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> Occasional crazy person could wreak havoc.

I don't understand what you mean by that. We have school shootings and crazy people acting violently today, not things I generally associate with peasants, but in any case, something we witness elsewhere.

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My perception is that the parent commenter is referring at least partly to "subcriminal" or nearly subcriminal behaviour. There is/was nowhere to "put" this kind of individual when they come from these settings, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from: something like "it's your neighbour's mentally ill kid, you really gonna call the cops for THAT?" to "what cops?".

School shooters and "crazy people acting violently" are probably incredibly rare by comparison. Sub/urban environments probably reduce the impact of the mentally ill on their surrounding neighbours in a whole host of ways, in fact -- in no small part because treatment is much less available in rural areas. (There's more of them in a smaller area and they're more visible and increasingly less criminalized, so people get the idea that poverty and health issues of that variety are modern, urban problems.)

Keywords in the literature around this include "community impact" or "community health", but it's not my area.

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