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Notes -
I don’t know about this.
I see far more families out on the street hanging out and just generally enjoying life in Latin America (where crime is much higher) than I do in the United States. It’s always the top thing I notice traveling between these two.
Latin American streets are full of life. Full of families, tons of children running around, events, gatherings, all manner of activity. US streets are quiet, dead, there’s nobody around, and even just walking around is shunned.
I also noticed that this affects my mental well-being a lot, and it’s the main reason my political persuasion is basically an urbanist in the way Noah describes.
There's things that could confound this: LatAm places have held onto traditional cultural aspects better than NorthAm places; better shared culture between people in the city; nobody ever felt the need to flee the cities (and if they did, they probably just straight-up fled the country instead); and part of the crime rate vs. niceness thing could be you can just shoot someone who makes your life/experience miserable and mostly get away with it.
I don’t think these are great counterpoints as, LatAm is one of the most ethnically diverse places of the world, and it’s definitely true that people structure the cities there based on fleeing from crime.
But there may be something in what you mention about the idea of fleeing cities, in the US, city cores became the crime ridden parts, whereas in LatAm, the outskirts are typically more dangerous and the city center is more clean and well kept.
That’s probably part of it. But in my opinion, car culture is the biggest factor here. Here in the US we went all in on designing everything around the car, and it upended basic communal life in my opinion.
Probably helps that the Mexican government never wages war on the productive classes within the city and never forced the children of the middle-class into the most violent neighborhoods at bayonet point.
America had functional urban life from its founding to the 1960s... then the federal government waged literal war on it
.
edit: this is why Canadian cities consitently remain intact in-spite of everything, even with modern homelessness and drug problems the middle and upper-middle class will still live in "inner suburbs" as few as 100 meters from housing projects or homeless shelters... because they can send their kids to schools, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, where their kids won't be interacting with that and anyone dealing drugs or interrupting class or comitting violence would be removed.
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