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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

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

I prefer those things not happen to me

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.

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.

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