Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

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Yes I have[1][2]. It's really not bad unless you drive yourself nuts worrying about things that will probably never happen to you. Yes, you see and hear the effects of crime everywhere but as long as your not know by your neighbors to be an ass, your house is harder to rob than most of the nearby ones and you don't associate with the wrong people you'll be fine. It's not like there's stray bullets coming through your walls once a week (if there are odds are it will be the police who fired them, not that it makes it any better). If you're the person who freaks out over some people in the street getting in a fight or a gunshot a few blocks over then yeah, it's gonna be bad.

[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)

According to the Wikipedia page for Fitchburg

>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.

What are the income stats for all of Houston?

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.

murder is rare. assault, robbery, and burglary are not.

I prefer those things not happen to me

People live their whole lives in these sorts of neighborhoods without ever personally being assaulted, robbed or burglarized.

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.

I think the point of most other comments is that you greatly underestimate the issues in an area like the Detroit "Red Zone" aka the 48205 ZIP code.

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.

As someone who lives in a really shitty part of SF, crime will affect you. Your apartments garage will get broken into, your packages will be stolen. People you don’t know will brazenly ask to buzz in at all times. If you are female, you will be harassed. If you are male, you may be harassed. It’s tolerable and my landlord has all kinds of fantastic security measures but it’s no breeze. Fights on the street can get pretty heated and you never know when something bad will go down. I balance all that with an apartment large enough to run my company from and entertain my dog but I’m totally down to move once I have enough capital to get a proper office and a nice place.

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