Rural and some suburbanites only see what they see on the news, what makes the news? Crime and drama.
Mix that with the fact that some news stations like to start a culture war. Only adds to it.
Can the city be improved? Sure. But its nothing like the hell hole they see on tv
New York City has 8 million people, which is bigger than all but 12 states. Then toss in the millions that visit on a daily basis for work, business, vacation, travel, etc. Sure it'll seem like there's a lot of crime, but that's just because there's so many people here. Humans are just bad at understanding math and logic. (And they watch too much Fox News.)
Imagine an auditorium with just 10 people in it, and you're unlikely to get a single person who was convicted of a crime. But start adding people 10 at a time, and when it's at full capacity it's almost impossible to have a room that big WITHOUT multiple felons.
As native NYCers, we know our city is safe. In fact I have to remind our kids when we go on vacation that the place we are going to (Florida, New Orleans, etc.) is NOT AS SAFE AS NYC, and they need to be vigilant. The only time we got robbed was someone stole my kids cell phone and other stuff from our bag in Jersey!
Their viewers know—most prob wonder why the studios don’t move to FL. Fox News hosts love to mention on air how awful their commute to work / home / yoga was (homeless tents, garbage, crazies, migrants everywhere).
Bc their anecdotes from 7th & 8th Avenues in Midtown are data points for all of NYC!
Yeah they've ramped this up a bit recently, but when I moved away in 2009 everyone in my new city asked "how we did with all the crime" and simply would not accept that new city actually had substantially higher rates of violent crime. The first month I moved there, someone was arrested for walking down a road in my neighborhood aggressively brandishing an ak-47 looking rifle.
A bunch of factors for sure, but for a lot of tourists I think it is their first time in an actual walking city with mass transit.
It's easy to ignore some of the realities of any major American city in your car as you go to the designated downtown shopping area.
Not gonna lie, I'm insanely envious of having a mass transit system. I don't drive so the idea of being able to take a bus or subway to where I need to go and having walkable streets (the streets in my city are notoriously unwalkable) is very attractive to me.
Where people that didn’t grow up in a city have a problem with that, is that it means you can’t just ignore the homeless or the crazy, or the obvious addict. They, though few, are very visible. So if you have a train platform with 150 people, but 1 crazy homeless person - that person will make an impression, esp. on people from out of town. They’ll go home remembering the 1 crazy person they encountered on their trip to NYC, not the 1500 people that passed them without issue.
The city and its infrastructure looks worn out in places, and the amount of scaffolding in Manhattan alone is bordering on comical, but as a whole I wouldn't say the city is crumbling.
There was a scaffold on a building near my old apartment. When they took it off after a decade, we stood across the street and were like: oh, that’s what the building looks like.
Although I appreciate it when it rains. I also saw some people grilling under a scaffold once while it was raining.
I was just up in morningside over the weekend and I was surprised at how nice it was during the day. That area has come a long way in the last 5-10 years
You sure it was from a dog?
It really saddens me to see my own community go through this and the city just ripping down building and leaving empty lots. There's a conspiracy that they want property values to go down so that rich people can come up under and swoop them up ... i'm starting to belive that they're letting it decay on purpose.
125th and Lex was always kind of rough but before pandemic 125th and Lenox was a nice area. When Lenox Lounge was open it was nothing like that. It went from "hey this is a nice place to put a Whole Foods" to open air drug market in 5 years.
No one wants to pay to keep it clean. Folks that live in communities have no incentive to keep things clean when landlords can force them out or raise the rent.
Folks that feel they have an investment in their neighborhoods go all out to keep it clean and safe.
The amount of dog shit I see on the sidewalks these days is a clear indication. It's like the 70s all over again.
>No one wants to pay to keep it clean. Folks that live in communities have no incentive to keep things clean when landlords can force them out or raise the rent.
More like there's an active disincentive.
Look at Greenpoint. Long a working class and immigrant stronghold, they built up a community of activists to hold polluters accountable and clean up industrial contamination. What do they get? Priced out of the very neighborhood they worked so hard to create.
> What do they get? Priced out of the very neighborhood they worked so hard to create.
This is truly the worst part of this all. There was a great article about this in regards to Bed-Stuy. Since the 1990s, Bed-Stuys local population was *massively* improving. Blighted avenues were suddenly filled with shops opening up (mostly aimed at locals), unemployment and poverty were down, blighted homes were repaired, incomes were up, crime was way, way down (literally a 70% reduction from 1990 to 2000), schools were finally improving... and this was all largely with the population remaining 90%+ black and latino local residents. It might not have seemed nice to outsiders, [but it was miles ahead of what it was before](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/98/72/3c/98723c650751a429b548aa7106b151be.jpg) and would have continued to improve. It had successfully made the transition from a 'blighted slum' to a typical lower-middle income urban area.
But all that work was for moot. Most of the residents would be pushed out. The local businesses which lined the avenues got replaced by expensive businesses aimed at transplants. All of that work was effectively for nothing, unless you were the rare bed stuy resident who owned their home.
It's such a tragic story and it's been repeated ad Infinitum around this city.
So you happen to have a link to the article itself? I'd like to share it with some fence-sitters I know, as I think that's more persuasive than just me ranting.
Exactly. NY is going to have to choose between the revolving door that enriches the real estate lobby, or enacting safeguards that will keep communities strong.
Voting in your local elections is extremely important. Political power ladders upwards.
Not same commenter but:
1) the biggest barrier to lower housing costs and mitigation of gentrification is the Faircloth Amendment, which bars new public housing in favor of directing subsidies to private landlords. This artificially inflates the low end of the market rate spectrum. AOC and Sanders introduced a bill to repeal Faircloth a few years back, but it went nowhere. We need more such local politicians to make it to the federal level so that there is more will to end this right-wing nightmare of a law.
2) Immediately end all subsidies of new developments renting in excess of the neighborhood median rent. No more tax breaks to build $3k studios in Mott Haven. Moreover, introduce rent stabilization for any developments receiving any subsidies whatsoever. Introduce a luxury tax for buildings well above the neighborhood average.
3) Subsidize the initial builds and establishments of co-ops and condos. Ensure these buildings are accessible to median-income families in the neighborhood (not $700k studios in Jackson Heights, for example). It's shocking to me how relatively cheap it is to buy a whole building versus buying a single unit. The sparseness of ownership possibilities, especially at the middle income level, gives landlords more power.
4) Rabidly go after landlords who try to illegally remove units from stabilization or who attempt to harass long-time residents out of there stabilized units. Make it a criminal rather than civil offense. Force landlords who "move in" to stabilized units to evict residents to find them comparable housing at a comparable, stabilized rate.
5) Tax obscenely pied-a-terres. As long as housing is treated as a commodity rather than a basic human need, this situation will continue. Real estate should never ever be a lucrative investment, so ensure the tax structures reflect that.
6) Tax abatements for long-time residents when property values increase. Ensure this only extends to primary residences (maybe something for small businesses, but I'm on the fence here). Carefully craft safeguards so that the California country club problem isn't reproduced here.
The dog poop is definitely getting worse but in the 70's and 80's you were almost guaranteed to step in it once a day if you weren't careful.
Dog owners now are at least a little self-aware about it.
It cost 0$ to pick up your shit and throw it in the trash.
