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As someone who lives in a particularly red area of an already red state, I'd say go ahead and do it... unless you're still angling to find a suitable life partner, then you might need to optimize for that first and foremost.
I read your entire post with a certain amount of bemusement, because while these problems aren't totally absent from this area, they're treated as an aberration, rather than a baked-in feature. The politicians and law enforcement talk a big game about fighting crime, and to a large extent actually follow through. I think the literal ONLY extant organized criminal gang active in the whole Tri-county area was rolled up and shut down the year after I moved here.
There was a single homeless man who used to post up outside my (very small) office building a couple years back. One day I came by and saw a Sheriff's deputy having a conversation with him. He hasn't been seen since, and no new vagrant has stepped in to take his place.
The town is miles and miles of suburbs, with one increasingly dense downtown area, and one long major 'strip' of road that has most of the local mainstay restaurants and amusements. That strip in particular is kept as clean and nice as possible because that's what drives most of the commerce for the surrounding area, although there are other developed areas that offer alternative, more walkable amenities.
On one occasion I was out with a date in the downtown area and a shooting occurred right outside the bar we were in. I didn't notice anything had happened until I walked outside and there were easily a dozen police cars with officers on the scene locking things down and questioning witnesses. These guys KNOW that keeping the area's reputation for safety intact is necessary to keep the money flowing here. So I dislike that there was in fact a shooting, but there is a certain comfort from knowing the local constabulary is actually focused on catching the guy and preventing it occurring again.
EDIT: I did a quick search of news articles, and there hasn't been a shooting incident in the downtown area since that one I happened be present for, over a year ago. And I laugh hard because it also dredged up news stories saying the perp of the previous shooting turned himself in (it was a white guy in case that matters), so the case wrapped up nigh-instantly rather than dragging out and people worrying about the guy resurfacing to do it again.
Much I could complain about, the local government has its corrupt and inefficient elements. But there's no sense in which I feel at risk, either my person or my property, when going about daily activities. Corrupt, inefficient, but RESPONSIVE and mostly competent governance is acceptable enough for me. I may at some point try to run for local office.
Also, there is a variety of great pizza places all around. Most of them are expensive though.
Yes, there's less 'culture' in the strict sense. I'd have to drive hours to go to a major concert or event. Although occasionally larger country music acts (the modern examples of the genre though, blech) do shows here. There are barely any 'tech jobs' to speak of, you're definitely not getting hired by one of the big players if you're here. There's something to the strategy of putting in 5 years with a giant company at high salary to save, then moving to a cheaper COL location with your nest egg.
Yeah the people are pretty fucking bland. The LGBTQ presence is limited overall, most restaurants close at 10, most bars around midnight. If you're in your twenties, the dating pool is limited and if you don't find a solid group of friends quickly, it can be very boring since most of the 'fun' stuff is geared for an older generation. Golf courses, tiki bars, nature trails. There IS a decent-sized university nearby where you could look for parties. But that is the tradeoff, because the more 'vibrant' the populace, the more likely you're getting all the attendant problems and risks, and the people around here just don't want to deal with that.
I understand why some people would accept the risks, the constant anxiety that is induced by living in a dense city with an apathetic (at best) government and frayed social fabric. I simply could never reach that sort of mindset myself. I like having a few local haunts that I can visit without fear of mugging, being shot at, or seeing a guy walking around naked and/or drugged out of his gourd. I like being able to have friends over without, as you have seen, having to warn them about the local wildlife. I like that what relatively low taxes I pay do actually go towards keeping the town nice and that the cops try their damndest to keep the undesirable elements on the fringes of society at bay.
And I feel like people who live in the cities long-term forget that all of this is EASILY possible if your citizens and your government just GIVE A DAMN, and that you don't have to believe that fixing things is futile.
