We deserve better cities

I would like to submit my own definition of what it means to be "plagued by crime." Crime has fallen... from "insanely high" to "very high." St. Louis has a long way to go until it's no longer "plagued by crime."

One of the most perverse aspects of the Woke Era has been the response to homelessness, which is, effectively do nothing, light a bunch of $$ on fire while destroying quality of life for everyone else Only shock is how long it’s taken for someone to topple this charade

Coke Zero drinkers are not persons in any morally or intellectually significant way, they’re philosophical zombies

You're much more of a slave to the 1% that commit 50% of crimes than you are to the 1% that create 40% of the wealth.

So much of our prime housing stock is permanently out of reach because of our inability to jail criminals for most or all of the rest of their lives

The single biggest issue in my life and the life of my loved ones is the inability to properly punish criminals in the city. Everyone I am close to has moved from a high crime city where activists DAs have pushed restorative justice programs. The crime was simply intolerable and is highly specific to a few metro areas where these DAs have power. They use culture war race grievances to ignore the problem. It’s not some fox talking point or some MAGA racism, it’s a massive policy difference between the two parties.

obviously not the same country, but Barcelona's Gothic Quarter has become something much worse than this: dozens of worthless souvenir shops selling the most trashy & grotesque t-shirts imaginable

So many urban issues are like this, where one way to solve a problem is a major capital project that will require billions of dollars and decades of implementation, and another way to solve it is to ramp up enforcement and arrest people before they do something insane and/or illegal. We should do both. But the solution that immediately begins saving lives is enforcement.

In a well-functioning society, security personnel wouldn’t be necessary to open public pools. Guaranteed this is to mitigate the significant likelihood of teen takeovers at these pools.

$250M is being spent to rebuild Preservation Square, the housing project where this shooting took place. But that won’t actually make it a good place to live, because none of that money will take care of the criminals who live and loiter there.

Gentrification discourse will always be the most ridiculous. Nobody has claim to any neighborhood; everybody pushed someone else out when they moved in. This "historic" lesbian bar has only been around since 2000––why would the rights of bar patrons to be loud outside trump the rights of, say, children or elderly people trying to get some sleep? What about working class residents who need to get up at 4 a.m. to work the next day? Why are the queer partiers considered sacred and holy but the other residents of the neighborhood aren't? "You might be in the wrong neighborhood"––but then you get mad at people for self-segregating. Should we live around people who are like us, or people who are different from us? Galaxy brain take: Maybe we should live in the places where we can find specific apartments that fit our needs well, and use the levers of the law and our social graces to sort out all the rest.

So, I don’t know when it happened or why, but there’s an entire subset of public servant that sees crime as nothing but a common, regrettable nuisance and not an existential threat to the common good and order.

The entire concept of “food deserts” was very funny, but this Chicago Alderman is operating on an elite comedic level with “medicine drought” and “pharmaceutical genocide” for Walgreens closing a store because of rampant theft

You can have the same experience in St. Louis’s Forest Park for a fraction of the cost of living

Anti-cop Redditors are some of the most childlike and naive people on the planet (In response to St. Louis cops shooting someone who charged at them with a chef’s knife)

I’ve put a lot of thought into trying to understand the Black Lives Matter moment and the “racial reckoning,” and I believe that the fact that black Americans endure a much higher level of routine crime victimization is a big part of it. The races of the people in this post are not disclosed, but I think they are probably black because the norms described here are foreign to white communities. White people call the cops when someone steals from us. I don’t believe there are any white people anywhere in America who would feel bad if a white neighbor kid who stole $2000 off our porch lost his college scholarship because we called the cops. That just isn’t how white people work. Nobody expects that whites will tolerate someone who is identifiable on video stealing an expensive package off their porch and not involve the police, and therefore, packages don’t get stolen off of porches in white neighborhoods. A tremendous amount of propaganda has been disseminated through elite media to convince black people that white people tolerate these kinds of transgressions from each other out of racial solidarity. This has always been a lie. White people do not practice racial solidarity. White people call the cops. People like the poster — nice, middle-class black folks who work hard and are doing well enough to order expensive stuff from Amazon — perceive that their lives are somewhat worse than they ought to be, which is true. Powerful political, media and NGO interests are telling them that the cause of this is racism, which is not true, and that the solution is solidarity with people like the neighbor kid who keeps stealing Amazon packages, which is completely counterproductive. What will actually make this poster’s life better is the rule of law being imposed on her neighborhood, which is something that America has failed to do for black communities for 200 years and is the fundamental source of persistent inequities. The reason you can’t order online packages and have them left on your porch is this neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason you have to put bars over your windows and you can’t park a car on the street in front of your house is the neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason there is no grocery store or pharmacy nearby is the neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason property values in the neighborhood are not appreciating the way they are elsewhere is the neighbor kid who steals everything. Your life will be better if he goes to prison. When there is a huge race inequity in who commits crimes, you can either have a huge race inequity in who is punished by the criminal justice system, or you can have a huge race inequity in who is victimized. Americans have chosen the latter, because that is the policy people in the most directly-affected communities vote for.

Even one incident per YEAR of a man roaming downtown sidewalks in the middle of a weekday with a weapon is too much. The string of stories from this past weekend is orders of magnitude too much news for a neighborhood that’s trying to rehabilitate its reputation.

The typical person who encounters this story online will say “Oh, there was a shooting Downtown?” and continue scrolling. They will update their priors on Downtown accordingly. (This is verbatim what my wife said to me this morning.) They will not consider the additional context of neighborhood crime statistics or the specifics of this story. Is it fair? Not really. But that’s why you need to aggressively reduce crime and disorder until it’s basically nonexistent. Changing the narrative requires going above and beyond on safety and sustaining it for years.

I hate redditors so much it’s unreal

People haven’t the slightest understanding of how the infrastructure that makes civilization possible works. They lack the mental faculty to even begin to understand it. Civil engineering is mocked as the easiest engineering discipline but it’s clearly beyond the ability of 80%+ of the population.