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Comment by joebob42 | Hacker News Reader

I live in a decently "nice" part of Seattle. Constantly concerned stuff will get stolen. Have had car broken in to more than once. "Terror" might be overstating if, but the level of property crime is objectively harming my day-to-day experience.

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That is less an inherent property of density and more a property of Seattle's moronic lack of petty crime enforcement.

Yeah, sorry, Im not trying to make a claim as to the cause here, just agreeing that this really does exist and really does make life way shittier in some very major cities.

We're seeing a level of wealth inequality now that rivals the level seen in the Gilded Age. "Petty crime enforcement" won't do anything but place more of your neighbors in harm's way. An oppressively policed neighborhood does not make the neighborhood safer.

The child poverty rate was halved under an emergency declaration in 2020. That policy was allowed to expire in 2022[1] and that, along with unchecked inflation and labor-averse federal monetary policy, is naturally producing misery and desperation.

1. https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/monthly...

Just curious: do you believe this a Seattle problem, a United States problem, or an urban problem?

Having lived, in the past five years, in Seattle, in a Seattle exurb, in a small city well north of Seattle (Bellingham), and now in London, I can say that this is just a problem -- not a Seattle problem, and urban problem, or a US problem. We had people prowling our secure parking garage in my Seattle condo building; my exurb house was in a development where summer days brought the smell of cow manure in through the open windows, but barely a week went by without cars being prowled; Bellingham is a college town and has had property crime issues for decades; and obviously London has loads of thefts and robberies, with a recent trend being masked robbers on motorcycles and scooters snatching phones from people's hands on the streets.

Everybody thinks this is a local problem, but the reality is that, in developed nations, property crime is quite strongly correlated with wealth inequality[1], which has been growing in most of the western world for the past couple of decades.

1. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/crime#:~:text=The%20link%20betw....

I don't know. I lived in a wealthy suburb outside San Diego and did not experience this problem (I used to leave my keys in my car with the car unlocked, which was obviously moronic but never caused me any problems), and I lived briefly in SF where it was substantially worse.

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