I'm sure you've heard of "sideshows" or "slideshows" where groups of mostly Dodge Challengers and Chargers do donuts in the middle of an urban intersection or freeway or bridge, creating an informal yet spectacularly dangerous block party. Also the roving gangs of plateless dirt bikes and quads, presumably mostly stolen anyway. Oakland, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc
And the police are literally completely incapable of shutting these down. We've heard the official explanations about manpower and escalation, but I would love to know how those internal deliberations really go. You've gotta have some gung-ho sergeants putting together gameplans and orchestration, but the top brass shut it down? For woke / squishy / PR reasons? Anyone have real insight?
It seems like it'd be 'trivial' to infiltrate the chat groups that are organizing these things and have a sting set up to roll up as many participants as possible.
Logistically challenging because of the decentralized nature of the situation. Its the rough equivalent to the raucous high school house party that gets out of hand, as soon as someone yells "SHIT, THE COPS" everyone scatters and most of them WILL get away.
I imagine the bigger difficulty is that a lot of those arrested would be minors and how do you justify throwing the book at them solely as a deterrent?
From a vigilante standpoint, I imagine a quick way to get them to disperse is to just fire a high-powered rifle into the air a few times and MAYBE put a couple rounds into an engine block. But ironically doing so is, individually, a more serious crime than what most of the actual miscreants are each committing so you're risking legal consequences yourself in the process.
Really seems like its a proxy for the quality of parenting in your area. If these things are happening regularly maybe it is a sign that the rot has really set in already.
Once the rot is passed down it is metastasized. Here in southeast asia there is a popular pastime among Malaysian Malay kids called basikal lajak. Take a normal bike, shorten the height by shaving the handlebar and the seat down, take off the brakes and reflective pads, then go to the highest point on your nearest highway and speed downhill. The kids go prone on the bike to minimize drag, and they also do not wear any protective gear of any sprt because protection is for pussies.
Wipeouts are common, but this practice came into focus because a group of malay kids lajak at 3am (because of the heat) and they went down the wrong direction of a highway, smashing into a car driven by a chinese woman. The malays cried that this woman murdered the eight kids, and the courts were subject to racialised pressure from malays until finally the high courts made clear that the driver, who was on the correct side of the road and following all rules, was not responsible for the kids all killing themselves.
So, why would the kids do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous and still think they were in the right? Its because their authority figures are themselves lajak (the grown up version are called rempits, who waste their food delivery paychecks on constantly destroyed motorbikes because they do drag racing at night too). These figures are the ones feted in the community, seen as cool and brave for irritating the authority figures enslaved to the rich yet too impotent to clamp down on rempits.
What of the parents? The parents either are rempits themselves, or simply do not give a shit. The mothers of the kids killed by the driver said that they had no responsibility for the conduct of their kids because 'kids do what they want, the government should build things for kids to do'. Its 3am and your kids are riding downhill! They did that when their road outside the village was a 200m dirt track and cars were nonexistent, but thats not the case anymore.
Because of this incident, the parents have doubled down. Rempits regularly arrange for convoys to travel the interstate highways to prove that THEY own the roads, not the authorities and certainly not normies. Any attempt at shutting them down is met with cries of racial discrimination, and politicians promise to fight for the right of rempits to practice their unique culture regardless of the cost to normies. It does not matter that the police and normies are themselves malays who simply want to lead a normal life, what matters is that the thugs are playing at being a protected class, and their rotten behavior flows down to their offspring.
It is difficult enough to enforce behavior when it is technically in-community policing. It will be Impossible in racial-culturally segregated societies like the USA.
I'm pretty sure the US is less racially-culturally segregated than Malaysia.
Perhaps not? Malaysia certainly isn't great, and Singapore uses forced integration as a cheat code, but I've never felt under active threat and treated like a foreigner in Indian plantation worker encampments or in Malay kampungs the way I was treated when I crashed at my friends place in Prospect Park (the precursor to the aforementioned loot goblin episode). I honestly think the difference between Black (ghetto) and Latino America is greater than the difference between Malay and Chinese Malaysia, much less Black vs White America. I've lived in both, and the cultural contrast/conflict between ghetto america vs gentrified condos is extreme, much less suburbia. When malays reach class escape velocity and become middle or upper class, they upgrade the trappings of their existing culture and maintain existing cultural practices. Blacks who reach class escape velocity either turn full white (Obama Harris) or live white while acting black (rap and sport stars). There is no maintenance of the actual good practices of hood life: community time sharing for elder or childcare, church attendance, I'm struggling here so I'm tapping out.
