You've clearly never lived in a shitty neighborhood.
Only in Menlo Park, CA did I hear automatic weapons fire on the weekends. That was before East Palo Alto closed down Whiskey Gulch, flattened the area, and put in a Four Seasons hotel and an office building full of lawyers.
[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ma/fitchburg/crime (this one is the "nicer" of the two by a long ways, has come a long way since the recession. I would have no problem raising a family here)
[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ma/new-bedford/crime (this one won the "award" of #1 crime rate in the state a few years back)
I prefer those things not happen to me
I know this is a topic that tends to bring out hysteria instead of rational assessment of probability but seriously, it's not as bad as people think. That said, the upper class crowd should feel free to not move in. The added pressure from gentrification would probably not make things better if SF is any indication.
My point here is that you can live cheaply in these neighborhoods and while there are trade-offs the trad-off is not the "living in a war zone" that many people would have you believe.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/story-series/death-by-inst...
I have been to less worse areas in Detroit in 2015 and still decided not to be play early adopter and be "the guy with money" on the block. And I'm absolutely not upper class.
Even if you live there just for the amount of time it takes to renovate and flip the house, you will need to constantly guard your tools, materials etc. If the local community thinks you are not one of them, life gets hard. In the end I bought a fixer upper house in a solid working class neighborhood (in a different city) and life is great. But yes, a lot of people think you are only safe in the suburb, which is not true. There are safe pockets in most major cities, but you have to scout for a while until you know the area.
>the median income for a family was $57,245. Males had a median income of $47,350 versus $37,921 for females. The per capita income for the city was $22,972. About 14.6% of families and 19.4% of the population were below the poverty line
Compare this with an area like Greenspoint in Houston, where middle class office workers are regularly warned of muggings outside their office buildings
>nearly half of Greenspoint residents have an income of under $25,000 per year, well below the Houston median of over $44,000 per year
Respectfully, while you may not have been in a pristine gated community, I think you underestimate what it means to live in a truely shitty area, and I think your advice, while reasonable on the surface, does less than you think to prevent being a target of violent crime.
Fitchburg is an entire city (albeit a small one). Like Houston it has bad and good areas (I don't think there's any gated communities though). The nice areas are quite nice. The not nice areas are rows of boarded up houses that have been stripped of all the copper. Every rust belt city is like this. The ratios just vary.