The problem here in your comment is associating dense neighbourhoods with bad neighbourhoods. The other problem is thinking all cheap neighbourhoods should be bad neighbourhoods.
I'm a brit, that spent a year living in USA. That term, "bad neighbourhood", is a term that I learned refers to a predominantly black neighbourhood. I was told things like "Don't go past this road junction on foot, that's a bad neighbourhood". The neighbourhood in question looked exactly the neighbourhood I was standing in, but with black people.
Those are also the cheap areas, and black families tend to move there just because they are poor. Of course the gangs in the area thus can recruit young local black kids (not being a member of the local gang can be dangerous). It isn't racism though, it is just reality - one that is very hard to escape for black people.
There is racism in the US as well, a lot of the current problems are rooted in the historic racism.
Nope.
Actually, I was standing on the street, not driving. This "bad neighbourhood" was 50 yards from where I was standing. If they wanted to rob people, they'd have found better pickings where I was standing than in the "bad neighbourhood".
I didn't have a car; we were visiting my sister-in-law. I'm accustomed to walking everywhere, unless I have an inter-city journey. The town was Charlottesville, VA, but I was told much the same when I settled (briefly) in Richmond, VA.
> Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
What I noticed was what's obvious. In a majority-white city, the so-called bad neighbourhood had exclusively black people on the street. And I noticed, for example, that every time I drove to work, there was a car pulled over on the freeway, with two black guys lying face-down, with cops pointing guns at their heads. I never saw this with white guys. My drive to work was just 15 minutes, but I saw this daily.
Do they actually do block-by-block crime statistics in these places? Because what I find shocking is that the granularity of this "bad neighbourhood" thing appears to be the block.
Also, council housing wasn't all concentrated in one place; typically you'd get a block of council houses embedded in a neighbourhood, which might be poor or prosperous. Basically the load was spread around.
The neighbourhoods that I like least are where a large-scale greenfield estate was built on the outskirts of a town, far from the centre and the shops. These estates were typically under-equipped with pubs and shops (but they had schools).
We don't build council houses any more, since laws were introduced requiring councils to sell such houses to their tenants at a discount. The closest thing now is housing coops, which buy and do-up individual houses. Coops don't build estates.