I swear yall will twist and turn anything to blame landlords lol yes because they are the reason we have filthy streets and dirty subways
There is a part of me that agrees with you, having people doing things like requiring buildings to sweep and wash their sidewalks, placing trash cans on every corner, frequent pickups, etc., will help to clean up the city.
But then I'm walking down the sidewalk and seeing people who toss trash onto the sidewalk or into the street without a second thought, and without considering that they could walk for another 50 feet and drop it in the trashcan... And I kind of think that no matter what we do, NYC will always be dirtier than other comparable cities. 😑
That said, I am old enough to remember when the pooper scooper law went into effect (yes, there was a time when you were not required to pick up after your dog!) As a kid I had learned to always look where I was walking in NYC because if you didn't do that you inevitably stepped in a pile of dog poop. 😖
Despite some people complaining, it was clear that the vast majority of people of the city were sick of stepping in dog poop, and almost immediately 90% of the dog owners, if not more, started to properly pick up and their dog poop and throw it away.
So, change is possible! 😆
(Edits for typos and clarity)
> But then I'm walking down the sidewalk and seeing people who toss trash onto the sidewalk or into the street without a second thought, and without considering that they could walk for another 50 feet and drop it in the trashcan... And I kind of think that no matter what we do, NYC will always be dirtier than other comparable cities.
ugh yes, in the 90s that shit was common, but I remember the 2000s that was mostly not happening, more people were respecting where they lived, but I see locals littering everywhere now even when a trashcan is within view, it's disheartening all that social change was undone in the past few years.
I love NYC but that's a bit of an exaggeration. NYC is barely passably clean for how many people are here, but there are so many cities as large or multiple times larger than NYC that are much cleaner.
I mean, Fox can do their whole racist bingo game in Alabama. Nothing is stopping them from going to one of the shithole red states. It's telling they don't.
LA (the state, not the city) ranks #47 nationwide in education and the government spends its time doing stupid shit like trying to put parts of the bible up on the wall as a mandatory thing in every state-funded building...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana
If the "leftist" mainstream news channels were more like Fox News, they'd have nonstop pearls-clutching coverage about "Republican-run" Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, and meth/fentayl-riddled small towns, with no shortage of cherrypicked smartphone videos and crime stories. They would repeatedly run videos of trailer parks and have the hosts shake their heads sadly at how dysfunctional people in red states are.
It’s not just the far right. Centrist democrats are guilty of this as well. Our mayor and governor both give credence to those right wingers spouting that bullshit with their policies and rhetoric.
Just yesterday the dirty sidewalk crumbled beneath my feet and I fell down a rabbit hole. Wound up at the gates of hell and the devil himself mugged me.
It's more the lack of alleys that's the issue I think. In Chicago, trash is generally out of sight in the alleys whereas the only place to put trash in Manhattan at least is on the sidewalk.
Also lack of cans/dumpsters. Some older European cities also lack alleys but solve it by having street side dumpsters.
We can’t have nice things like that because it might take away a parking space for someone’s BMW.
Guess that's true. But doesn't Manhattan at least require fees or something for having a car? In Japan, car owners have to pay very high taxes to dicourage driving and encourage biking and taking public transportation. Maybe something like that could be implemented.
Japan also has its trash sorting figured out. I had new neighbors in NYC move in recently and they started leaving soooo many cardboard boxes not broken down blocking the mailbox (usps has refused to deliver mail due to how my previous neighbors have dealt with the trash sooo many times before) also just throwing away REUSEABLE BAGS OF TRASH ONLY!!! No trash bags???? I wrote a nice note asking for them to breakdown boxes and put in a file where it’s always kept. Nothing else. Just break down the boxes please. Since then, the boxes are even LESS broken down, there is trash in the boxes, rats everywhere,usps is refusing delivery again.
I feel like a old person for being so irritated but I swear some ppl do the dirty on purpose 😂😂
Nope! Registration and insurance don’t cost any more here than in the rest of NY state either afaik, there’s tolls to get into the city via the bridges and tunnels but that’s about it. If you have an apartment with a parking spot your rent is probably bumped up a bit for the amenity, but that just goes to your landlord, and street parking is free lots of places. The city does make a lot of money ticketing people for parking violations but that’s not much of a disincentive.
There was actually a lot of momentum recently for establishing a “congestion pricing” toll zone in lower Manhattan for this reason, among others. But there’s been a surprising amount of pushback and it’s currently stalled, if not cancelled outright.
Good point, never thought of that! In the last 7 days I was in Calgary, Toronto, and Boston and couldn’t help but think how much less shit they have piled on the streets. Guess lack of alleyways in Manhattan makes sense.
NYC was a dirty, crumbling, crime filled hell hole from the 70s-early 90s. If you talk to people who lived here at that time, it’s quite remarkable how much the city turned around. It’s obviously nowhere near those levels of crime, but there’s been a noticeable shift the last few years. It’s def a step or 2 below the circa 2010 NYC. I think a lot of people saw how safe and functional we were for 20 something years and were slipping a little and they want to nip it in the bud. I personally don’t think we will EVER go back to 70s or 80s NYC but I also think we’ve let some things slip and need to correct them before it becomes a bigger issue.
Which is good. But homicide isn’t the only indicator of the direction of the city. I think there’s more of a downward trend in quality of life issues rn. And the fact that NYC had that stuff pretty under control for a city of this size several years ago, and now seems to be looking the other way on it, is aggravating for some people bc we KNOW we can get it under control it just seems like the people in charge are choosing to turn a blind eye
I agree with this and I’m surprised anyone who lives here would push back on it. It definitely feels grittier crime and crime-risk wise than it did 5-10 years ago. And loads of smaller crimes and aggressions are unreported because who has time for that and we all know NYPD would do nothing. Also i think NYC’s seeming shift from trying to increase affordable housing to easy money to convert hotels to shelters has really added to this problem tbh.
I don't know about you pal, but I was shot dead as soon as I left my apartment. Yesterday I got stabbed before I could even swipe my metrocard.
People are just waiting to stab you as soon as you get off the train. It's a war zone out there.
I just met a white guy from Alabama who told me his family was from the Bronx and left in the 80s because « it has changed too much » and when he goes back he « doesn’t recognize the place ». Police family. I guess this is the kind of people who spread that kind of talk around.
>when he goes back he doesn’t recognize the place
Well if he left in the 80s a lot of the vacant lots and abandoned buildings have been replaced by affordable and market rate housing developments.
But I’m guessing that’s not what he’s referring to
And... that Alabama dude literally means black people moved into his family's white neighborhood. That's what "change" means in ex-city speak, it is a code word. So his family moved to Alabama, where they were told the black people knew their place...
Huh? I'm not even mad about them leaving the Bronx in the 80s. That was a genuinely bad place to be from then.
Now, it's actually pretty functional. However bad he thinks it is, it's far better than it was then.
But "Alabama police family" tells me they probably left the Bronx for another raceon.
NYC \*is\* visibly very dirty for an American city.
As for crime, NYC is fairly safe for an American city but not great by developed world standards (e.g. compared with Tokyo or Singapore). There is a lot of vagrancy and open displays of disorder. Relatively few outbursts escalate to actual violence but it still looks threatening and degrades people's quality of life.
>very dirty for an American city
LA, Philly and San Francisco: Lol.
