In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out of your way to get there. Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise. By comparison I also lived in SF where the bad parts are unavoidably located in the center of the city and I've witnessed multiple violent crimes over a similar time period. The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience.
Check out this map for stats: https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/
East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are using cars more often than before.
(There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)
I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG employee, startup founder, etc) but found the neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity to Central Park, and an overall appealing character compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan
If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider living in Harlem again.
"Where things happen", aka Manhattan? Tbh, Manhattan kinda blows these days. It's more or less a sterile, disneyified, yuppy, consumerist grazing ground from 100th down, with the exception of alphabet city and Chinatown. But even Chinatown's changing, unfortunately. Feels like the old Chinatown Fair shutting down was a signal.
Idk Manhattan has a few solid areas that have held up over the years, but I personally try to avoid it unless my boys and I have a skate session or heading to a museum.
Also, the commute from the boroughs really isn't bad. If you really need to get to Manhattan you're probably looking at 45-50 min on average, which is whatever... unless you live in bumfuck nowhere where there's not a stop within a mile or two.
It's more or less 30 min minimum to get anywhere regardless of location and there are beautiful and interesting spots all over this city, not just Manhattan. Why not explore?
As others remarked correctly, aggregated numbers are useless and not representative for the avg person. If you truncate NYC’s crime numbers by stripping out high crime areas such as Brownsville or the South Bronx, crime here is shockingly low. Even more so if you correct for crime that would be er affect you unless you’re in some sort of drug gang (many of the violent crimes are gang on gang crimes).
Also saw folks here mention East Harlem — I assume that’s a joke?! That hasn’t been a “dangerous” neighborhood for 35+ years. It’s now a very sought after area esp. for families, and it’s got plenty of artisanal BS stores that come with gentrified areas. I can’t afford to rent there.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
This makes no sense. It's a mobile city. You can live on the UWS but have to go downtown to see a doctor, or work in midtown but commute in from the Bronx or Queens to go to work. The vast majority do not live and work in the same neighborhood let alone work and live in the same nice and safe neighborhood.
>"Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise."
Not only is that a walking commute but there is literally not a single bad block between anywhere in Chelsea and Union Square.
>"The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience."
Yes exactly, where do you think all of the service workers that are back bone of the city travel through on their commute, often at night? Hint, it's not Chelsea.
If I was thinking of moving to somewhere in NYC, I would want to know just that: could I live there safely? If someone answers that topic with “well, many people are exposed to crime, and it’s really unfortunate, and change is really desired”, that’s all true, but that doesn’t answer my question. If one were to tell me “yes, it can be fairly safe if you have the means to live here, and commute over there, and mostly hang around this place”, that doesn’t somehow minimize or deny the plight of those who are less fortunate. These are two separate topics that are both worth discussing.
Edit:
I now live in Dallas. I don’t know about crime stats at the moment, but if you’ll allow me to speak of how safe I feel in the city: I would say that there’s no way to live in Dallas (assuming you want an active social life that involves music, drinks, shows, etc) that feels safe. The usual hangout spots in Dallas (e.g. Deep Ellum) are right next to shady overpasses, sections of street with vacant buildings with busted out windows and broken street lights. So much of the city is in a state of disrepair. I feel like I’m gambling with my life if I go anywhere remotely interesting in Dallas.
When I lived in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn, I could walk to the coffee shop, or go to dozens of great restaurants and shops, get late night tacos or pizza, and never feel like I was in a sketchy area. Granted, I was privileged to have the means to live where I did.
If someone then asks me where I would prefer to live on the basis of apparent safety, I would say Brooklyn. If I was then asked if everyone feels safe in Brooklyn, I would say “no” — if you live in a low income, high crime area, you’re not going to feel safe — and that’s an unfortunate reality for many people. Both things are simultaneously true.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/business/goldman-sachs-employ...
Which is not really the same thing at all…
The implication there is that the areas with fewer tourists have higher true rates of crime than the official stats, which makes the overall case worse...
That's not true, and my stats above are solely Manhattan.
I find it amazing that in the US, you can walk from one neighborhood into the other, and suddenly have it be 100x more dangerous.
It’s so apparent that I’m still surprised.
I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much safer than perceived
[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
I'd also factor in the numbers are higher also because policing is very robust. I can't think of any other city where I saw a cop nearly as often as NYC, they're everywhere.
Anecdotally, I never felt unsafe there. Although where I grew up crime was rampant, common, and expected- so comparatively NYC seemed really safe, and it wasn't hard to avoid high risk places/situations. I do think people hype up the crime numbers, and forget to consider the variables present in a megalopolis which aren't present in smaller cities.
That number doesn't really matter, does it? I'd think the average number of people there each day is much closer to the relevant number.
