I’ve lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.
The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn’t give me any shit when I said I didn’t carry cash.
But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there’s always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao
Also I hate when people’s stories of why a place is so dangerous are actually a story where everyone was fine?
“I don’t feel safe walking in the park at night, one time there was this homeless guy walking behind me”
And did he… do anything? Or have true crime podcasts just rotted your brain and now you just see other human beings and think they’re going to murder you? Because what you just told is a story of walking through the park and being completely unharmed.
The fear of the cities actually traces its roots back to the establishment of the (overwhelmingly) white suburban “middle class”, which was a product of Jim Crow era legislation and laws along with redlining and white flight.
I have a whole bit about how this happened, if anyone is interested in hearing more about it.
Please share!
Alright here goes:
So at the end of WWII you have this influx of veterans returning to the US.
This posed a social problem that, in a post-WWI country, was often disastrous. The early proto-fascist and pro-fascist paramilitaries that wracked the Weimar Republic and helped bring the Nazis to power and to intimidate/suppress the opponents of the Nazis (along with terrorizing German Jews etc.) were made up by a majority of returned WWI veterans who were pretty fucked by the war and often struggled to find work and reintegrate into a post-war society, although they knew how to conduct war and they were roaming the streets, so it created a powderkeg of malcontents. These WWI veterans across Europe caused a great deal of political strife throughout the interwar period.
I haven’t read any sources where the US government was specifically aware of the political problems posed by veterans from WWI failing to find work and to reintegrate into society, thus causing political strife, but it’d be hard to imagine that they weren’t aware of this and that thus that their policies towards WWII veterans weren’t influenced by trying to pacify and neutralise this potential political problem.
So WWII veterans return to the US and the US creates the GI Bill which was a massive welfare program designed to bolster the US economy domestically while also providing for the needs of the WWII veterans.
A large part of the bill was aimed at providing low-interest rate, no down payment home loans to veterans and the funding preferenced new builds.
This created a massive subsidy for the construction industry and it was the Levitt brothers who used this influx of funding to create low cost, mass produced housing outside of the city areas, the most famous of which was Levittown town (humble folks, those Levitt brothers eh?)
This was essentially the advent of suburbia.
Because of the low cost that housing loans were provided at, it was actually cheaper for veterans to buy new houses in the suburbs that were springing up than it was to live in the city.
Although, this is post-war America we’re talking about so obviously this is when Jim Crow laws were still gripping the country and, of course, the GI Bill catered to the political interests of those who supported Jim Crow.
Effectively, what this meant was that the GI Bill massively preferenced white veterans and it actively and passively discouraged non-white veterans from benefitting from the bill.
As one example of this, in the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.
So, basically this was economic apartheid.
Not only do we have the creation of the suburbs and all the car-dependence that comes with it happening right there, we also see the emergence of the so-called “middle class” which was overwhelmingly white in its makeup because this housing freed up disposable income and it fostered intergenerational wealth from the investment into property that suburbia allowed for.
Although people of colour languished behind and were excluded from property ownership through the design of this bill and redlining, so they tended to stay stuck in inner city slums which cost a lot more for housing than a cheapz subsidised home loan in the suburbs offered.
Over time there was a strong push to “clean up” the inner city and to eradicate slums. You see these massive housing projects developing from the 1930s as cities became gentrified, and perhaps the most famous example of public housing projects is the much-maligned Pruitt-Igoe project (which has a fantastic documentary on it called The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.)
These projects concentrated poverty and “criminality” (if you’ll excuse the shitty term for the sake of my vain attempt at brevity here) due to complex issues of economic and social exclusion, intergenerational trauma, drug/alcohol abuse etc. and they also were extremely exploitative. Some residents of Pruitt-Igoe were spending up to 3/4s of their income exclusively on housing, which perpetuated the cycle of poverty for black Americans.
So you have this dual effect of the middle class emerging and creating generational opportunity and wealth in the nascent (white) middle class while people of colour are excluded, stuck in expensive slums, and then they are shifted out of the slums and into public housing which was arguably worse than the slums in many ways as it disrupted the established communities and displaced local businesses in order for property speculators (especially slumlords) and property developers to cash in on the gentrification of the inner city.
replying so you remember to ping me when you feel inspired to do another of these ❤️
Thank you 💜
This is the little reminder I need - I’ll remember our discussion in DMs we had about this and I will have a good chance of remembering I’m supposed to ping someone when I write my next effortpost but the chances of me finding your username in my notifications months down the track would be slim and I don’t have a place to record this info elsewhere - my ADHD brain will write the info down and then immediately forget about it 😅 but now I know exactly where to look and it’s not possible for me to misplace your comment since it’s right there.
Damn, this is good. You should repost it to c/effort.
Thanks for the compliment!
Your comment made me realise that I’m a massive dummy and, I think because my head has been completely immersed in other subjects, I entirely forgot about the Bonus Army events that occurred post-WWI in the US so there actually is direct evidence that the US government was completely and acutely aware of the potential social and political ramifications of veterans returning from the war and failing to find work and reintegrate into society can have. There’s a decent argument for the events surrounding the Bonus Army being a causative factor for the downfall of Hoover’s presidency too.