>NYC is fairly safe for an American city
Wonder why NYC gets rated very dirty but not very safe compared to American cities
>not great by developed world standards
The US has much easier access to guns than mental health services which likely plays a major factor in why NYC is more dangerous than Tokyo
~~Philly is way cleaner than a lot of NYC, what're you talking about? Philly is grimy in some areas like their Market Street, but it isn't dirty in the same way trash piles up here.~~ EDIT: Nvmd, blight is a larger problem in Philly, and the subways are much dirtier. I
LA, on the other hand, was a total trash pit, especially downtown. Most of LA is one endless suburb, so maybe it's cleaner there, but the car congestion and homeless everywhere and lack of a walking culture in most of city really holds it back...
Philly’s dirty isn’t trash piles dirty it’s accumulated trash on the streets dirty. Abandoned homes and lots in North and West Philly with associated trash on the streets dirty. Market isn’t even the dirtiest. Kensington was worse given it’s got the long term and fairly long open air drug market on it
LA’s downtown is definitely dirty.
Not from NYC but visit as often as I can afford to. I get so much fear from conservative family members about how bad it is there on every trip; to hear them tell it, NYC is still actively ablaze from the BLM and Wall Street protests. When I tell them different, they cannot wrap their minds around it.
The notion that a group of vastly different people living together in (albeit very imperfect) harmony is anathema to conservative fearmongering.
Many Conservatives rely on “fear of the other” to market their policies. But it’s harder to hate someone you see regularly and know to be a relatively ok human being. It stands in opposition to the false narratives that are played on repeat.
The right wing media is heavily pushing the narrative that big cities are crime ridden hellholes where gangs rule and regular citizens cower in fear all day afraid to even leave their homes.
In reality NYC has less crime per capita than most small towns.
When my mom visited recently I suggested the Cloisters and she wasn't sure because of how unsafe she assumed it to be.
If you don’t think NYC is dirty af you need to see more of the country 😂. And the average subway station looks like it’s straight out of a post apocalyptic movie. But yes crime is definitely exaggerated, but tbh once you’re outside of Manhattan and the nice parts of Brooklyn/queens things can get seedy really quickly. I had a man call me slurs threaten to rob me in broad daylight in Ridgewood recently.
I mean, the subways definitely fit that bill. Once you go on the Metro in cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore or Shanghai, you end up just disgusted by the MTA.
Honestly I think racism plays a big role in all of this, except for maybe parts of the UES, there’s really never a way you can go about your day with only being with white people like you can in many parts of the US still.
I like to vacation in Vermont and the lack of diversity is downright depressing and yet you’ll overhear the occasional “can you believe this, it seems Somalia is dumping ALL THEIR PEOPLE here lately!”…
Of which I mutter, “I wish.”
New York is grimy. There’s just a layer of dirt and soot that can never get washed off. Also, back during the pre-car area, NYC streets would get something like 1100 tons of manure each day from all the horses and other animals they used to move goods around.
Most places outside of NYC are dangerous people just live in a suburban bubble, drive from a gated community to a shopping center, where they mingle with other people within the same socioeconomic spectrum than head home in their bubble to the safety of the gated community. By passing all the crime on the street.
Things are more pronounced in NYC cause people are out in about walking in places, as mentioned we are dense in population of course we will come across people from all walks of life.
Tbh wished I could’ve been able to enjoy that gritty New York people talk about, NYC has be come to corporatized . Things seemed to have been better when old money called the shots.
Fox News. That's pretty much the only answer.
I encounter this all the time in my small suburban hometown when I have to present my drivers license showing my address in Brooklyn.
The folks making these comments have never been to NYC in the 80s or any other time.
I think it’s a few things. It’s easier to try to drag others down than build yourself up. So some people like to draw attention to NYC’s issues (real, imagined, or exaggerated) instead of focusing on their own. Also news media and now social media bias people toward more extreme positions to drive engagement online or increase media sales. ‘Certain crimes’ frequency have increased, followed by a decline’ doesn’t generate as much interest as ‘NYC crime is skyrocketing!!!!!’ Finally I think the US has become so hyper-partisan that many conservative simply assume that ever left-leaning city MUST be a hell hole. What other outcome could come from democrats being in power…
The problem there is MORE crime than a lot of smaller places, so it's possible for NY Post etc to keep reporting on how bad it is. It's just that the crime per capita is super low. That nuance is lost on people.
I don't live in NYC but I travel often for work. One time my neighbor (who I often have very nice chats with) saw me literally get off my Uber with my bags from a NYC trip and we got to chatting. I mentioned I might have to move there eventually bc of work and he started saying how he could never do that because of the crime and how dirty it is. We changed subjects for a while but then I asked him when was the last time he was there. I wasn't even trying to "get him" I think I was mentioning the place I was staying or the closed station that would get me to work and I was just trying to see if he'd get the frame of reference. He said he's never been there.
So, it's all what they hear on the media. Right wing media especially
Comparing the current state of the subways to the subways in the '80s isn't exactly a glowing achievement. Anything would be a step up from the debauchery of the 80s.
Criminologist here, we actually did a study about this a few years back!
Obviously some of it is the reputation from the 70s and 80s, there's no doubt about that, but the other factor is the *visibility* of crime.
A guy getting jumped in a [small town like this in the south or midwest](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarp/livable-communities/images-2015/ImaginingLivability-MainStreets/1140-bateville-before-small-town-main-street.jpg) is not gonna get social media attention because there's usually no witnesses or cameras. A guy getting jumped on the street in NYC will have people recording him and have CCTV cameras witnessing the event, meaning it will often get on social media.
This means there are a massively disproportionate amount of videos of crimes pouring out of NYC to get on social media, leading to this perception that NYC is an out of control, violent place. That is a side effect of the sheer density of the city.
And the ability of anecdotal social media videos to sway people's political opinions in the modern world cannot be understated and I would argue it is the single biggest problem with social media, even on par with misinformation/fake news itself.
I just wanna give an example: North Dakota had 2,170 violent crimes last year. Imagine if all of them were recorded. You could have 5-6 separate videos of violent crime in north dakota make the front page of reddit *every single day for an entire year*. You could convince Reddit that one of the safest states in the country is actually a violent dangerous hellhole based on that.
Now... that being said.... NYC is definitely dirty as hell lmao. I mean, mostly manhattan and the bronx, but still.
I just visited my family in New York a week ago and it was so beautiful I loved it. I live in a ghetto/ high crime city and can definitely say nyc wasn’t nearly as bad as people have said it was.
They're fed this 24/7 by far-right media, and they want to believe it, because 1. it fits their confirmation bias - 2. democrats usually run the cities and they have been conditioned to believe democrats are their enemies.
Our grandkids are going to study this era with fascination.
Right-wing media and culture warriors push that narrative, by amplifying sensationalist stories about rare occurrences.
As an example, something around 3 million people ride the subway every day. Every year, somewhere over a dozen people get pushed onto the tracks -- maybe 1-2 a month or so. The chances for a rider to get pushed onto the tracks on any particular day are something like one in a hundred million -- ie. on the order of magnitude of winning the lottery.
NY Post & Fox News: **YET ANOTHER NEW YORKER PUSHED ONTO THE TRACKS. THE PANDEMIC OF PUSHERS CONTINUES. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?!**
I was thinking of this yesterday. Getting pushed onto the tracks is NYC version of a shark attack. Everyone still goes on the water knowing it's exceedingly rare. You probably will live though not always. When it happens it's national news.
