If someone is looking the broad area between the coasts, they see:
1. Crumbling ghettos (as you describe)
2. Crumbling non-ghetto rust-belt that's still not pretty
3. Rural areas beset by meth and herion.
4. Vast-scale suburbs with indeed little to no culture and fairly thin on jobs.
5. Areas like the coasts but costing close to the price of the coast -
But I'm sure there's good stuff between that.
Also, the City Of St. Louis is certainly the limit of the broad St. Louis ghetto, as the Ferguson events clearly shows. The metropolitan area is basically the 2nd or third most dangerous city in the US (behind Detroit and sometimes New Orleans).
The metropolitan area is basically the 2nd or third most dangerous city in the US (behind Detroit and sometimes New Orleans).
This is not only incorrect, it's perhaps the most notorious example of the problems caused by comparing cities at a level smaller than the MSA. The St. Louis MSA is, in fact, about middle of the pack on crime. See here:
The division between St. Louis City and St. Louis County creates a lot of issues for this region, but the fact that you could make your comment with such confidence demonstrates that the area's primary challenge is image marketing.
The problems actually go even deeper than this. It's pretty difficult to make reasonable comparisons using crime data, even when looking across entire regions.
To illustrate this, imagine one region where the baseline crime rate is not extreme, but above average all across the region. Now, think of another place where most of the region is pretty safe, but one pocket of the area has an extremely high rate.
These two regions might have identical crime rates. But which one would you rather live in?
This is why the FBI recommends against using its own numbers to make comparisons like the grandparent's:
"Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents."
1. Crumbling ghettos (as you describe) 2. Crumbling non-ghetto rust-belt that's still not pretty 3. Rural areas beset by meth and herion. 4. Vast-scale suburbs with indeed little to no culture and fairly thin on jobs. 5. Areas like the coasts but costing close to the price of the coast -
But I'm sure there's good stuff between that.
Also, the City Of St. Louis is certainly the limit of the broad St. Louis ghetto, as the Ferguson events clearly shows. The metropolitan area is basically the 2nd or third most dangerous city in the US (behind Detroit and sometimes New Orleans).