Capitalism makes rural life untenable, and forces people into the cities in search of jobs that pay high enough to survive off of. This forces people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds into close proximity with one another, which leads to diversity which reactionaries see as the destruction of the traditional heterogeneous society. Cities are also highly polluted, easy to get sick in, and full of safety hazards. Capitalism creates poverty alongside urbanization, and poverty leads to addiction, mental illness, and crime (since poverty is criminalized under capitalism, and so is doing what you need to survive, like stealing food) which in turn leads to overpolicing, prison slavery, etc… Reactionaries skip over the part where capitalism causes poverty, and assume the cities themselves cause crime. Along with their favorite scapegoats: immigrants and minorities. So I think there’s a combination of economic, environmental, and cultural grievances one can have with cities. Some of these grievances are reactionary, and some are sincere displeasure with the inconveniences of urban life (the economic and environmental issues, mainly).
In my experience cities are way more dangerous because of dumbest car drivers constantly running red lights and almost hitting pedestrians. It felt terrible walking everywhere and trying to dodge cars, and I avoided riding a bicycle there as they frequently put bike lanes between car lanes and I had other bikers warn me about them having highest bicycle fatality rates in the country that year.
Cities where I live are just a scheme to get as many poor people ran over by giant confederate-flag waving trucks as possible
I live in a city. Today a dude tried to smash my window in and called me a f[slur].
In 2022, a homeless dude stole my bag from my on Burnside.
In 2020, multiple comrades got fucked up by the PPB.
In 2016(?) a comrade of mine was stabbed on the lightrail.
In 2015, a comrade was run over by a fascist (rip Lewis)
In 2014 a comrade had their house ransacked by the pigs during a “wellness check.”
Cities can be violent places. That said, I live in thr suburbs now and desperately miss Portland. Lake Oswego can suck my fucking asshole. I’ll take rest of it any day.
And you know what? It’s more dangerous here. Everyone’s sedentary because they can’t walk anywhere. Everyone’s an alcoholic because they’re alone and miserable. Everyone’s broke because they have to pay for a car. This shit kills people.
I feel the same way. I’ve experienced violence living in various cities, but I’d still take it over the suburban shithole I live in now. Anyway the point is not really that conservatives are wrong that cities can be violent (obviously they exaggerate the danger a lot, but still). It’s that they live in such fear. They are cowards, bullies and fantasists.
For the split second I spent on Twitter I had a fun time getting conservatives to go silent by demonstrating violent crime rates in areas near them were higher than in the cities they were posting about.
a lot of US conservatives experience notions of safety/crime by
, and since huge parts of the US have a rural-white / urban-brown diverse situation going on, it’s the coded way to express racial bias.i grew up and spend the first half of my life in areas where the rural communities were as racially diverse as the cities, so it was not something i recognized until i moved to the “rural = white” parts. if you get a white conservative cornered on this topic, rub their tummy/make them feel safe and tease it out… it’s always about them being
don’t get me wrong, there are always people in rural areas that have apprehension about the city who are not fucked up about race. the overpolicing, the prices, the unfamiliarity with navigating / complexity with parking (often paid) and traffic patterns. for people without social connections in the city who are having to go there for some administrative/bureaucratic b.s. or a big event, the city quickly becomes a place where there are lots of institutions putting their hands in your pockets. regional urban hospitals can absolutely nail families visiting from the boonies on food and parking. not to mention, there are a number of downtown areas where finding a fucking free/public bathroom is a goddamn nightmare if you’re just arrived and on your own. which is absolute bullshit, imo. a big fancy city with no easily accessible public bathrooms in the central core deserves all the scorn and piss and shit on its sidewalks and streets that humans put there. i personally hate that the most.
but to your point, the conservatives complaining about “crime” and “safety” (and explicitly not “safety from zealous cops”) are talking about their racial hangups.
My chud ex-neighbor visibly cringed when I told him I was moving closer into the city. “more power to you, I guess”, says the man who jokes about killing homeless people for sport
Fuck I should’ve slashed his tires
Also, if cities are so bad, then why are property values in cities SO GODDAMN HIGH!?
I live in a rural shithole because I’m too poor to afford anything else, and trust me, I feel plenty unsafe around so-called “good 'ol boys” who can [redacted] someone and then get it away with it. If you don’t like it, you’re seen as the weirdo.
I’ve seen this split happen in real time between myself and my liberal-as-heck family. We’re both in the same metro area and while I’ve lived in the city proper for most of the past three years they’ve been in the suburbs for the last ten or so, and any time the subject comes up they always come reeeeeal close to saying some wack stuff about Hispanics, undocumented immigrants, homeless people etc and I’m always pushing back on it. It’s like sure, comparatively where I live is the “bad part of town”, but we’re in one of the safest cities in America get a grip.
“Oh yeah? If cities are so safe then explain this video footage from Chicago”
Shows a guy walking through Freeside in Fallout New Vegas
shows clips of shoplifting
“This is why X retailer is leaving Y city!”
[Six Months Later]
Retailer X closed Z stores in Y city because those stores were underperforming, as cited by their investor documents.
Lots of good comments in here, but another big factor is that people suck at dealing with large numbers. They’ll hear there were 300 murders somewhere in some year and think that place is a shooting gallery because they don’t know the population of the city, and if they did they aren’t going to intuitively grasp how rare crimes actually are.
And of course media has been banging the drum on crime for the past ~40 years despite crime lowering significantly over that time frame.
Also you know what beats out all those bad things?
Deaths from fucking car accidents which happen waaaaaaay more often in suburban and rural areas.
it is MY RIGHT to DRUNK DRIVE 40 MINUTES to and from the BAR
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at one point i met every individual homeless person in our city as part of a massive food drive. didnt get mugged or shanked a single time by these supposedly dangerous individuals
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