I was trying to figure out why I equated cheap with bad which you pointed out to me. I think it's because I figured if someone built cheap housing, and it was actually nice and somewhere you wanted to be, it wouldn't stay cheap for very long at all. If someone built and sold condos for 250k in a town that usually sells for 1 million.... Wouldn't the buyer soon sell it for 750k? If it's cheap, it basically has to be much worse than other options or it'll soon become the price of the expensive options.

I'm not dimissing your experience which comes from the current situation. But the current situation came about because of intense gentrification and the housing prices rising faster than society could cope over the past few decades.

I don't really get it. Stockton CA is a bad place because housing prices rose too fast? The average house there is now probably 300k. If they were 100k still, Stockton would have less murder and car theft?

> bad neighbourhoods

I'm a brit, that spent a year living in USA. That term, "bad neighbourhood", is a term that I learned refers to a predominantly black neighbourhood. I was told things like "Don't go past this road junction on foot, that's a bad neighbourhood". The neighbourhood in question looked exactly the neighbourhood I was standing in, but with black people.

That it is black is not racism, there are real factors that make them bad areas. You are far more likely to be accidentally show in those areas (even though the good neighborhoods may contain as many guns, they are not used in those areas). You are far more likely to be assaulted.

Those are also the cheap areas, and black families tend to move there just because they are poor. Of course the gangs in the area thus can recruit young local black kids (not being a member of the local gang can be dangerous). It isn't racism though, it is just reality - one that is very hard to escape for black people.

There is racism in the US as well, a lot of the current problems are rooted in the historic racism.

Did you check any crime stats for the neighborhood, or were you expecting to see burglary, rape and murder as you drove by that second? Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.

> were you expecting to see burglary, rape and murder as you drove by that second?

Nope.

Actually, I was standing on the street, not driving. This "bad neighbourhood" was 50 yards from where I was standing. If they wanted to rob people, they'd have found better pickings where I was standing than in the "bad neighbourhood".

I didn't have a car; we were visiting my sister-in-law. I'm accustomed to walking everywhere, unless I have an inter-city journey. The town was Charlottesville, VA, but I was told much the same when I settled (briefly) in Richmond, VA.

> Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.

What I noticed was what's obvious. In a majority-white city, the so-called bad neighbourhood had exclusively black people on the street. And I noticed, for example, that every time I drove to work, there was a car pulled over on the freeway, with two black guys lying face-down, with cops pointing guns at their heads. I never saw this with white guys. My drive to work was just 15 minutes, but I saw this daily.

Do they actually do block-by-block crime statistics in these places? Because what I find shocking is that the granularity of this "bad neighbourhood" thing appears to be the block.

don't brits use 'council housing' with pretty much the same pejorative connotation? also there are absolutely bad neighborhoods in the us, you can usually spot them because of all the bullet holes.

"Council housing" denotes a sort of basic utility housing. But a typical council house was (a) a house fit for a family; (b) usually had a small garden; (c) was good enough that there was a lively market in them during the Thatcher years.

Also, council housing wasn't all concentrated in one place; typically you'd get a block of council houses embedded in a neighbourhood, which might be poor or prosperous. Basically the load was spread around.

The neighbourhoods that I like least are where a large-scale greenfield estate was built on the outskirts of a town, far from the centre and the shops. These estates were typically under-equipped with pubs and shops (but they had schools).

We don't build council houses any more, since laws were introduced requiring councils to sell such houses to their tenants at a discount. The closest thing now is housing coops, which buy and do-up individual houses. Coops don't build estates.

Ok I guess bad is not nice. But they're clearly not as safe nor as nice as the more expensive neighborhoods of the same community. And I wasn't saying they should be this way. I guess I was just going from basic observation and some memorable stats.