Yes, and that "average number of people there each day" would include all the non-residents/tourists in the city. Which is a non-trivial number at all for NYC.
So if there really is an 11x increase in crime, along with a 10x increase in yearly population, that's actually a huge increase in crime on a per-person per-day basis.
Correct, but NYC had 66 million visitors in 2019[0], which is way more than 1mil you guesstimated.
Which, conversely, would increase the daily population by 20k*66=1.32mil. 1.32mil is a non-trivial increase in daily population at all.
0. https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/osdc/tourism-industry-ne...
For this reason, researchers typically use homocides to make comparisons, because that's consistently defined and tracked across jurisdictions, and because it's harder to manipulate those statistics when recording.
NYC - particularly Manhattan - has a much lower homocide rate than other places.
One of the reasons I left NYC. I'm now in one of the safest neighborhoods, we have virtually no violent crime, except from the occasional visiting criminals.
Could you explain that? Crime is trending down in NYC over the last 20 years.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers. NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were applied.
I believe the south has the highest per capita murder rate which is mostly Republican led. It's states with lower education and higher poverty that have high murder rates. I think blaming Democrats or Republicans is misguided. We're a country pretty evenly split and there's no place that's a panacea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/10/blame-rur...
People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend that crime hasn’t gotten worse in the last few years.
The reality on the ground is much different, most people just don’t bother reporting crime, because it’s not worth the effort and the police probably won’t come anyway.
I know this sounds insulting but you seem like seem to have bought into a narrative of them versus us. There are ills on all sides, we are all humans who are mostly trying to make it through. Yes, there are people that are terrible at their jobs and cause harm. Yes, they are in both parties. If there was a third party they would be there too. Sure, vote and support people that align with your values but life is not a binary thing.
So dishonest. And gaslighting.
And I am glad my taxes don't support Democrats' pro-crime policies.
In Portland mobs fully control the streets, drag people out of cars and beat them, they threaten people, while police is just standing and watching. This is on video, not propaganda.
So you follow-up propaganda with hyperbole, and pretend that extreme outliers are somehow a normal representation.
There's also plenty of evidence of Republican-run cities locking up innocent people, or conservatives attempting a violent coup during a transition of power. It's a silly game.
Parts of Florida great. Never been to Texas.
I think small stuff like this just adds to your total anxiety without you even realizing it. It's really sad how difficult it is to live in extremely safe, small villages like my childhood home nowadays.
When researching getting a lock for a personal scooter NYC always comes up as ground zero for problems with theft, to the point where much of the advice is to not even lock it up but bring it inside.
Statistically, where I live now is the same or significantly worse than Austin. But with the lower population, there are simply fewer incidents.
(I am in a doorman building.)
I use bike shares opportunistically, but they are not a reliable mode of transport.
As a pure anecdote, my husband had his bike outside in Prospect Heights for 3 or 4 years literally not moved. It had a lock but he didn’t even use the bike. It got weathered and abused and after literal years, I think it was finally stolen. In Seattle, where his has been broken into multiple times in a locked garage in our luxury building, I have no doubt that an untouched bike would have lasted a few weeks at most.
But that’s all anecdotal. I can say that in the 5 years or so that I used the CitiBike system, I never had a problem either finding a bike and the pricing was also more than fair. I frequently would take a bike from near Union Square and ride across the Brooklyn Bridge home on nice afternoons. I never once had a problem getting a bike or returning it to its drop off place near my apartment.
And the app/locator lets you know the status of bikes at any time so you can know if there is a bike at a specific site or not.
This might have changed in the last few years, but if anything, the city had a hard time convincing people to use the bikes. The system is a lot more efficient than the Lime bike/scooter setup that a lot of other cities like Seattle have (people in Seattle also don’t know how to use bike lanes and use the fucking sidewalks like assholes, because Seattle).
It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it. I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey, small things like this add up.
p.s. I really like your content!
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.
Or maybe they're only comparing themselves to Chicago and Rio de Janeiro?
(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)
In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.
I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.
There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.
I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.
This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.
I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?
[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/weisburd-zastrow-crime-h...
Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.
My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.
NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.
NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.
Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime
It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.
What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that it's safer than the entire "rest of America."
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-cri...
In terms of homicides though the US is less safe than Pakistan, India, Iran and Egpyt and other big countries.
And while this reminds me of XKCD: Heatmap[0], the density of crime also matters when it's where you live, and the actual proximity you are to frequent violent crimes.
I don't have stats for Amherst specifically, but here is a comparison between NYC and NH as a whole:
NYC: 5.5 murders per 100k + 1.6 auto fatalities per 100k = 6.1 deaths per 100k
NH: 1.0 murders per 100k + 8.9 auto fatalities per 100k = 9.9 deaths per 100k
I would still say Manchester, Rochester, Nashua ETC are 10x trashier and more neglected than even the most run down alley in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.
