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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible for me to disconnect articles like this from the concepts of white flight and the practices of redlining. The city is now where "those people" are, and the suburbs are where "we" are. The cities are scary, the suburbs are safe. Really have to hand it to the last several decades of marketing on the grounds of managing to shape incredibly profitable societal attitude shifts.

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Demographics drive everything we do; no one wants to be close to crime, you don't need a marketing for that: it advertises itself.

Sure but that presumes that where and how bad the crime is is an understood fact and people make decisions accordingly, when the evidence says the opposite. Over-policing in predominantly minority areas cases more crimes to be reported as occurring, even when the actual crime rates are more or less equal between those areas and predominantly white areas, simply because more police and police resources are allocated to those areas, and therefore, more crime is discovered and prosecuted. This becomes a death spiral for neighborhoods: more police presence equals higher crime statistics which in turn are used to justify increasing police budgets and police presence in those same areas, and, worst of all, those areas never actually become safer for the people who live there, often the exact opposite.

Are you aware of the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...?

As I said, people and business flock to areas where they are welcomed and the limiting factor is money.

Not in the Bay Area. Or manhattan. City living is for the wealthy. Working folks live in cheaper places like East Palo Alto.

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