I could just be especially negative towards 'the black experience', since I am not actually black and my black friends were codeswitchers who had intact middle class families and spoke ebonics just to get entry into Orange street clubs.
What’s the intermarriage rate between Chinese and Malays? Most people with a large social circle in diverse middle class parts of the US will know or have known at least a few black-white couples. I’m in KL on occasion and I’ve never seen a Chinese-Malay couple.
Honestly you might have seen plenty of Chinese women who were married to Malay men, but they dress identically to upper class Malay women (HEAVY makeup, overly embroidered tudungs, and double layered flowy full body dressses that swish aggressively to show off the expensive underlayer or shoes) and thus are indistinguishable. Similarly, upper class Malay men can look extremely Chinese, so the racial differences may not be so obvious if they are dressed the same. Malay and Chinese men can look very similar, especially when heavily weathered by the sun. For air conditioned professionals, grooming can make all the difference. Remove Hishamuddins pornstache, put him in a suit and he will look like any number of Chinese contractors.
Specific to marriage rates, Chinese women marry out at far higher rates than Chinese men, but usually to White or Indian men. Chinese women rarely marry malay men due to extreme familial resistance stemming from the religious intransigence of Islam, and for the most part girls who marry malays become fully acculturated, hence my above on the presentation.
Off the top of my head I would say the ratio of Chinese women marriages in Malaysia is 85% chinese, 7% white, 6% indian and 2% others (black, malay, hispanic). Among PMC it would be 60% chinese, 25% white, 10% indian and 5% others. This factors in the overseas education rate of Chinese PMC, where it is almost guaranteed they will marry a foreigner.
Indian and malay with have lower outmarriage rates because of lower baseline attractiveness relative to chinese women. Pale skin and low bodyfat% is still valued, and unfortunately indian and malay girls simply don't have the same genetics or cultural influences incentivizing outmarriage optimisations. Indian and Malay families refuse to let Their women be despoiled by outsiders, but Chinese either devalue daughters (more a historical than current practice) or the Chinese PMC is cucked by western liberal values into pretending all races are equal and perpetuate the kayfabe. The last point is more a westernised Asian phenomenon but such liberal pieties have found traction in the PMC here.
Interesting. I have to say though, there is categorically no way that even close to 25% of Chinese PMC women in Malaysia marry white men. White people aren’t uncommon in KL but there aren’t that many of them outside of that one backpacker / gap year party street with all the outdoor bars and stalls (and I presume those aren’t the whites marrying wealthy Chinese women), and most are either tourists, expats with expat wives/husbands, or business travellers. As regards Malays and Chinese, I’d say when dining at high end restaurants that are not specifically Malay-unfriendly (say the Nobu in the Four Seasons, which is probably my favorite decent restaurant in KL for consistency and service) every Malay I’ve ever seen there with family (ie not entertaining more diverse clients, colleagues etc) was with a wholly Malay family. All my Malaysian colleagues and clients, even though they work in companies that are ethnically diverse enough in terms of Malays, Chinese, Indians and sometimes whites being represented, are themselves in mono ethnic relationships and in their own ghettoized communities.
One thing I find amusing in KL is that even the high end shopping malls are completely segregated. There’s the Malay / Muslim one, by the base of the twin towers near the Four Season and Mandarin Oriental, featuring all halal restaurants and the Din Tai Fung where every dish replaces pork with chicken, and there’s the Chinese one whose exact location I forget, where every restaurant serves pork and one would be hard pressed to eat a full meal at Din Tai Fung that did not contain pig in some form. The stores themselves are the same, only the clientele differs.
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San Antonio PD wasn’t able to prevent this until they lost local control of their police department and the state troopers shut this stuff down. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes though.
