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Some of this seems to be about very small microenvironments and whether you stumble across and into them is quite random. Last year, my wife and I visited Milwaukee. I know Milwaukee pretty well, there are a bunch of areas of the city that aren't great, but I typically think of them as being quite easy to avoid if you have any familiarity with the geography. We went to a basketball game, an event at a brewery, then went out to go grab a takeout pizza afterwards. Thus far, all was well! Nothing to see other than people out having a good time. Maybe a few bums panhandling at a couple streetcorners, but nothing really worth mentioning. After we grabbed our pizza, we thought it would be nice to enjoy it at one of the local parks on the Milwaukee River, which is much more scenic than you might expect. To our surprise, the park that seems pretty nice during the day had dozens of vagrants, a couple of which began yelling at us about our pizza literally the moment we stepped off the riverwalk and into the park. We fled pretty quickly - we both felt like we were in genuine danger, not just uncomfortable with some beggars. I still think the city is a generally nice place to visit, but I have revised my opinion on how attentive I should be at night.
On the other hand, Baltimore really is unusually bad, even compared to other Rust Belt degradation.
About ten years ago, some friends and I visited a restaurant in a Chicago suburb, right on the edge between an extremely rich neighborhood and a fairly poor one. When we arrived around 8:00, the staff and customers were all white, and the background music was pop. When we left a little after 9:00, the staff and all the other customers were black, and the background music was hip hop. On our way out, one of the employees warned us not to linger in the parking lot. Apparently that’s how this restaurant operates: well-off whites during the day, poor and more frequently criminal blacks at night. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed such a clear division in the same physical location.
I'm kind of curious to know what it's like to live in Grosse Pointe Park, MI, in a wealthy white neighborhood just one block from a typical Detroit hood. Pretty rare nowadays to see this without a miles-long, gradual buffer zone.
I'm also curious. But from my understanding Grosse Pointe is actually not desirable anymore. The rich, like Matt Ishbia, prefer to live out in Bloomfield, far beyond the reach of local vibrance.
And... this is correct. You can buy some very nice homes there for not so much. For less than a million you can own an updated 3000 square foot colonial with 5 bedrooms.
https://www.redfin.com/city/9051/MI/Grosse-Pointe-Park
It's a buyers market too. Lots of inventory!
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