D said:
Growing up in NY conditioned me to feel safe when there were people on the street...
Also, on the issue of people on the street: one of the reasons that cities like Baltimore and Detroit have become such havens for criminal activity, and therefore dangerous, is that those cities have so many empty buildings and half-abandoned neighborhoods, as described by
Yossarian, above. This leaves lots of places where drug dealers and gangs can thrive without any oversight from law enforcement or from community members who want to keep their neighborhoods safe.
Anyone who's seen
The Corner or
The Wire knows the way that drug users and dealers use abandoned houses in Baltimore for dealing and shooting up. And once this starts in a neighborhood, the people who want to avoid crime and violence often move out, leading to further decay.
Baltimore and Detroit are both textbook examples of postwar "white flight," in which middle class white Americans fled the cities and moved to the suburbs, leaving behind mainly poorer, black residents. In the 1950s, Baltimore's population peaked at about 950,000 (in the city proper), and Detroit's peaked at almost 2 million. Now, Baltimore has about 670,000 and Detroit just dropped below 900,000. That's a net loss of about 300,000 in Baltimore, and about 1 million in Detroit. When that many people leave, there are lots of abandoned houses and small businesses. Baltimore currently has between 10,000 and 15,000 abandoned houses.
Of course, the decline in population lowers the tax base, leaving the city with less money to provide schools, services, etc. To maintain its income, the city raises property taxes. Faced with declining services and rising taxes, even more residents choose to flee to the suburbs, continuing a vicious cycle of decline. While it's very easy to complain about the consequences of gentrification, with its influx of yuppies, at least it can help prevent cities fall into this poverty trap. What we need is urban policy that seeks to make city life livable for people from low income backgrounds, rather than (a) abandoning them to destitution and violence, or (b) forcing them out and replacing them with dot com workers and investment bankers, a la San Francisco.
Detroit City said:
especially if they have a Glock 9mm and you have nothing
Anecdote time.
A few weeks ago, my partner and i spent two weeks in New York. We have a very small back yard where we grow tomatoes during the summer, and the evening before we left Baltimore, i went to our next-door neighbor's place to give them a bag of tomatoes that would otherwise have gone to waste. Our neighbors are an older white couple, probably late 60s, and obviously of working class background, even though they seem pretty comfortable financially.
I knocked on the door at about 8pm, as it was getting dark. At first i thought no-one was home, but then the husband came to the door, saw who it was, and opened up. "Oh, it's you Mike. Sorry i took so long, but i had to get this," he said, pulling a big handgun from the back of his waistband. It was a large-calibre revolver--a Beretta, i think he said--and he told me that he never answers the door without it after dark.
