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Comment by KBme | Hacker News Reader

Haha not a word about social issues or crime. I wonder why.

precisely.

> It used to be that the best city for technologists was the Bay Area.... ...but Covid reordered the world.

The Bay Area governments and surrounding State have/has essentially unlimited budgets. They have no political opponents. The actual problem is the ideas, and I wish they would stay in California where they belong.

Most of the Bay Area is safer from crime than 90% of the country, probably safer than where you are.

> stay in California where they belong

Out of the US biggest 100 cities, CA also has 3/7 top safest from violent crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> The actual problem is the ideas

No problem with the ideas that cause Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas to have higher violent crime rates than CA as a whole?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

San Francisco coming 4th most dangerous in your table might be correlated with a reluctance to go there.

For one, 4th is looking at property crime, not "most dangerous," where SF is #37 for violent crime. Yes, SF attracts the nexus of crime around the BART stops, but that also pulls it from most of the surrounding area, which OP was talking Bay Area as a whole.

Anecdotally, I've been here 30 years and never victim of a "dangerous" crime. Fat chance you move to Mountain View to work at Google and anything happens to you.

The only place in CA someone reading a "Best City for Techies" will encounter crime is Market St. and Tenderloin in SF. The rest of it in deep Oakland, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino, and pockets of LA, they will never end up.

I am pretty sure most people who work for Google and live in the south bay could tell you stories of having their car windows smashed in, and I do mean most. I think it is about 100% of the googlers and ex-googlers I know have had that experience.

Also as of two years ago, the chances that your Catalytic converter was stolen unless you parked your car in your garage was getting near 50% as well.

I suppose if you limit crime to just "dangerous" maybe it comes out on top, but I would prefer to be somewhere that I don't have to worry about 50,000 of my neighbors OD'ing on the street every year.

Interestingly, this is a similar experience I have from friends from when I lived in Johannesburg. Smash and grabs and car/parts thefts were very common.

South Bay petty crime and homelessness has unfortunately arisen but that is a real alarmist way to speak about the most mundane stretch of suburban sprawl outside of LA County.

Are you confusing South Bay with SF? Nothing ever happens in South Bay. Nothing good and nothing bad.

> affluent neighbourhoods have lower (violent) crime rates but surrounding areas are literal sh*tholes way to sell the city

Also, these statistics measure crime according to the laws, their enforcement and reporting. SF has lax laws, lax enforcement and underreporting.

Unfortunately, you do not have to go to "deep Oakland" to encounter violent crime these days. It is kind of everywhere in Oakland now.

That's non-violent crime; most of this is attributed to larceny. SF is number 37 in violent crime.

Pay no attention to Oakland…

I grew up in a small Midwest city that I thought was pretty nice and safe, but is a statistically very dangerous place to live. I knew of Oakland’s rep before I moved here, and was underwhelmed with the reality of it.

I’ve never once felt as unsafe in any part of Oakland as I did at the Taco Bell on S. National in Springfield, Missouri on any given Friday night.

People have these ideas because “most dangerous city” lists usually mean most dangerous big cities, and leave implicit that more-rural areas are far safer.

If you start analyzing and carving things up other ways, it quickly becomes clear that the “small town and small city America is safer than big city America” thing that a lot of people assume is true, isn’t. Muddled at best, and bordering on simply being backwards.

This makes perfect sense when you consider that violent and property crime correlate with poverty, and small towns and cities tend to be much poorer than big cities. Add in that density effects mean that you might see more crime in a big city while in fact being safer than in a small city, and the picture starts to come together.

Rural and suburban areas are more dangerous than cities because you're in or near cars more often. That's really all that matters.

In particular, NYC is by far the safest place in the country.

Your link uses FBI Uniform Crime Rates.

Some facts about FBI UCR:

1) The FBI web site recommends against using its data for ranking because these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

2) they are submitted voluntarily by police departments

3) many police departments don't even participate: "This year about 7,000 police agencies, covering about 35% of the U.S. population, were missing."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-wi...

4) From your own Wiki link: "Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area."

5) The BJS reports that 45% of violent crimes and 36% of property crimes go unreported to police. And I don't know that we can assume the rates of not reporting crimes are consistent across metros.

https://www.waldenu.edu/online-masters-programs/ms-in-crimin...

> Most of the Bay Area is safer from crime than 90% of the country

That's pretty hilarious.

In the 48 hours I was there, I had a homeless exposed his dong to me, another offered to sell me cocaine, then while I was eating at a nice Thai Restaurant, a lady in her underwear smashed the front window of the restaurant with a fire extinguisher.

Literally none of these things have ever happened to me anywhere else in the world in 39 years, except for the 48 hours I was in the Bay Area. Now please tell me about Selection Bias next.

It's the same deal in Seattle, I don't even bother reporting this stuff to the police. Elsewhere, the police would respond and it would show in statistics.

Prevailing political sentiment is an important social issue and it was addressed in the article.

Maybe, but homelessness/poverty and education quality not, for example. These would be important for people who plan to have a family.

I guess the social side can be deduced easily from the fact that these places are single-party cryptodictatorships, though.

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