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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise. NYC became much safer in the 90s after the crime crackdown. It's not like you have to choose between criminality or convenience.

Suburbia is poorly-planned in the US. It SHOULD be based on the European village model: centered around a school, post office, pub, playing field/park, church/community hall, local small grocery, so it's walkable for most leisure activities and for kids, even if the parents have to drive somewhere for work. Modern suburbs are just houses without community, though there may be a school tucked here and there. Part of the reason is that people don't want to pay taxes for parks, and part of it is that suburbs don't have community leadership to address zoning. The "leadership" is some developer who doesn't care about anything but selling 500 houses.

Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise.

Can you elaborate on the evidence you believe supports this assertion? The stats overwhelmingly show the opposite, and it's one of increasingly fewer things that are still pretty easy to Google.

Eyeballing their "Most Dangerous Counties" list, we find:

I think there's two ways to think about an area being safe, and you+bloomberg are using a different one than most folks here.

Bloomberg/your numbers are meaningful if by moving to Big Horn County, I would then also give up my laptop class remote work job and take up lumberjacking. In the kitchen I'd stop cooking vegan adaptations of low carb japanese food and instead cook the heavily fried fatty foods more typical to American Indians, as well as the heavy drinking common to that demographic. (In spite of my nic I don't actually drink much, and actually specialize in low ABV stuff. Shoju FTW!) And I guess my genetics would also change.

However most people assume that they would move to a new place, adapt their current lifestyles to what is available locally (regular instead of malabar spinach), and not make adaptations that are too far removed (daily opioids laced with fentanyl instead of LSD microdoses).

The person you were responding to is talking about crime, not overall safety. Additionally, they claimed that people want to move to a place where criminals would realistically require a car to reach, and that is satisfied with suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs, as the link you gave agrees, are far less hazardous than rural areas.

And when it comes to crime, the second graph in that link indeed shows that the most urban geographies (light blue line) have by far the highest homicide rate of all the geographies. If you want to talk about "the specific urban area with the lowest urban homicide rate in the country" (NYC) rather than "urban" in general, you can certainly do that, but I don't think "just move to NYC if you care about crime in your St. Louis neighborhood" is going to get much traction.

And if you want to argue that people should include other hazards (e.g., car accidents) in their decision about where to live, you can certainly do that, too. But I would respond by saying that violent crime is pretty unique in how it affects our sense of safety and quality of life. I suspect people will tolerate quite a lot of risk of death by car accidents, lightning, and farm machinery if it means not having to be worried about crime.

Yeah, I was gonna say. Rural areas are way safer than urban areas.

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