Just fewer people. Trailer parks instead of projects. Same crime, same misery.
The stuff that shocks the soul is a small fraction of the struggle and misery.
That's just not true. A quick google pulls up this visualization from 2017: https://www.santarosa-lawyer.com/united-states-crime-map-201...
And you'll note that... there's basically no correlation with urbanity at all. Highly urban states like CT are very peaceful, but so is Idaho (but not Montana, which is pretty bad). Two of the worst states are NM and Alaska, which have near zero urban population!
There may be some rules to glean from the data, but the one you picked is not it.
Homicides are much better to look at. There is very little difference between Alaska and New Orleans in their reporting of homicides. And when you judge rural vs urban by homicide rate, urban is much larger. Of the top 10 counties with the highest homicide rate, 4 are major metropolitan areas. This is particularly shocking because small sample sizes of small counties should make it so every single member of the top 10 is rural, but it’s not.
https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-...
Easiest way to tell someone is lying with statistics is when they try to make a point by counting outliers at the edge of the distribution.
I don't see how what you're saying follows at all. It seems just as likely that broad exurban counties are more economically inclusive while urban counties tend to cluster very-poor high crime areas more densely while leaving the safer adjoining suburbs (very much part of the "urban" population under discussion here) in different buckets.
Are "cities" killing more people per capita or not? Seems like that's a simple matter of adding up some numbers, so your attempt to spin here seems a little suspect. Again, my read is that there is almost no correlation at all.
If you want to investigate it more, then that actually would be healthy. But instead you look at some colors on a map delineated by state lines, and think that’s convincing evidence. It’s clear you’re only interested in validating your pre-existing beliefs when you jump with such energy into flimsy data that corroborates your prejudices while dismissing other analyses out of “suspicion” when they contradict you.
In reality, the facts don't back up anything you said. :/
By far the most heavily subsidized, most expensive, poorest and least educated people in the United States are the poor living in urban zones. It's not even remotely a close comparison in terms of numbers.
You can see it in the crime statistics, you can see it in the drop-out rates, you can see it in the homelessness rates. And so on.
You can also see it in the cost of incarcerating violent criminals (not drug offenders, which are a shrinking, smaller share of the incarcerated population), which urban zones produce radically more of to go with the extreme poverty found in US cities. The urban zones - which are hyper dangerous in the US - produce the overwhelming share of all murder in the country. Who pays for the very expensive policing necessary to keep terrorist groups from burning Portland to the ground? That isn't going on in rural Oregon. Who pays for the very expensive policing to try to control the extreme murder rates in Baltimore or Chicago? That isn't going on in rural Maryland or Illinois; the per capita murder rates in Baltimore are 50x to 100x higher than in rural Maryland. These things are all subsidized by the urban high income brackets, and it's a huge cost.
And it's also true that the urban zones have far higher incomes, so they pay higher taxes and push more money into the welfare system accordingly. They subsidize both their local urban poor and the rural poor outside the cities.
The bottom 10% in Los Angeles represent a de facto third world standard of living and it's a very large population. Those shocking, unbelievable homeless camps in Los Angeles look like something out of a sci-fi dystopian movie. And that's just a very small fraction, a small visual representation, of the extreme poverty in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago.