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Boston isn’t a shithole; Back Bay is probably second only to Greenwich Village / Lower Manhattan in terms of quality walkable neighborhoods in the US. But it is interesting that in other countries, these psycho fentanyl hobos don’t really exist. They may have homeless people, most places do, but they’re of a substantially different kind. They’re not terrifying and mostly pose no risk to anyone but themselves and sometimes each other.
I haven’t been to a lot of places in your list, certainly not in the last few years, but I’ll answer for the ones I have.
Bronx: Too big for a universal judgment, there are a lot of nice parts of the Bronx along with some shitholes. The devastating thing for Seattle isn’t that the bad part of town is bad, it’s that the central business district is a bad part of town. I’d say the Bronx is 70 on this scale.
Flushing: Flushing is fine, it’s not a great neighborhood but it’s not a bad or dangerous place IMHO, 60.
Lower Manhattan: huge variety, but overall the best urban environment in America. Declined since COVID although nowhere near Seattle’s level. 55, Restrict if just to the village and it’s 50. Psychotic hobos are absolutely an issue but there’s safety in numbers and there are always people around. The subway is a bigger issue.
Ithaca: Eternal shithole, long has been, long will be. Those who must live there deserve nothing but pity. I’ve heard it’s even worse now, but how that’s possible is beyond me. 100.
I assume Buffalo is also 90-100, it’s not a place you hear great things about. Asheville was nice 7 or 8 years ago, would be a shame if it had deteriorated.
(By this scale San Francisco is 90, Vancouver 40, London is 25, Paris and Berlin 30, Tokyo 10, Singapore 5)
I would not say Greenwich Village is meaningfully better than the rest of lower Manhattan on this issue. The crowded parts closer to Washington Square Park are full of psychos. The park itself has a corner that is essentially Hamsterdam and the only place that’s worse in lower Manhattan is the area around the Bowery and Grand Street station in Chinatown
I don’t think the village is meaningfully better than the rest of Manhattan on this issue, I just think it’s the best place to live in lower Manhattan and that’s broadly reflected in eg property prices and neighborhood cachet anyway. There are psychotic hobos around but it’s probably the busiest or one of the busiest parts of lower Manhattan at all hours, certainly in the warmer months there are always students and other residents around at night, it’s rare to feel unsafe in my experience (having lived there my entire life between 1995 and 2017 when I moved to England, and having returned very frequently since). Which corner of the park is like Hamsterdam? You’re more likely to encounter students drinking and smoking weed than to be accosted by psychotic hobos.
The northwest corner is full of groups of junkies and psychotic people screaming at each other.
Here’s a NYPOST link, obviously they are a bit of a tabloid but what they report is true. https://nypost.com/2021/05/29/washington-square-park-drug-den-horrifies-greenwich-village/
Try walking through there on your next visit and compare to the rest of the park, there’s a very distinct vibe shift and I’ve seen a lot of wild shit there.
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I assume this is the part where you're taking the piss. Ithaca's always struck me as a very nice place, whenever I've gone there to visit family. Or is there a different Ithaca, one that doesn't host Cornell?
The whole thing feels like taking the piss to me. Genuinely, this is all so bizarre. I've traveled to major cities, for school and work and for pleasure, typically by myself, I nearly always end up having booked a hotel in a worse neighborhood than I thought I had because I'm cheap and pick a cheap one, and I've never experienced anything like this. I've never taken any particular effort to "protect" myself or to avoid bad neighborhoods, I've nearly always walked where physically possible. NYC, DC, SF, Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, Chicago. I've never experienced anything remotely close to this. Closest I ever came was the first time I was in Boston, ten years ago, I saw two homeless guys get into a knife fight. No one has ever accosted me, people who ask me for money generally respond just fine to a firm No, or if I'm feeling the spirit I'll offer to buy them a sandwich which they will occasionally take. The only time I can recall ever having a really negative interaction with a street person was at 18 getting talked into spending $10 on somebody's struggle rap demo at Penn Station. I've walked miles through the Bronx or Brooklyn or Harlem drunk in the middle of the night, I've wandered around SF aimlessly. I've gone to midnight concerts in the wrong part of town and wandered back at 2am. I've gone to games, concerts, fight nights, bars, parties, walked around drunk and high and stupid. I've always looked like a preppy white guy, I'm not tough, I've more Hayseed than Street Smart about me, I should be a target in a what they say of "bad" neighborhoods, yet I have never had the slightest bit of trouble. The residents of "bad" neighborhoods have generally been friendly to me. The last "bad" experience I ever had was a black guy on the Broad Street Line trying to sell me liquor on the Septa train after an Eagles game; I told him I didn't drink because I was Muslim, we had a brief conversation about that and he asked me to subscribe to his Youtube channel. He later tried to steal somebody's duffel bag, another black guy's, but was chased off.
