Many places have gotten rougher, there is the visible disorder in San Francisco but even the small city of Ithaca, NY has seen a large increase in aggressive panhandling. You can plot opioid overdoses on the map and it looks like a pattern of bullets aimed at the needle exchange. People used to think the old African-American neighborhood downtown was “dangerous” (it wasn’t) but rents have gone up, the area has gentrified, and many of the former residents have relocated to smaller towns in the area. Today people are terrified of the large homeless colony by the inlet and the accompanying shopping cart graveyard.

The pedestrian mall downtown for years was decimated by a construction project that went overtime like the construction of a nuclear reactor, then the pandemic hit. It has been bouncing back and is even starting to get more diverse businesses (it just got a clothing store after years without one, a restaurant moved into the site McDonalds vacated 25 years ago, …) but boy there are a lot of head shops that look more lurid then head shops every looked. (You are dealing with bro overdose when you have a strain of weed called “AK-47”.). I never thought I’d see the day when the mayor, the governor, and the head of the business improvement district would hail the opening of a cannabis dispensary as a strategy for economic development.

My guess is that most cities have people telling a similar story today.