC, till they got sick of it and elected mayors who cared about fighting crime more (messrs giuliani and bloomberg). Back in the messrs koch and dinkins eras, NYC was a dump, by and large.
San Jose takes crime seriously and it's constantly up there among the safest large cities in the US.
One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously. SF is slowly taking crime more seriously. Maybe the EB can lear from SJ and SF a bit.
Undoubtedly some people will raise the issue of profiling criminal behavior[1]. If I had to choose between simmering street violence and occasional police excess (where one can seek redress), I'd choose the latter. Not sure why the EB is so anti-police so much as to spite their own safety. The good of being better policed vastly outweighs, to me, the occasional bad cop. But to each their own.
One phenomenon I don't understand so well. In NYC I'd see people dress us as (wannabe) mobsters (acquire their style), but they were no mobsters, tho maybe they idolized them in some way --they would complain that they'd get flack from the police. Maybe if they didn't try to pretend to be toughs the police wouldn't think they were toughs. I can see some similarities in the 'anarchists' in the EB.
> One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously.
'wish' is a good term to use here, since I don't see any other way of reducing crime in Oakland since they have no money to provide nearly enough police services, and can't really tax their residents any more since they're already financially overburdened.
That is the most commonly cited neighborhood where people are shocked that there is so much crime. That's a very historically depressed neighborhood, less than the old E. 14th days, but just because there are two streets with cute old 1900's houses does not mean it's safe at night.
East Lake isn't that much cheaper than other options, and a mid-high crime dump. You'll be hard pressed to find a resident who's excited to be there, especially after a year or three.
Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th.
I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.