"Try that in a small town" oh you mean the suburbs where everyone is alienated and afraid and paranoid of their neighbor so they shoot a kid who's basketball lands on their front yard? Yum, community spirit!

I live in a city. Today a dude tried to smash my window in and called me a f[slur].

In 2022, a homeless dude stole my bag from my on Burnside.

In 2020, multiple comrades got fucked up by the PPB.

In 2016(?) a comrade of mine was stabbed on the lightrail.

In 2015, a comrade was run over by a fascist (rip Lewis)

In 2014 a comrade had their house ransacked by the pigs during a "wellness check."

Cities can be violent places. That said, I live in thr suburbs now and desperately miss Portland. Lake Oswego can suck my fucking asshole. I'll take rest of it any day.

And you know what? It's more dangerous here. Everyone's sedentary because they can't walk anywhere. Everyone's an alcoholic because they're alone and miserable. Everyone's broke because they have to pay for a car. This shit kills people.

a lot of US conservatives experience notions of safety/crime by , and since huge parts of the US have a rural-white / urban-brown diverse situation going on, it's the coded way to express racial bias.

i grew up and spend the first half of my life in areas where the rural communities were as racially diverse as the cities, so it was not something i recognized until i moved to the "rural = white" parts. if you get a white conservative cornered on this topic, rub their tummy/make them feel safe and tease it out... it's always about them being

don't get me wrong, there are always people in rural areas that have apprehension about the city who are not fucked up about race. the overpolicing, the prices, the unfamiliarity with navigating / complexity with parking (often paid) and traffic patterns. for people without social connections in the city who are having to go there for some administrative/bureaucratic b.s. or a big event, the city quickly becomes a place where there are lots of institutions putting their hands in your pockets. regional urban hospitals can absolutely nail families visiting from the boonies on food and parking. not to mention, there are a number of downtown areas where finding a fucking free/public bathroom is a goddamn nightmare if you're just arrived and on your own. which is absolute bullshit, imo. a big fancy city with no easily accessible public bathrooms in the central core deserves all the scorn and piss and shit on its sidewalks and streets that humans put there. i personally hate that the most.

but to your point, the conservatives complaining about "crime" and "safety" (and explicitly not "safety from zealous cops") are talking about their racial hangups.

My chud ex-neighbor visibly cringed when I told him I was moving closer into the city. "more power to you, I guess", says the man who jokes about killing homeless people for sport

Fuck I should've slashed his tires

Also I hate when people’s stories of why a place is so dangerous are actually a story where everyone was fine?

“I don’t feel safe walking in the park at night, one time there was this homeless guy walking behind me”

And did he… do anything? Or have true crime podcasts just rotted your brain and now you just see other human beings and think they’re going to murder you? Because what you just told is a story of walking through the park and being completely unharmed.

Also you know what beats out all those bad things?

Deaths from fucking car accidents which happen waaaaaaay more often in suburban and rural areas.

One time we were explaining to a relative how a storm had downed some tree branches and they implied that our urban trees were just weaker compared to their country trees lmao

Smh at the rootless cosmopolitanism of these city trees

Also, if cities are so bad, then why are property values in cities SO GODDAMN HIGH!?

I live in a rural shithole because I'm too poor to afford anything else, and trust me, I feel plenty unsafe around so-called "good 'ol boys" who can [redacted] someone and then get it away with it. If you don't like it, you're seen as the weirdo.

"Oh yeah? If cities are so safe then explain this video footage from Chicago"

Shows a guy walking through Freeside in Fallout New Vegas

There has to be some kind of car brain explanation. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, a tiny town an hour and a half's drive north of a mid-sized city. I remember people thinking it's perfectly reasonable to drive 90 minutes to work or to revolve your life around your car. But back home they love it. Driving around is pleasant for them for some reason. They love driving 100mph with no one doing anything about it, since there's no traffic and the cops don't give a shit unless you're black. Back home you can drive in a straight line without stopping for at least an hour. The road just keeps going. I think some rural folk interpret this as the greatest personal freedom, the ability to get on any road you want and drive in a direction far too fast and end up wherever you please.