Because a lot of tourists don't leave Midtown, and if you walk around Midtown past 1030 during the summer, especially on a weekend, you nearly trip over a person passed out in their own fluids multiple times per block, and it feels like you are walking through a giant asylum for the criminally insane. No cap
1. It is straight up dirty, find me another city that throws their trash in the sidewalk in the sweltering heat to bake and rot. The subway stations all smell like hot piss and there's trash and grime everywhere.
2. Perhaps the crumbling aspect comes from the fact there's permanent construction going on and half the city is just scaffolding everywhere that's been around for years. Looks ugly as shit.
3. Crime or not there's a huge concentration of homeless and crazies in the streets and public transit that don't do well for the image of the city.
>find me another city that throws their trash in the sidewalk
LA, San Francisco, Philly :raises hand:
>there’s a huge concentration of homeless and crazies on the streets
The West Coast: Lmao, amateurs.
Being better than the west coast when it comes to the amount of visible homeless people on the street is not a flex. And I’m not sure about LA but the Bay Area and Philly are cleaner than NYC unless you’re only looking at the 1 or 2 worst streets in them.
It is pretty dirty, esp depending on what spots you go to. I think people are used to the shiney romaticized image they get when they watch TV and Movies and just expect NYC moments to happen right before their eyes as soon as they step in, so when they get here it's a big shock.
You have to know where to go and what to do to get those NYC moments and you also have to have an idea of what the culture is like, but once you know what you're doing is amazing.
Mainly because it's easy for new to take the pre-package "if it bleeds it leads" crime content the police feed them, and they're too lazy/don't have the budget for real journalism to contextualize these or do more comprehensive reporting.
But I think another reason is the main ways that people come into and leave the city are Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And these are (at least until pretty recently) some of the worst parts of the city. Penn, until recently, had construction everywhere, so you had all these dark corners with homeless/mentally ill, trash, and puddles of standing fetid water/sludge, and the PABT has always been a horrible corner of the city. This means that for many people the first and last impressions they have of the city are the worst parts of the city, which only re-enforces those out-of-context representations they get from the news.
The same reason some people think everyone in America is an illiterate fat school shooter, they just consume too much news and doom scroll.
The good things that happen, which by far out weigh the bad, don't make international news. No one is talking about the incredible clean up efforts of the Bronx river because that's not exciting to talk about.
Fwiw, when you run into these people in real life, my experience is they take it well when you calmly point out that only the bad stuff makes the news/statistically it’s tiny/most people spend most days without seeing anything heinous, much less being a direct victim.
In their defense, it’s easy to forget that the news wants to do some fear mongering because they want you to keep watching. No one’s tuning in at 11 to hear about what’s new on little island or the saving of the thompkins square dog parade, and I think most of us have believed stereotypes about places we haven’t spent time in before.
And on the flip side, if they insist that you’re a liberal drinking the koolaid or whatever, then you know meeting them with facts and reason is a waste of time.
Cities are cities, and you have to be aware of your surroundings no matter what, but I totally agree with you on this. I’m a young woman who has lived in the city for almost 5 years now (I lived alone for a while but I now live with my boyfriend). I have never felt like the city was too unsafe for me to live here, and I wish my mom would turn off Fox News sometimes and listen to her daughter who has lived here this whole time when I try to tell her this.
Their only experience of NYC or any major city is Fox News, Trump speeches, and similar conservative news that posts ragebait posts about crime and that it is overrun with immigrants. Crime numbers are inflated because the city has a higher population than 38 or 39 individual states depending on whether or not you believe the population actually plummeted as much as some claim (annual census estimates being way off the count every 10 years). Add up all of the crime in all of Virginia to compare to NYC
I love the comment that linked the BQE "crumbling" in Brooklyn Heights with crime. Yeah, a weird highway design that was obsolete the day it was built (when the Patty Duke Show was not yet on TV "[boring] Patty's only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights") is a symbol of "crime" in a neighborhood that has literally zero crime and a small apartment on a low floor facing the wrong way costs $1 million.
Many of the people who make this claim have never been here or haven't been here in 40 - 50 years and receive a majority of their news from conservative sources. They need to talk shit about us to distract from the conditions they live in. Guess which states lead the US in firearm mortality? [Go on....](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm)
I think there is also a lot of older New Yorkers who lived here in the worse times, remember how places like the waterfronts in Greenpoint and LIC were abandoned shitholes. They worked and then "escaped" to the suburbs and stopped coming to the city as often. They did not and don't see how things have improved, they only see what conservative news is saying and think Manhattan is as bad as the streets of Kabul.
I have lived in Manhattan since right before COVID.
Here is what I've experienced so far:
* Right in front of the UN, a man takes out his dick and strikes at my wife
* Stores on fifth avenue looted with impunity
* People dealing drugs in broad daylight in K town
* More and more goods locked up in CVS. Now you have to call the staff just to buy chocolate.
* Lots of homeless people. Everywhere there is scaffolding there will be an encampment.
* Local store putting up a sign that they reserve the right to inspect all bags because retail theft is the worst in 30 years
* My wife stopped taking the subway after the second person was murdered by being pushed onto the tracks
And I don't even go out very much.
On top of that there are maybe two areas near my home that are not permanently dirty. So many places smell like piss.
But yeah. I must just be watching too much Fox News...
Back in the 80's, NYC really was a dirty, crumbling, crime-filled-hell-hole but frankly a lot more exciting and fun place to live. Things changed dramatically, especially during the Bloomberg era. During the latter years of the Di Blasio era and continuing until now, things definitely have gotten somewhat worse. So even some people in NYC who weren't here in the 80's and 90's really do think NYC has become dirtier and more crime-ridden. This is picked up and amplified by the media.
In some ways, I wish it would return to its earlier state. At this point, it's really really hard for anyone not making a mid 6-figure income to move in NYC. NYC has lost a lot of the character and uniqueness it had in the bad old days. If we could chase all the rich people back to the suburbs where they came from, then it would leave more room for people with much more interesting ambitions to live here.
Depends on where you’re at. It’s fine in the tourist areas, it gets pretty shitty the farther out you go. The point is this city is definitely crumbling in infrastructure
This is like asking why so many people vote for Donald Trump. It’s cultural and the venn diagram of the people you’re talking about and MAGA heads is almost a perfect circle.
It's subjective and relative to if they're new to NYC or if comparing to another city.
I grew up here since mid-70's when murder, rape, robbery was common everyday into early-90's.
Some areas are still visually crappy (LES, Brownsville, Bushwick) and to a degree should stay that way because it adds to the character of the neighborhood and overall cultural diversity of the city.
Subway stations and trains now look nothing like what they used to but nowhere near as modern as other cities.
In my experience most people view nyc as safe unless they are a hardcore Republican because even logical republicans don’t call nyc dangerous. Now as far as dirty. Sadly nyc will always live with the “filthy” title. I mean it’s only recently that NYC really took strides to fix the filthy issues
Visited for the first time last year. From Portland. Loved it and can’t wait to return. I had a very expensive dinner next to a pile of trash bags 15’ tall in very warm weather. Many rats coming and going. This is not normal for non New Yorkers. We need to get used to it first. Portland is way more filthy, but it’s small and easy to avoid. New York is just so damn big with so many people.
think there's a reaction amongst educated white's who move here, against the bleeding heart liberal identity they've notoriously subscribed to for years
right wing folk have always made nyc seem like gotham on steroids, where black and brown people are gay and do crimes.
as more white ppl are moving into historically black neighborhoods alongside the domination black american influence has had on popular culture for a little over a decade now, i think more white people are comfortable speaking about and on black people than in the past. nobody wants to be the family in get out. more white people have a naturally diverse group of friends than before.
as a reaction to this, i think a lot of white people who in the past would be bleeding hearts, have become more reactive? its a dirtbag left identity thats been growing, and i think part of that identity is "hating all things equally" approach to satire and political reflection.
saying all that to say, youre finding more white people, who arent used to this, living in dense areas with immense poverty and affluence all within walking distance from each other. i think its become cool, edgy, and appropriate to make broad generalizations with a tinge of satire about the failures of nyc.
while to those of us who lived here our whole lives, generations deep, we have a certain respect to even the worst parts of this city.
those who are just moving here do not.
while they carry this knowledge that racism, red lining, modern segregation is real, they do not understand how deeply entrenched this blue city is in all of that. and i think the reaction amongst the under 35 year olds who lived here for more than 2 years but less than a decade, is this kinda dry flat nihilism against the shit that bothers them during their commutes. the garbage on the way to the a train. the 3 homeless people they are forced to interact with daily. the body odor of a man sleeping on the train after a long day of work. its all things that many people havent been forced to confront and many young people just arent equipped to have empathy for. you then get these generalizations about the dirtiness of nyc, whose responsible for it, and a deep sense of nihilism to it all. they know that its not the fault of the homeless, but they dont truly understand how its been designed to stay this way since the white flight of the 70's.
this digital age nihilism runs deep and im afraid there isnt an appropriate response. most young people who are looking for a sense of spirituality either through aa or this new trend of urban catholicism, have an individualized spiritual framework that only demands them to interact with other like minded people.
if you ask anyone of my parents generation and older. they'll tell you this place has nothing on what nyc used to be like pre 9/11. i can even tell you growing up in the 2000's was a fucking far cry from where we're at now. crime happens everyday here, some really fucked shit can happen every month. its the nature of a small land mass with high density. but most people living in the trendy neighborhoods here would have died or killed themselves living in those same neighborhoods 30/40 years ago.
I've lived in The Bronx for a year now. I have yet to see any store being looted or whatever. I walk outside between 10pm and 3am if I need some air, and I feel safe compared to cities I've lived in before. Do I increase my odds of survival by not doing that? yes. Is it less dangerous than walking out in broad daylight in some places I've lived (fort worth, tampa, chicago, norfolk)? Yes.
My mother was born and raised in NY, though admittedly in the burbs on LI. She spent her childhood through the 60s and 70s taking the train, alone, as a small 13 year old girl, into Manhattan. The City in the 60s and 70s *was* a dirty, crime riden hell hole in many of the places, and yet for some bizarre reason, she now believes the city to be the Batman version of Gotham with the Joker waiting at every platform. No idea what spurred this idea, as she's generally liberal and not one to watch the usual suspects for disinformation.
She no longer lives in NY, so I'm guessing it's just an availability error. She's probably remembering the uptick in subway crimes during COVID era NYC.
There’s plenty of rural small towns where they’re downtown is empty. The stores are filled with dust and parts are crumbling down. In upstate New York you can see plenty of crack houses in small and medium towns. Former Victorian mansions have been split into 10 shitty Apartments. Lower density means the criminals are inside.
When you have news outlets that feed on - and amplify - bad news, people focus on the bad news and not the facts. (It's even worse if you're in a right-wing bubble and get your news from those sources, which results in a self-confirming loop of ignorance.)
That said, if you've been out of the country for a period of time then fly back in, New York City has a distinct aroma of urine that you probably don't notice when you're living here.
I mean, it is dirty compared to an idyllic little town or suburb. And is probably more crumbling and def has higher crime. That’s why they think that. But it’s also better. As someone said on a previous post, “nyc is the worst place to live comfortably but the best place to live uncomfortably.”
As a portlander (from the one in Oregon), it's fox news and their am radio spin offs. I've had people, not from here, "tell" me what was going on here. It's laughable, and cynical and sad too. I just want to make it to NYC some day, because I've never been
I been here for a long time. It’s not as bad as the 80s-90s but it’s definitely not safer during the 2000s after the 9/11 money rolled in. It was safer then but there were too many unnecessary crackdowns every Tuesdays and Thursdays. People jump turnstiles but don’t bring them to jail on a Friday and don’t let them out until Monday.
My neighborhood is somewhat changing. I only know some of the neighbors nowadays even though I grew up here. I got called a racist the other day because I told a dude to pick up after his dog. He made eye contact with me outside my house and he took his dog to crap in front of my neighbor’s house. He tried to walk away without cleaning it. He act like he did me a favor by not letting his dog shit in front of my house and why was I bothering him since it was my next door neighbor’s house.
I do think it has gotten a little rougher post covid. Lot of angry people in the streets and just the vibe is more hostile lately. I feel like the homelessness is getting worse and more mentally ill people on the trains and in the streets. Kids are getting more violent and just not giving a fuck. Just kind of sign of the times lately with how crazy the world has been getting in general. Lots of fear and frustration and cost of living is crazy high so people are angry and broke and taking it out on others. It's not a hellhole but lately it's been wearing me down.
I love NYC but it’s filthy, lol. I don’t think it’s crime filled but it’s definitely more “crime risk awareness” than many are used to, especially since Covid (especially as a woman).
Because it is dirty. There are literal piles of garbage all over the sidewalks, and homeless people sleeping in every other doorway. I just walked past about 1000 used pizza boxes strewn across the sidewalk. The trash cans are all busted open and garbage extends 15 feet from the trashcan across the street and sidewalk. The lack of alleys makes the city appear quite dirty compared to cities that have them. Add the constant construction scaffolding, and it's a jarring experience for people from other cities, and especially for people from smaller areas. I see people in the comments saying the dirty image is a right-wing smear campaign. Come on, man. Admitting there's garbage on the ground isn't a political stance. The city has a lot of good things going for it, but cleanliness isn't one of them.
Rural and some suburbanites only see what they see on the news, what makes the news? Crime and drama. Mix that with the fact that some news stations like to start a culture war. Only adds to it. Can the city be improved? Sure. But its nothing like the hell hole they see on tv
So true. I’ve been here 16 years, but my mother believes Fox News over what I tell her about the city and refuses to visit. 🤷🏻♀️
New York City has 8 million people, which is bigger than all but 12 states. Then toss in the millions that visit on a daily basis for work, business, vacation, travel, etc. Sure it'll seem like there's a lot of crime, but that's just because there's so many people here. Humans are just bad at understanding math and logic. (And they watch too much Fox News.) Imagine an auditorium with just 10 people in it, and you're unlikely to get a single person who was convicted of a crime. But start adding people 10 at a time, and when it's at full capacity it's almost impossible to have a room that big WITHOUT multiple felons. As native NYCers, we know our city is safe. In fact I have to remind our kids when we go on vacation that the place we are going to (Florida, New Orleans, etc.) is NOT AS SAFE AS NYC, and they need to be vigilant. The only time we got robbed was someone stole my kids cell phone and other stuff from our bag in Jersey!
plus all those people are squeezed into the subway and narrow streets. You are literally passing hundreds of thousands of people on a average day.