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Meta still hires remote and at most they'll knock 15% off of Bay Area comp.
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It's one of the things I thought about when I drew up my list of places I would be applying to work for, along with many others. Fortunately this country still has a plethora of cities in red states, some of which are run by people who - as you put it - give a damn, and have a decently high population of young people. I'm going to be moving to one of them. I spent my college and then law school career with an almost single-minded focus on the area I want to practice in, so while I attend a relatively regional school, I'm not limited to searching for jobs in the DMV. I've had very pleasant and productive conversations with offices that I can say without exaggeration span the country. It seems like I'll have my pick of several different places.
I might have to make a follow-up post about my process for making the speadsheet of places I want to apply to. It was extremely Mottian. Salary and cost of living of course, but I also made my own adjusted cost of living. I have excel columns on total population, population growth or decline, median age, percentage of white population, largest minority population, size of the local Jewish community (I like Chabad), presence of graduate programs, ease of access to nature, violent crime rate, property crime rate, addiction rate, presence of a "progressive prosecutor", political leaning of the county, political leaning of the state, gun laws, presence of a med school, reputation of local hospitals, and a few others.
If you want a large Jewish community, have you tried moving out towards Pikesville? You'll encounter fewer gunshots and more "I'm the only one out driving on a Saturday morning..." Not that you should stay here if you don't like it. It's a big wide world, find a place where you're comfortable.
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Without doxxing yourself, would it be possible to give your top 5 or 10 cities by those criteria? Would make for an interesting discussion.
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If you have a law degree and bar license, you can do pretty well in this area. That's my secret, I zeroed in on practicing the exact type of law that people that live here are most likely to need.
Lol definitely mottean, but I think there's no real substitute for doing an actual 'vibe check' and living in an area for a while. But knowing what you're getting into is good.
A mild pro-tip on this point is that moving somewhere with a lot of retirees tends to vastly increase the availability of local medical resources. Two main reasons: old folks are the major consumer of medical services so providers go where the money goes... and experienced doctors in the twilight of their careers will also move to this area as a pre-emptive retirement move, so you can have access to professionals with MASSIVE amounts of experience available, although it can be hard to book an appointment because they will work whatever hours they please.
I also don't mind gambling a bit that as a younger, healthy guy I'm unlikely to need any major medical services and so the quality of hospitals is demoted somewhat in my general hierarchy of needs.
Absolutely. I'm going to be doing some traveling this semester and next, visiting the areas I'm particularly interested in. I'm planning on walking around the area near where I would potentially be working, as well as checking out the areas I might live in. It's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass, but as you said, there's no substitute for an actual vibe check.
Good tip, thank you.
I differ from you in this for two reasons. The first, my hobbies include activities that put me at a noticeably higher risk for needing emergency medical care. I'm a particular enthusiast of competitive shooting (2-gun my beloved), as well as hiking and camping. I've done what I can to give myself an edge if something were to happen - I got my EMT-B several years ago and have mostly retained the emergency trauma lessons, as well as a Stop The Bleed course. My friend group recently had a competition where we had to record ourselves putting on a tourniquet from wherever we keep it in our daily lives in under sixty seconds. We're uh... weird. But fun. Anyway, so I tend to want to have good quality medical care in the area for that reason. The second, I'm hoping this next move will be my last for some time. I'd like to put down some roots. So, with an eye to the future, I take medical care into account. I thought about accounting for primary school quality as well, but I figure I'll either be somewhere with good schools, or I'll be making enough that I can afford to put my kid(s) in private school.
I've also pulled the trick of befriending guys with actual experience with trauma medicine and having them around me a good portion of the time.
One is previously a Navy Corpsman who has stitched up bullet wounds in Marines, the other was previously an EMT and now a fireman. So long as I have one of them around I can be relatively certain I'll make it to the hospital if I'm not killed instantly by any particular event.
My health insurance is geared towards catastrophic events (and paying for lost wages from being unable to work) so I do have to make sure I can get to the emergency room.