In cities things are more congested, and driving around is more of a chore. Parking is more difficult, there's traffic, and navigation is more complicated. Back home there were just two roads. You go north to be in more rural swamp forest nowhere, you go south to be in civilization. Navigation rarely got more complicated than that.

Capitalism makes rural life untenable, and forces people into the cities in search of jobs that pay high enough to survive off of. This forces people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds into close proximity with one another, which leads to diversity which reactionaries see as the destruction of the traditional heterogeneous society. Cities are also highly polluted, easy to get sick in, and full of safety hazards. Capitalism creates poverty alongside urbanization, and poverty leads to addiction, mental illness, and crime (since poverty is criminalized under capitalism, and so is doing what you need to survive, like stealing food) which in turn leads to overpolicing, prison slavery, etc.. Reactionaries skip over the part where capitalism causes poverty, and assume the cities themselves cause crime. Along with their favorite scapegoats: immigrants and minorities. So I think there's a combination of economic, environmental, and cultural grievances one can have with cities. Some of these grievances are reactionary, and some are sincere displeasure with the inconveniences of urban life (the economic and environmental issues, mainly).

the other night i was walking home alone and a person asked me if i had a spare dollar. i said i didn't. they seemed happy that i even acknowledged their existence.

that's my experience of living in basically the "warzone" city.

It’s not even cities. There are small towns near me that are poorer and more Latino/Black than the surrounding area, and conservatives (and liberals lol) will routinely refuse to go there.

My friend needed something from a cvs once, and I said oh I’ll drive you to the one in [town], and he goes bro, it’s 9pm, I don’t want to get shot. Like holy shit I cannot imagine having these brainworms.

witnessing/being the victim of some crimes isn't even a valid reason to live in fear of the city to the degree these suburban brownshirts do.

wana fucking smack any asshole who's heard where i'm going or where i've been and does the whole "dangerous area" routine. i've been stalked & saw someone get shot over there, i don't give a shit what your coward ass has to say about somewhere you're too scared to go

and the people doing the beatings & killings in these "bad areas"? 90+% cops, the same people the suburban nazis think need even more license to enact violence. most blood i've ever seen in my city was when the cops attacked peaceful protestors. the attempted murders i've witnessed were by rent-a-cops.

Lots of good comments in here, but another big factor is that people suck at dealing with large numbers. They'll hear there were 300 murders somewhere in some year and think that place is a shooting gallery because they don't know the population of the city, and if they did they aren't going to intuitively grasp how rare crimes actually are.

And of course media has been banging the drum on crime for the past ~40 years despite crime lowering significantly over that time frame.

For the split second I spent on Twitter I had a fun time getting conservatives to go silent by demonstrating violent crime rates in areas near them were higher than in the cities they were posting about.

at one point i met every individual homeless person in our city as part of a massive food drive. didnt get mugged or shanked a single time by these supposedly dangerous individuals

I've visited big cities. Lived in a medium sized city. Lived rural.

At least if I got shot in the city there might be somebody willing to apply compression and the hospital isn't 40 minutes away. If somebody pops me out in the boonies I'm probably toast.

I'll never 4 get the time my boomer boss told us he was going to bring his gun with him the next time he rode his Harley through the city because he was scared. Same city we routinely drunkenly stumble through, and dude you're a 300lb man on a motorcycle who is going to fuck with you? (He was an instigator in every situation that ever befouled him)

My dad was telling me about how four people got shot near me the other day, and I pulled up the local police blotter and literally nothing happened. I think the news just makes shit up at this point to make cities sound dangerous.

classic country music these "countryfolk" are always playing derivatives of: "can't wait to go into town--oh boy i love going dancing in the city--big fairs with loads of people are the best ever"

rural conservative today: "you take the BUS? with STRANGERS on it???"

A few weeks ago I went into the nearby city to help canvass for support for the UPS union. She was comically worried about me getting shot.

they are just performatively shitting their pants about cities to demonstrate to each other how much they hate minorities

I live in a city, work in a suburb. I talk up every scary think I see (litter, unmowed lawns, tents with people in them, just EXISTING without paying a landlord or anything) to my conservative coworkers. Whatever I can do to keep them out of the one cool city in this state is worth it in my eyes