The area where I live achieves another distinction.
If "safety" is at the top of your list when it comes to requirements for your a place to live, don't move to St. Louis. That city is at the bottom of the list of 182 cities across the US evaluated by WalletHub and ranked from safest to least safe. The site used 41 metrics related to home and community safety (presence or lack of terrorist attacks; number of mass shootings and other types of crimes; number of first responders; number of deaths from other causes including drug poisonings and traffic accidents, etc.), natural disaster risk, and financial safety (unemployment and underemployment rate, poverty rate, foreclosure rate, and more).
I don't actually live in the City but just across the River Des Peres from it in a town called Shrewsbury which is in St. Louis County (the City is not part of the County). Rest assured that a lot of us who live around here have the same opinion of St. Louis that people in other places do.
We'd really rather not go downtown, thank you very much.
The City's murder/shooting numbers don't approach Chicago's but they're a far larger town than St. Louis is. Factor town size in and St. Louis' numbers are pretty damned impressive. And you can get shot pretty much anywhere down there. Bars, restaurants, Cardinal games. Yup. Several years ago, some poor guy was shot and severely injured just outside Busch Stadium right after the Birds played.
So you can see why some of us would be rather reluctant.
If "safety" is at the top of your list when it comes to requirements for your a place to live, don't move to St. Louis. That city is at the bottom of the list of 182 cities across the US evaluated by WalletHub and ranked from safest to least safe. The site used 41 metrics related to home and community safety (presence or lack of terrorist attacks; number of mass shootings and other types of crimes; number of first responders; number of deaths from other causes including drug poisonings and traffic accidents, etc.), natural disaster risk, and financial safety (unemployment and underemployment rate, poverty rate, foreclosure rate, and more).
I don't actually live in the City but just across the River Des Peres from it in a town called Shrewsbury which is in St. Louis County (the City is not part of the County). Rest assured that a lot of us who live around here have the same opinion of St. Louis that people in other places do.
We'd really rather not go downtown, thank you very much.
The City's murder/shooting numbers don't approach Chicago's but they're a far larger town than St. Louis is. Factor town size in and St. Louis' numbers are pretty damned impressive. And you can get shot pretty much anywhere down there. Bars, restaurants, Cardinal games. Yup. Several years ago, some poor guy was shot and severely injured just outside Busch Stadium right after the Birds played.
So you can see why some of us would be rather reluctant.
4 comments:
I live about ten miles from downtown Durham, NC, and I won't go there. Downtown, and even some portions of uptown, Raleigh are getting dangerous as well. Both these are Democrat-administered cities, of course.
As is St. Louis. I think their last Republican mayor was in the 40's or something like that.
Your problem is that municipal boundaries did not advance with your tract development, and now 80% of your metropolitan settlement lives outside the core city, with the core city largely occupied by slums (which you have in any city). So, you don't have the tax base for a properly staffed police force, you have a demoralized force without much ambition to attack real problems, and nowadays you have Democratic pols who are frankly hostile to law enforcement (a disposition that was as recently a decade ago limited to black chauvinists and sociology professors). You want to attack the problem, step one is transferring police services from municipal governments to a four-county authority which covers the whole metropolitan settlement. Step two is proper staffing. Step three is to adopt best practices, which have worked in New York. New York's police precincts cover areas which have a mean population of 130,000 and encompass > 2/3 of the slum population of the whole metropolitan settlement (which sprawls over 19 counties in New York and New Jersey). Not one precinct has a homicide rate higher than 16 per 100,000 as we speak.
Sounds about right. Don't know if it'll ever happen, though.
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