My old ‘north side’ neighborhood goes through cycles.
I’ve lived there 1975 through 2008.
It has the bad reputation of all the sections of town but the truth is better that the stories. ( at our wedding someone wanted to fight my visiting white-guy brother untill he said his new brother in law was Frankie Fisher ! Their eyes got huge their hands went up and they said…’‘never mind’’ )
We moved to the east side to a bigger house for this set of kids but still own, and will return to the north side family home my wife grew up in.
– a bar to the north, a soup kitchen two blocks east, a church to the west and their school accross the street, restaurant to the south and their used item store accross, are all draws to the …‘homeless’ who frequent here. ( homeless in quotes because many of these people simply chose not to go home. years back Gallup was know by ‘drunk town USA’ because of the population of ‘‘homeless by choice’’ people. )
This year my renters moved out because the panhandlers had gotten too aggressive…
.seems the younger bunch don’t understand how to co-exist with the residents, so I began what I had told the renters to do in the first place, an immersion publicity campaign to re-focus awareness and police presence there…letters to the editor from numerous neighbors and businesses…phone calls to police for EVERY minor instance from EVERY neighbor… ( I put fliers in all the mailboxes in a two block radius ) …tell EVERY panhandler NO so none get the idea that it’s a place to get anything.
My new renters see no problems there now.
We never had any huge problems either ( except for that big a$$ bar to the south that finally got closed down. ) I just dealt with them as I just said and we all got along.
I think the key to some of these ‘‘fears’’ lies in what you do about it.
My renters ran away, moved out, leaving it for me…or not…so I stepped up to the plate. That’s MY neghborhood and we’ll be back in five years.
Automotive ‘‘fears’’ are manifesting themselves in the same manner.
Too many drivers leaving the issues for somebody else to deal with. Crying that the CAR and more LAWS should do all the protecting and yet not bothering to learn the driving methods AND not stressing to others to do the same.
What different views people have of places and times. I was almost never scared of wandering around DC in the 1960s, even after Dr King was murdered. I worked on rebuilding a Peoples Drug Store in the burned area on 14th Street NW, and never had any problems. There were areas that I would not go, but they were very few. Maybe I was just too young and too used to black folks to be worried. Even now when I see a group of young black men I’m not concerned. Sometimes I think they are amazed that I’m not scared of them… We’ve had some nice conversations once we decide that the other guys aren’t so menacing after all. I recall the 70s in DC the same way.
Heroin has taken over parts of my town. There’s an estimate that 8000 people are on it…in a town of just over 30,000.
I see posts on FB about people seeing others shooting up in all kinds of places, needles littering our parks and streets. People shooting up while sitting in their car in a parking lot, or even while they are driving(her BF tied the seatbelt around her arm as she drove and shot her up in between stop lights).
Rural areas have their problems, but the vast majority of the population lives in urban and suburban areas, where violent crime rates have been falling since the seventies. NYC had several times as many murders then as they do now. Last year they had the fewest murders since they started keeping good counts in 1963. They are one of the most dramatic examples, but almost all the larger cities are down by quite a lot. Suburbs are also down, but most of them had low rates to begin with.
When did safety exclude comfort, reliability and practicality. As a matter of fact, increased safety in a car often enhances all three. Better handling cars are safer, safer cars tend to be more durable/reliable when mandates insure they must function for a period if time. Now, if you had more fun in a really old and unreliable car, it is probably less safe and less fun then a newer, safer one. If a loved on got hurt or worse in one that you had handed to them with the idea they take it and just have fun, you would definitely be questioning your own judgement…after the fact.