These diatribes feel like two movies one screen to me, at best. I'm reminded of a trade show I once attended in Baltimore, years ago. I was going to a bar to meet a friend of mine from high school, as I was leaving a guy from West Virginia who I had met at the show latched onto me. Wanted to go out for a drink. He walked with me. Nice enough guy. A little drunk already. Every time we saw two black guys standing next to each other, he would grab me and hustle along, say don't look at them, MOVE. And then say "phew, really dodged a bullet there, you're lucky I was here dude." We split up at the bar after he got bored of the conversation, I walked back drunk, by myself. Somehow, despite being alone and not following his advice, no one accosted me. This has been my experience over and over: actual violence is vanishingly rare, and has never touched me despite my best efforts to make myself vulnerable, but some people perceive violence all around them.*
Objection 1: But FHM, you might think of yourself as a giant pussy, but be fair, practically speaking you are a male of average height and you've lifted your bodyweight overhead every year since Obama's second term, you are not factually a soft target. Maybe you carry yourself like less of a pussy than you perceive yourself as?
Sure, this makes some degree of sense. Maybe I'm not perceiving my own privilege. But...this kinda flips the political valence of so much of the argument? Does it make sense to say that the Red Tribe is the tribe of tough, independent, masculinity if the online whinging about urban crime seems to consist of people scared by all this, while the girly effeminate or feminine Blue Tribers walk around feeling fine? If women and the weak are the ones threatened, why is the pro-police party so masculine?
Objection 2: Maybe you've just gotten lucky? Odds are...
Sure, but people who whinge about this kind of thing online, like my learned friend in argument @2rafa , seem to run into this all the time. While I have, over my entire adult life, never once. If merely traveling to these cities gives one person a dozen experiences in a day, living in them for years, attending school and going to parties and events, should have given me at least one.
Objection 3: You're the one taking the piss!
Fair enough. We're at an impasse.
*All the actual crime I've suffered from has been of the annoying, pissant, middle of the night variety. I reckon I've had more stolen from me than most around here, but it's been people kicking in the door of a house we were working on and walking off with wire and a table saw. Or catalytic converters! God the catalytic converters I've lost. Recently someone broke into our junkyard and graffiti'd an old trailer. Honestly, I was unlikely to catch them, and the cops would never give a shit, so I left a note: "Hey, I don't really care if you put your name on the broken down stuff, your art ain't bad, but no penises, no swastikas, no swear words. Don't make me do something about this." So far, they've listened. Go figure.
Seattle is much worse than any East Coast or Midwest city I’ve visited in this way, even though objectively violent crime is much higher in St Louis, Detroit, New Orleans etc, even after Seattle’s spike. I’d say the situation is also different. In Baltimore and Philly and even Chicago the primary risk is that a couple of guys come up to you, take out a gun or a knife and demand your wallet and phone. They may be mildly fucked up but it is, ultimately, a robbery. The thing about psychotic hobos on the West Coast is that they’re unpredictable because they’re strung out and dealing with severe mental illness. There is no predictability. My dad has stories about NYC in the ‘70s and ‘80s but fundamentally if you had $20 and/or handed over your wallet you were safe, especially as a man but mostly in general too. The people who got shot or shivved were for the most part the guys who decided to be heroes and fight back.
And I’d be wary of saying I’m an extreme prude about this. I grew up in NYC, as I said to Nybbler I’ve frequented the sketchiest, OK second-sketchiest Manhattan McDonalds as a teenager and young adult that was regularly the scene of drug abuse, knife fights, hobo brawls and the settling of various other armed disputes, and that was life. I’ve walked through much of lower Manhattan at 2am countless times, in my more reckless days by myself, have taken the subway at all hours. I’m not a wide-eyed suburban naïf who crosses the street at the sight of two loitering black men (or, in NYC, one would pretty much never go outside). But this was sketchy, and I think it’s clear in the behavior of the population.