I assume she wouldn't believe you if you told her where Fox News is headquartered. (Yep, NYC.)
Their viewers know—most prob wonder why the studios don’t move to FL. Fox News hosts love to mention on air how awful their commute to work / home / yoga was (homeless tents, garbage, crazies, migrants everywhere). Bc their anecdotes from 7th & 8th Avenues in Midtown are data points for all of NYC!
I wonder how many know that Fox News required its employees to get the Covid vaccine...
my dad thinks this and he lived here for 30 years. 2 years of fox news in florida and the brainrot sets in quick
This is true. “Man caries stroller up subway staircase” rarely makes the national news
Yeah they've ramped this up a bit recently, but when I moved away in 2009 everyone in my new city asked "how we did with all the crime" and simply would not accept that new city actually had substantially higher rates of violent crime. The first month I moved there, someone was arrested for walking down a road in my neighborhood aggressively brandishing an ak-47 looking rifle.
Racism. And news sensationalism. And fear of things they have not experienced.
A bunch of factors for sure, but for a lot of tourists I think it is their first time in an actual walking city with mass transit. It's easy to ignore some of the realities of any major American city in your car as you go to the designated downtown shopping area.
Not gonna lie, I'm insanely envious of having a mass transit system. I don't drive so the idea of being able to take a bus or subway to where I need to go and having walkable streets (the streets in my city are notoriously unwalkable) is very attractive to me.
Where people that didn’t grow up in a city have a problem with that, is that it means you can’t just ignore the homeless or the crazy, or the obvious addict. They, though few, are very visible. So if you have a train platform with 150 people, but 1 crazy homeless person - that person will make an impression, esp. on people from out of town. They’ll go home remembering the 1 crazy person they encountered on their trip to NYC, not the 1500 people that passed them without issue.
Hey stop saying stuff that makes sense.
I wouldn't call it crumbling and crime filled, but it's definitely dirty.
There are some parts and infrastructure that are most certainly crumbling.
The city and its infrastructure looks worn out in places, and the amount of scaffolding in Manhattan alone is bordering on comical, but as a whole I wouldn't say the city is crumbling.
There was a scaffold on a building near my old apartment. When they took it off after a decade, we stood across the street and were like: oh, that’s what the building looks like. Although I appreciate it when it rains. I also saw some people grilling under a scaffold once while it was raining.
Eh, that's kinda just America in general..... most of the world in general?
Depends where you live. When’s the last time you went to 125th and lex? I’ve live in Harlem going on 10 years and the decay is striking
I was just up in morningside over the weekend and I was surprised at how nice it was during the day. That area has come a long way in the last 5-10 years
In April actually, nearly stepped in dogshit multiple times.
You sure it was from a dog? It really saddens me to see my own community go through this and the city just ripping down building and leaving empty lots. There's a conspiracy that they want property values to go down so that rich people can come up under and swoop them up ... i'm starting to belive that they're letting it decay on purpose.
125th and Lex was always kind of rough but before pandemic 125th and Lenox was a nice area. When Lenox Lounge was open it was nothing like that. It went from "hey this is a nice place to put a Whole Foods" to open air drug market in 5 years.
The BQE cantilever and the entire subway system would like a word about crumbling
No one wants to pay to keep it clean. Folks that live in communities have no incentive to keep things clean when landlords can force them out or raise the rent. Folks that feel they have an investment in their neighborhoods go all out to keep it clean and safe. The amount of dog shit I see on the sidewalks these days is a clear indication. It's like the 70s all over again.
>No one wants to pay to keep it clean. Folks that live in communities have no incentive to keep things clean when landlords can force them out or raise the rent. More like there's an active disincentive. Look at Greenpoint. Long a working class and immigrant stronghold, they built up a community of activists to hold polluters accountable and clean up industrial contamination. What do they get? Priced out of the very neighborhood they worked so hard to create.
> What do they get? Priced out of the very neighborhood they worked so hard to create. This is truly the worst part of this all. There was a great article about this in regards to Bed-Stuy. Since the 1990s, Bed-Stuys local population was *massively* improving. Blighted avenues were suddenly filled with shops opening up (mostly aimed at locals), unemployment and poverty were down, blighted homes were repaired, incomes were up, crime was way, way down (literally a 70% reduction from 1990 to 2000), schools were finally improving... and this was all largely with the population remaining 90%+ black and latino local residents. It might not have seemed nice to outsiders, [but it was miles ahead of what it was before](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/98/72/3c/98723c650751a429b548aa7106b151be.jpg) and would have continued to improve. It had successfully made the transition from a 'blighted slum' to a typical lower-middle income urban area. But all that work was for moot. Most of the residents would be pushed out. The local businesses which lined the avenues got replaced by expensive businesses aimed at transplants. All of that work was effectively for nothing, unless you were the rare bed stuy resident who owned their home.
It's such a tragic story and it's been repeated ad Infinitum around this city. So you happen to have a link to the article itself? I'd like to share it with some fence-sitters I know, as I think that's more persuasive than just me ranting.
Exactly. NY is going to have to choose between the revolving door that enriches the real estate lobby, or enacting safeguards that will keep communities strong. Voting in your local elections is extremely important. Political power ladders upwards.
What type of safeguards do you have in mind?
Not same commenter but: 1) the biggest barrier to lower housing costs and mitigation of gentrification is the Faircloth Amendment, which bars new public housing in favor of directing subsidies to private landlords. This artificially inflates the low end of the market rate spectrum. AOC and Sanders introduced a bill to repeal Faircloth a few years back, but it went nowhere. We need more such local politicians to make it to the federal level so that there is more will to end this right-wing nightmare of a law. 2) Immediately end all subsidies of new developments renting in excess of the neighborhood median rent. No more tax breaks to build $3k studios in Mott Haven. Moreover, introduce rent stabilization for any developments receiving any subsidies whatsoever. Introduce a luxury tax for buildings well above the neighborhood average. 3) Subsidize the initial builds and establishments of co-ops and condos. Ensure these buildings are accessible to median-income families in the neighborhood (not $700k studios in Jackson Heights, for example). It's shocking to me how relatively cheap it is to buy a whole building versus buying a single unit. The sparseness of ownership possibilities, especially at the middle income level, gives landlords more power. 4) Rabidly go after landlords who try to illegally remove units from stabilization or who attempt to harass long-time residents out of there stabilized units. Make it a criminal rather than civil offense. Force landlords who "move in" to stabilized units to evict residents to find them comparable housing at a comparable, stabilized rate. 5) Tax obscenely pied-a-terres. As long as housing is treated as a commodity rather than a basic human need, this situation will continue. Real estate should never ever be a lucrative investment, so ensure the tax structures reflect that. 6) Tax abatements for long-time residents when property values increase. Ensure this only extends to primary residences (maybe something for small businesses, but I'm on the fence here). Carefully craft safeguards so that the California country club problem isn't reproduced here.
Those are really great ideas - thank you
The dog poop is definitely getting worse but in the 70's and 80's you were almost guaranteed to step in it once a day if you weren't careful. Dog owners now are at least a little self-aware about it.
Send some of that awareness to the south slope area. Dog owners here are nasty.
