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Notes -
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.
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