i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.
am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.
there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.
There doesn't seem to be anything mandatory about cities having proportionally more crime.
But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.
Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.
So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
Bars are also disbursed all over not just in the city center. We have bars here, and they produce essentially zero crime.
But even if all of the crime was alcohol related, all of the crime isn’t occurring inside bars.
People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kensington+phil...
unbiased source data, clearly
So yeah maybe the statistics say something else (I wonder how many people like me just don't report crime -- the police do nothing in such places) but I'm not eager to relive that experience.
That said your immediate neighbors in these areas can be incredibly nice and protective of each other as a survival mechanism, because everyone else is quite literally out to get you.