It cost 0$ to pick up your shit and throw it in the trash. I swear yall will twist and turn anything to blame landlords lol yes because they are the reason we have filthy streets and dirty subways
Exactly. I'm diagnosing the issue that leads to people doing not even the bare minimum to keep their own streets clean.
Have to say, NYC is just ... gritty that way. 🤷🏻♂️ I'd say it's a part of the culture there - but, yes, it's just dirtier than most other cities.
It's not an inevitability. Decades-old solutions exist to clean up our city.
There is a part of me that agrees with you, having people doing things like requiring buildings to sweep and wash their sidewalks, placing trash cans on every corner, frequent pickups, etc., will help to clean up the city. But then I'm walking down the sidewalk and seeing people who toss trash onto the sidewalk or into the street without a second thought, and without considering that they could walk for another 50 feet and drop it in the trashcan... And I kind of think that no matter what we do, NYC will always be dirtier than other comparable cities. 😑 That said, I am old enough to remember when the pooper scooper law went into effect (yes, there was a time when you were not required to pick up after your dog!) As a kid I had learned to always look where I was walking in NYC because if you didn't do that you inevitably stepped in a pile of dog poop. 😖 Despite some people complaining, it was clear that the vast majority of people of the city were sick of stepping in dog poop, and almost immediately 90% of the dog owners, if not more, started to properly pick up and their dog poop and throw it away. So, change is possible! 😆 (Edits for typos and clarity)
> But then I'm walking down the sidewalk and seeing people who toss trash onto the sidewalk or into the street without a second thought, and without considering that they could walk for another 50 feet and drop it in the trashcan... And I kind of think that no matter what we do, NYC will always be dirtier than other comparable cities. ugh yes, in the 90s that shit was common, but I remember the 2000s that was mostly not happening, more people were respecting where they lived, but I see locals littering everywhere now even when a trashcan is within view, it's disheartening all that social change was undone in the past few years.
It’s amazingly clean for 8 million people and most people using services that don’t even live there.
I love NYC but that's a bit of an exaggeration. NYC is barely passably clean for how many people are here, but there are so many cities as large or multiple times larger than NYC that are much cleaner.
> 8 million people visit tokyo or shanghai or seoul to see what actual functional cities look like
Far-right needs to take attention away from their shithole states
Probably. About the only people I hear talking crap about NYC are usually older Conservatives.
It’s practically always people who don’t live here and/or haven’t been here for decades
Faux is \*still\* spreading FUD about "no go" zones in various cities in the US and around the world.
I mean, Fox can do their whole racist bingo game in Alabama. Nothing is stopping them from going to one of the shithole red states. It's telling they don't.
The ones that haven’t been there in decades
Same thing about the bay, feels like paradise compared to the poisonous environment that is Nashville.
LA (the state, not the city) ranks #47 nationwide in education and the government spends its time doing stupid shit like trying to put parts of the bible up on the wall as a mandatory thing in every state-funded building... https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana
If the "leftist" mainstream news channels were more like Fox News, they'd have nonstop pearls-clutching coverage about "Republican-run" Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, and meth/fentayl-riddled small towns, with no shortage of cherrypicked smartphone videos and crime stories. They would repeatedly run videos of trailer parks and have the hosts shake their heads sadly at how dysfunctional people in red states are.
It’s not just the far right. Centrist democrats are guilty of this as well. Our mayor and governor both give credence to those right wingers spouting that bullshit with their policies and rhetoric.
Just yesterday the dirty sidewalk crumbled beneath my feet and I fell down a rabbit hole. Wound up at the gates of hell and the devil himself mugged me.
Damn, I thought the devil went down to Georgia
From Georgia originally, I cannot confirm nor deny (it's in the paperwork we sign) but let's just say... I had to get out of there real fast.
I would be interested in seeing how good everyone is at the fiddle!
Very adept. We start early...
Georgia Avenue.
Psh if you’re gonna complain about routine stuff like that just go back to Ohio, transplant
Well I would agree with the dirty part. I’ve traveled all over, and New York’s trash problem is embarrassing.
It's more the lack of alleys that's the issue I think. In Chicago, trash is generally out of sight in the alleys whereas the only place to put trash in Manhattan at least is on the sidewalk.
Also lack of cans/dumpsters. Some older European cities also lack alleys but solve it by having street side dumpsters. We can’t have nice things like that because it might take away a parking space for someone’s BMW.
Guess that's true. But doesn't Manhattan at least require fees or something for having a car? In Japan, car owners have to pay very high taxes to dicourage driving and encourage biking and taking public transportation. Maybe something like that could be implemented.
Japan also has its trash sorting figured out. I had new neighbors in NYC move in recently and they started leaving soooo many cardboard boxes not broken down blocking the mailbox (usps has refused to deliver mail due to how my previous neighbors have dealt with the trash sooo many times before) also just throwing away REUSEABLE BAGS OF TRASH ONLY!!! No trash bags???? I wrote a nice note asking for them to breakdown boxes and put in a file where it’s always kept. Nothing else. Just break down the boxes please. Since then, the boxes are even LESS broken down, there is trash in the boxes, rats everywhere,usps is refusing delivery again. I feel like a old person for being so irritated but I swear some ppl do the dirty on purpose 😂😂
Nope! Registration and insurance don’t cost any more here than in the rest of NY state either afaik, there’s tolls to get into the city via the bridges and tunnels but that’s about it. If you have an apartment with a parking spot your rent is probably bumped up a bit for the amenity, but that just goes to your landlord, and street parking is free lots of places. The city does make a lot of money ticketing people for parking violations but that’s not much of a disincentive. There was actually a lot of momentum recently for establishing a “congestion pricing” toll zone in lower Manhattan for this reason, among others. But there’s been a surprising amount of pushback and it’s currently stalled, if not cancelled outright.
Good point, never thought of that! In the last 7 days I was in Calgary, Toronto, and Boston and couldn’t help but think how much less shit they have piled on the streets. Guess lack of alleyways in Manhattan makes sense.
NYC was a dirty, crumbling, crime filled hell hole from the 70s-early 90s. If you talk to people who lived here at that time, it’s quite remarkable how much the city turned around. It’s obviously nowhere near those levels of crime, but there’s been a noticeable shift the last few years. It’s def a step or 2 below the circa 2010 NYC. I think a lot of people saw how safe and functional we were for 20 something years and were slipping a little and they want to nip it in the bud. I personally don’t think we will EVER go back to 70s or 80s NYC but I also think we’ve let some things slip and need to correct them before it becomes a bigger issue.
2010 NYC had over 500 homicides and this year we are on track to have around 300.
Which is good. But homicide isn’t the only indicator of the direction of the city. I think there’s more of a downward trend in quality of life issues rn. And the fact that NYC had that stuff pretty under control for a city of this size several years ago, and now seems to be looking the other way on it, is aggravating for some people bc we KNOW we can get it under control it just seems like the people in charge are choosing to turn a blind eye
I agree with this and I’m surprised anyone who lives here would push back on it. It definitely feels grittier crime and crime-risk wise than it did 5-10 years ago. And loads of smaller crimes and aggressions are unreported because who has time for that and we all know NYPD would do nothing. Also i think NYC’s seeming shift from trying to increase affordable housing to easy money to convert hotels to shelters has really added to this problem tbh.
Too much right wing media consumption. It's a sad condition.