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I feel like this could describe my north-Texas environment.
There are a few nutjobs on the train, but everyone uses the sprawling highways. There might be beggars at intersections, but no camps, no fentanyl shuffle. It gets worse if you go into Dallas proper, but not that much worse. Not in the parts remotely near a venue. Maybe it’s just too damn hot to stay on the streets.
I was looking up articles on some recent shootings in Deep Ellum, and they make all the right noises. Clamp down on anything resembling a trend. Manage the impression of safety.
It really is a constant.
I have literally never seen a Fent zombie or similar zonked out drug user in person around here. I bet they exist, the drug trade sure does, but I'd guess they remain in off-the-beaten-path drug dens that are 'known to police' so they can keep an eye on things, and the druggies don't get to wander the street.
I think there are also areas that are rural enough and mostly vacant and abandoned where you can form a homeless camp without anybody noticing easily, so there's less pressure to set up in populated areas.
And of course, the local response to the housing crunch has been... building more housing at a frenetic pace. Much to my chagrin the cow pasture near my house has been converted into a tiny little gated community of houses on postage-stamp lots, but I can at least be pretty damn sure there's unlikely to be an 'affordable housing' development thrown up within walking distance of me.
I know people don't much like it as an idea and it's probably not possible to formalize in laws, but this actually is my primary solution to homelessness. I want the police to aggressively enforce rules to chase bums out of nice city parks. I also want them to look the other way at encampments in lightly trafficked areas. My goal isn't to "criminalize homelessness", it's to keep bums out of parks and off of sidewalks.
Yep. See my comment here where the police will roll through at irregular intervals to make sure there's no nasty surprises or people hiding in the camps, but otherwise tolerate them when they're well away from civilization.
It WOULD be hard to formalize, because the way trespass laws work. The owner of a particular wooded, vacant parcel of land can tolerate a homeless camp but at any time can also have them all trespassed off if he wants to do something with it. So there could be 'tacit' agreement with the owner to tolerate them in the meantime, while reserving the right to kick 'em off if it becomes inconvenient. The other option is letting the city or county own the land but leave it undeveloped and just let the camp exist, but that opens up some potentially problematic optics. You don't want there to be any implied 'contract' between the land owner and the camped out homeless to ensure their safety as 'guests.'
The cops around here are also a bit more aggressive than average about enforcing panhandling laws, which has led to some 'interesting' tactics to evolve by the panhandlers to create some level of deniability as to why they're standing around at the intersection. Of course, summers here get hot and humid as balls so there is a natural deterrent in effect too. The panhandlers themselves are most likely to set up in places with shade.
Private landowners have many of the same worries, like liability and the condition of the property should they decide to do something with it in the future. But they also have to worry about squatter's rights in the medium term. I don't know if there are jurisdictions where they have to worry about tenant laws, but I would not be surprised.
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I think this is probably a lot of it. Having a release valve to give people an option of doing something other than the most disruptive possible thing seems very helpful. If nothing else it means when the cops hassle them they have an option of a place to go where they won't be hassled and of course won't be bothering other people. If there are literally no options available which don't involve bothering normal productive people, then why not set up shop in downtown and shit directly onto the sidewalk. The cops having a middle option of "roust them out of here and into the out of the way encampment not bothering anyone" also means there is something for them to since all of the more serious remedies have been denied them.
Back when I was in the criminal defense world there'd be the occasional 'raid' on a given encampment which was basically just a handful of officers checking the tents for fugitives, drugs, and weapons, and otherwise making sure there were no dead bodies or hazards to the occupants. It was pretty obvious that arresting the homeless guys would be doing them a favor so unless there was an actual violent resister it was most common to just seize whatever contraband was lying around in plain sight and asking if anybody needed medical attention, then leaving.
If the raids are random enough, it probably disincentivizes them acting as drug mules and such.
Don’t you want homeless encampments moving every so often to prevent buildup of unsanitary conditions? It’s not like anyone’s gonna run plumbing or garbage collection out there.
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