That said, I shared a Lyft to the airport pre-dawn one time and where we picked up the other rider was a little more exciting than I would ever want to be.
> People in rural areas don’t lock their doors for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening? Having lived in a rural area and in a few cities, my experience is the latter. No one wants to be robbed.
Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
I don’t think that refutes their point that they don’t care. Having come from a rural area myself, the decision was to drink at home or a friends I was staying over at rather than drive drunk. They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
I also come from a rural area and I think you're missing some detail in the individual calculus. The chance of negative consequences drop so precipitously in some areas that, coupled with poor transportation options, it becomes primarily an individual risk in their eyes. They don't see a big issue with being over the limit when it's a road they drive everyday and encountering even a single vehicle on the way back is rare. It's not a lack of caring, it's just a different calculation.
I've never drove drunk (or even buzzed) and I'm not defending the practice, just trying to explain their point of view.
Being called a pussy for instance for not wanting to drive while smashed isn’t a result of a lack of transportation.
Neither, they just take fewer mitigations in response to the same level of risk because of cultural habits.
America in general (both rural and urban) has a very high crime rate by developed world standards. I grew up in <redacted> which has a lower crime rate than 99% of America, including the parts where people brag about how it's so safe that no one locks their doors, and everyone locks the doors to their houses and cars anyway, because that's just the cultural norm.
I’m in a rural area. I wear my seatbelt, along with everyone else I know. I don’t even drink. The only people I’ve ever known that have driven drunk were dumb teenagers. I lock my door, but I not only kept my high school car unlocked - I left the keys in it.
For two years I did that, and the only time it was “stolen” was when my friends skipped class, used it to drive to the bakery for some doughnuts, and deliberately parked it elsewhere as a prank. Do you really think that’s how it would have worked out in any major city?
I remember it being major news when a few houses were burgled when I was a kid.
Now, the biggest town in the county? Crime happens there all the time. It’s only 20,000 people but a lot of them are…lower rung.
I think that’s the real difference. When I walk in a major city or even that town, crime might happen to me. In the 20 mile radius around my house it’s very unlikely, and I very rarely see a cop unlike in NYC.
On a per capita basis "a few houses being burgled" in a rural area is probably more burglaries than NYC sees.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
You are less likely to be murdered in NYC than the average rural area. I don't know where you live and it's possible that your rural area is safer than average, but in general the myth that so many smug rural Americans subscribe to that the typical rural area is safer than big bad New York City is just totally, completely wrong.
This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area. Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
Rural areas account for 19% of the population but 56% of the DUI fatalities. That means a 5.5x higher fatality rate per capita.
Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28), and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than median, though.
Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered a part of Manhattan borough...
Garbage in, garbage out.
If you want to demonstrate that NYC is less safe (and it may well be), focus on the high risk factors, not the salient ones.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191720/traffic-related-i...
However, I do also think an important question is "safe for whom?" Depending on your race, sexual orientation, gender presentation, etc, rural American communities can foster their own distinct unease. Those are the places where you keep your head down, self-censor, try not to draw attention. When is the absence of reported crimes in a state which is 92.8% white "safety" and when is it something else?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crime-newyork-statistics/...
From a random search, I got 2.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people citywide, which means all 5 boroughs. For just New York county (Manhattan), the most official statistic I could find is 4.57 in 2019[2].
[1]: https://www.lx.com/community/nyc-crime-rates-how-dangerous-i...
[2]: https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/individual_charts/v...
I think, at least in today's culturally polarized environment, there are a lot of people who would be understandably nervous and on guard traveling to rural America, and it has nothing to do with what crime looks like in their home city.
There’s hospital quality, time spent in private automobiles (one of the most dangerous things Americans do), risk of natural disaster, etc etc.
I think it’s very reflective of an anti-urban bias
Personally, I'd rather be alone on foot in NYC than alone on foot in some small town where I'd stand out. Maybe because I grew up in a city and have traveled to many places, maybe because of my characteristics that make me feel vulnerable when I'm the outsider in a less diverse area, or maybe because I've lived in a city far more violent than NYC- so for me the things I visit for are worth the possible risk of crime.
NYC isn't even on the top 50 most violent cities in the world, which is quite a feat when you consider how things used to be there in the 80s/90s.
Parent commenter is completely correct that NYC is safer not just than the average location in America, but also the average rural area.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
Maybe your very specific neck of the woods is very rich and safe but I don’t know why you felt the need to butt in and make the conversation about you, OP never claimed that NYC was the absolute number 1 safest place in the country.
Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".
Some crime stats: https://imgur.com/a/qDKqC59
edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45% more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45% more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of America" but it's not true.