The ‘red tribe’ often exaggerates problems with urban crime. In Britain, conservatives like to suggest knife crime is a big problem in London (it isn’t, London is one of the safest cities in the West with a 100% murder clearance rate and almost every knife homicide victim is either in a domestic violence situation or a young black man involved in gangs on tough project housing). And the hysteria about NYC, certainly since Giuliani, is very much misplaced.
But this was bad. And - per your example - the ‘blue tribe’ residents of Seattle were clearly reticent about spending much time on the street in any great numbers.
Sure, but I'm looking at the comparisons you are drawing, and clearly you and I have a significant gap in perception of something. Perhaps it isn't risk of violence?
In the comment thread above you stated:
Maybe we're talking about different things, and your 100 rating is to do with some aesthetic distaste which I don't even notice. What exactly is your 0-100 based on?
Ithaca is, has been for decades, and remains as of last year, ten square miles surrounded by reality. I can't imagine anywhere safer, short of a literal shopping mall or something. I wandered around as a kid, as a drunk undergrad, as a law student, as a middle aged tourist. I've never even heard of violence there that wasn't perpetrated between students, or essentially domestic in nature. Buffalo is...just a city? Not particularly upscale, but neither particularly dangerous nor hassling, I felt no sense of risk going out for wings there. San Francisco and NYC I've lived in, I don't know that I felt THAT much difference from Paris or Berlin, certainly Madrid and Barcelona and Luxembourg were worse experiences for me. Paris certainly I had significantly more hassle from street people, but that might be because I am quite obviously not French. I've heard great things about Singapore, though I've never had the pleasure.
I can accept your assessment of Seattle and Portland, I haven't been to either since I was maybe eleven. But then to say SF, which I have visited, is 90% as bad, and Buffalo and Ithaca which I've been to regularly and enjoy, are also "shitholes" and just as bad...I'm a little lost.
To your point...
I agree, the Republican fear of inner city crime suffers from the same 'boy who cried wolf' problem that Democratic accusations of Naziism and racism have suffered from. And when you call Ithaca a horrifying shithole where residents should be pitied, it destroys credibility of accounts of other places.
To be completely clear, my point about Ithaca was largely intended as a joke. But as the link shows, nowhere is safe from this problem in the US right now.
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I was, but sadly after searching it’s now declined rather steeply, too.
Commons has always been a bit sketchy, but it was a small town "dumb and poor people who go way back and have a mixture of old beefs and enabling habituation to each other's antisocial tendencies" kind of sketchy that should be familiar to those who watch a certain genre of police cam videos for fun. I'm wondering if the homeless in the post are part of that web; Ithaca is not a place where unconnected homeless could easily survive the winter.
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You literally said:
So Boston is only 'probably livable' and equivalent to San Francisco, in your eyes. You said this about San Francisco:
So you say San Francisco is a dump (and by extension, Boston is the same). I assume now you'll try and wriggle out of having used the word shithole by saying you were only talking about Union Square, so whatever.
I was willing to suspend disbelief, never having been to Seattle or Portland myself. But when you start going off on cities I've lived in and indeed bike commute through everyday and call them 'barely livable' I know you're either so snobbish and rich as to be out of touch with the reality the rest of us live in or playing it up to try and make an argument about how we're all ugly people leaving in ugly cities. Granted, I'm not a (presumably) 5 foot something Jewish woman but I can't deny what my lying eyes see every day.
Yes, I literally was only talking about Union Square which has had a hobo problem since well before COVID. I apologize if you think that’s changing my original meaning, but it wasn’t.
And again, you’re comparing neighborhoods to cities. The point is that both Boston and NYC have neighborhoods ‘as bad’ as downtown Seattle. But their core business areas are nowhere near as bad, that’s the tragic thing about Seattle, that the crisis has consumed the city center itself.
Boston is not a shithole. Like literally every major coastal city it has a big problem with homeless drug addicts, but as I said there are nice places. My point was to compare the financial district of San Francisco to Boston in a way that made clear both were ‘liveable’.
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