I was presented with the following top 10 list in a local development forum recently. My area is nothing short of obsessed with top 10 lists. It’s like Christmas every day in RDU for top 10 lists. A quick Bing search (sorry I just abandoned Google) gives us lots and lots of scholarly articles on income correlations and, well, things we deem desirable. Good physical health. Good mental health. Life expectancy (assuming long is good). Educational attainment. The good ol’ cycle of poverty is a tough nut to crack in the face of these obstacles. But I had a hard time coming up with any studies on public safety and high income areas. I am sure they are out there, but they sure didn’t float to the top of the search results (I used Google too, to be sure).
So, from deep within the well, I conjured up, what might be a thesis…..the title of this post….had I been thinking about this stuff back when I was university aged. And had I not flunked out of undergraduate school at one point making graduate school all but impossible. Anyway, I’ll let my post on that development forum represent the defense of that thesis, that I never undertook.
“I had a bit of a revelation the other day driving past a gated community….it was a bit ironic that the wealthy folks living behind that gate, in many ways are responsible for creating the conditions that require them (in their minds anyway) to live behind a gate.
Absolutely nobody wants to be a victim of crime. Obvious. But a surprising few perps *want* to be committing crimes….but people get admittedly desperate just trying to survive…in my neighborhood I meet them all of the time…all of this just to say, I’d be careful bragging about how safe a community is….the big picture never goes away, and low crime areas are tethered to all the other areas in ways less flattering than anyone but a Sociology PhD will ever think about…
Put another way…shouting “we left all you other poor f&*#ers behind!” is what this list says to me. Good job Cary. ”
Cary is the white flight version. Put the rich folks in this here gated cow field with not a sidewalk or bus connection to the City proper anywhere in sight.
The gentrification approach is the other way to get yourself on such a list. Good job Alexandria. Downtown Raleigh has itself almost completed this process by attacking it in reverse. Kick the poor people out by starting with “targeted enforcement“. The high incomes will follow.
As an aside, put top 10 lists, on my top 10 list of things I am sick of.