In many western cities - and I won't name names - the downtown area is not pleasant due to anti-social behaviour. So even when they do make it walkable, I don't want to walk there, I'd rather drive to a suburban mall and reduce my chances of an altercation.
Until that's fixed it's a non-starter.
I know many parts of the world have problems like this, but Europe doesn’t have many places like that.
While the commenter said they wont name the cities, it can be Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, etc.
It makes it unpleasant, and if you do have to live in the middle of downtown or such, not only are you paying more - you have to for safety. Safety of a living place, safety of controlled entry, safety of a garage for your car, etc.
In General it's all depressing, you'd imagine downtown cores would be the "best" of a city, but in the USA they generally are not.
Now whether or not it's true insecurity, fear or such can be up to person/gender but criminal statistics do not lie. You can pull up a map and see where the majority of crime is reported of happening - and there you go.
Then you can look at the threshold and severity. But nowadays we live in an era of political correctness or wokeness, so saying or making direct observations of that data can become very faulty quickly, especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators.
So eh.
Is there sufficient social support for the families of young black males? If not, it may make sense economically to provide it, if it would make American cities functional again.
The name for welfare discouraging marriage is "the marriage penalty", but it's a general policy thing that people still argue about, so I couldn't find anything good about the old AFDC marriage penalties on short notice. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria... does a quick outline in passing.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...
https://www.roadsnacks.net/murder-capitals-of-america/
The same is probably true of other crime as well.
for one thing, it depends a lot on how city borders are drawn. for example, baltimore city usually shows up in top five lists for per capita murders, and indeed it is an unusually violent place. but unlike many (most?) american cities, baltimore county is completely separate from the enclosed city. if you calculated murders per capital for baltimore city and county as a single population, it would still be bad, but it wouldn't be in the national top five every year. a corollary to this is that murder rates can vary much more neighborhood-to-neighborhood within the same city than they do when comparing entire cities. most cities I've been to have at least one or two dangerous areas to be avoided if possible.
second point: even in "dangerous cities" upper-middle class professionals are unlikely to be victims of violent crime. they generally choose to live in safer enclaves of those cities. realistically, property crime is a greater concern for this demographic, which does not scale linearly with violent crime and is not restricted to the "bad neighborhoods" the same way. interestingly, "safe" cities like seattle and SF actually have higher rates of property crime than baltimore.
Addressing the context, though, Baltimore certainly belongs in any discussion of unpleasant downtowns. Altercations are a potential issue even driving (more so than walking actually). But there's also increasingly little to even walk to. The nightlife and culture all moved to the surrounding neighborhoods, now you just go downtown for the aquarium or the occasional bureaucratic necessity.
are you referring to the complimentary car wash at president and lombard? but yeah I agree, there's a lot that's wrong with baltimore's downtown.
if you assume that most people have to commute to work, it does make sense to have a downtown that's mostly office buildings and well-connected via public transit. so I kinda expect most downtowns to be kinda boring, not sure why you would expect them to be fun to walk around it. of course, nowhere in baltimore is particularly well-served by public transit, and the downtown is not merely boring; it's downright unpleasant and somewhat unsafe.
I guess you could imagine restaurants switching from lunch to dinner service, but yeah the whole idea of downtown lends itself to emptiness I guess. Certainly not helped in Baltimore's case by how many of the offices are just empty.
The problem is more that America has areas where most of the inhabitants are living in fear.
What used to be a nice, safe neighborhood near uptown no longer is. Leave your car doors unlocked if you park on the street overnight, or else you'll find the windows broken by morning by kids looking for stuff to steal (happened to a coworker, the one night her husband forgot to not lock the doors).
In the last two years, theft of catalytic converters from cars, as well as carjackings, have skyrocketed citywide. It has definitely changed the mood on the streets.
We also have homeless camps, which get cleared out when the annual deep freeze comes through (amazing that people try to sleep outside when the temp can drop to -40). Those same encampents leave used drug needles all over public parks adjacent to schools.
Granted, I'd have the problems we have over what CA cities have to deal with, but then again I also chose to bail entirely to live out in the countryside.
The northern east coast is what I believe the GP was referring to. We don't really have homeless people. I've honestly never seen a homeless person before, until I left. Neither has anyone tried to "get something" out of me, until I went down south or out west.
I think it's cultural. The people who had moved out West were those that weren't necessarily successful or prosperous in their homelands (e.g. Britain, Russia, or the original 13 colonies, comprising mostly of the propertied class). So what you get is a bunch of grifters, drifters, and people who didn't "fit."
And well, if that's what your communities are comprised of, I expect them to be antisocial.
The saddest thing is I have family there, who have children; and seeing those children slowly take on the typical West Coastian attitude (and believe that property, violent, and sexual crimes are simply the way the world is), has been heartbreaking. I'm sure they will perpetuate the cycle of shit, in their own unique way -- even if it is minor.
"grifters, drifters and outcasts" really doesn't describe us at all.
It seems like I still have many more places to visit.