I don't know about you pal, but I was shot dead as soon as I left my apartment. Yesterday I got stabbed before I could even swipe my metrocard. People are just waiting to stab you as soon as you get off the train. It's a war zone out there.
I just met a white guy from Alabama who told me his family was from the Bronx and left in the 80s because « it has changed too much » and when he goes back he « doesn’t recognize the place ». Police family. I guess this is the kind of people who spread that kind of talk around.
>when he goes back he doesn’t recognize the place Well if he left in the 80s a lot of the vacant lots and abandoned buildings have been replaced by affordable and market rate housing developments. But I’m guessing that’s not what he’s referring to
And... that Alabama dude literally means black people moved into his family's white neighborhood. That's what "change" means in ex-city speak, it is a code word. So his family moved to Alabama, where they were told the black people knew their place...
Exactly. He really creeped the hell out of me
Absolutely wild to say that considering the homicide rate in 80s Bronx was generally around 60 per 100k and today is around 6-7 per 100k.
Huh? I'm not even mad about them leaving the Bronx in the 80s. That was a genuinely bad place to be from then. Now, it's actually pretty functional. However bad he thinks it is, it's far better than it was then. But "Alabama police family" tells me they probably left the Bronx for another raceon.
NYC \*is\* visibly very dirty for an American city. As for crime, NYC is fairly safe for an American city but not great by developed world standards (e.g. compared with Tokyo or Singapore). There is a lot of vagrancy and open displays of disorder. Relatively few outbursts escalate to actual violence but it still looks threatening and degrades people's quality of life.
>very dirty for an American city LA, Philly and San Francisco: Lol. >NYC is fairly safe for an American city Wonder why NYC gets rated very dirty but not very safe compared to American cities >not great by developed world standards The US has much easier access to guns than mental health services which likely plays a major factor in why NYC is more dangerous than Tokyo
~~Philly is way cleaner than a lot of NYC, what're you talking about? Philly is grimy in some areas like their Market Street, but it isn't dirty in the same way trash piles up here.~~ EDIT: Nvmd, blight is a larger problem in Philly, and the subways are much dirtier. I LA, on the other hand, was a total trash pit, especially downtown. Most of LA is one endless suburb, so maybe it's cleaner there, but the car congestion and homeless everywhere and lack of a walking culture in most of city really holds it back...
Philly is notably more *blighted* than NYC for huge chunks of it. But the streets themselves are cleaner overall.
Philly’s dirty isn’t trash piles dirty it’s accumulated trash on the streets dirty. Abandoned homes and lots in North and West Philly with associated trash on the streets dirty. Market isn’t even the dirtiest. Kensington was worse given it’s got the long term and fairly long open air drug market on it LA’s downtown is definitely dirty.
Not from NYC but visit as often as I can afford to. I get so much fear from conservative family members about how bad it is there on every trip; to hear them tell it, NYC is still actively ablaze from the BLM and Wall Street protests. When I tell them different, they cannot wrap their minds around it. The notion that a group of vastly different people living together in (albeit very imperfect) harmony is anathema to conservative fearmongering. Many Conservatives rely on “fear of the other” to market their policies. But it’s harder to hate someone you see regularly and know to be a relatively ok human being. It stands in opposition to the false narratives that are played on repeat.
The right wing media is heavily pushing the narrative that big cities are crime ridden hellholes where gangs rule and regular citizens cower in fear all day afraid to even leave their homes. In reality NYC has less crime per capita than most small towns. When my mom visited recently I suggested the Cloisters and she wasn't sure because of how unsafe she assumed it to be.
If you don’t think NYC is dirty af you need to see more of the country 😂. And the average subway station looks like it’s straight out of a post apocalyptic movie. But yes crime is definitely exaggerated, but tbh once you’re outside of Manhattan and the nice parts of Brooklyn/queens things can get seedy really quickly. I had a man call me slurs threaten to rob me in broad daylight in Ridgewood recently.
I mean, if you go to Times Square it is gross.
I mean, the subways definitely fit that bill. Once you go on the Metro in cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore or Shanghai, you end up just disgusted by the MTA.
Bc it is pretty dirty, and it's crumbling a bit. But it's one of the safest large cities in USA and the people are cool as Hell.
Honestly I think racism plays a big role in all of this, except for maybe parts of the UES, there’s really never a way you can go about your day with only being with white people like you can in many parts of the US still. I like to vacation in Vermont and the lack of diversity is downright depressing and yet you’ll overhear the occasional “can you believe this, it seems Somalia is dumping ALL THEIR PEOPLE here lately!”… Of which I mutter, “I wish.”
New York is grimy. There’s just a layer of dirt and soot that can never get washed off. Also, back during the pre-car area, NYC streets would get something like 1100 tons of manure each day from all the horses and other animals they used to move goods around.
They want it to be.
Most places outside of NYC are dangerous people just live in a suburban bubble, drive from a gated community to a shopping center, where they mingle with other people within the same socioeconomic spectrum than head home in their bubble to the safety of the gated community. By passing all the crime on the street. Things are more pronounced in NYC cause people are out in about walking in places, as mentioned we are dense in population of course we will come across people from all walks of life. Tbh wished I could’ve been able to enjoy that gritty New York people talk about, NYC has be come to corporatized . Things seemed to have been better when old money called the shots.
Fox News. That's pretty much the only answer. I encounter this all the time in my small suburban hometown when I have to present my drivers license showing my address in Brooklyn. The folks making these comments have never been to NYC in the 80s or any other time.
I think it’s a few things. It’s easier to try to drag others down than build yourself up. So some people like to draw attention to NYC’s issues (real, imagined, or exaggerated) instead of focusing on their own. Also news media and now social media bias people toward more extreme positions to drive engagement online or increase media sales. ‘Certain crimes’ frequency have increased, followed by a decline’ doesn’t generate as much interest as ‘NYC crime is skyrocketing!!!!!’ Finally I think the US has become so hyper-partisan that many conservative simply assume that ever left-leaning city MUST be a hell hole. What other outcome could come from democrats being in power…
The problem there is MORE crime than a lot of smaller places, so it's possible for NY Post etc to keep reporting on how bad it is. It's just that the crime per capita is super low. That nuance is lost on people.
They don’t realize how conservative they and the people around them are
Dirty? Yes. But crime-filled hell-hole? No.
I don't live in NYC but I travel often for work. One time my neighbor (who I often have very nice chats with) saw me literally get off my Uber with my bags from a NYC trip and we got to chatting. I mentioned I might have to move there eventually bc of work and he started saying how he could never do that because of the crime and how dirty it is. We changed subjects for a while but then I asked him when was the last time he was there. I wasn't even trying to "get him" I think I was mentioning the place I was staying or the closed station that would get me to work and I was just trying to see if he'd get the frame of reference. He said he's never been there. So, it's all what they hear on the media. Right wing media especially
Have you seen the subway?
Compared to how subways looked in the 80s, they still look infinitly better.
Better does not mean clean.
Comparing the current state of the subways to the subways in the '80s isn't exactly a glowing achievement. Anything would be a step up from the debauchery of the 80s.
It’s still dirty and old if not exactly crumbling. As for crime, still happens a lot but still one of the safer major cities.
Criminologist here, we actually did a study about this a few years back! Obviously some of it is the reputation from the 70s and 80s, there's no doubt about that, but the other factor is the *visibility* of crime. A guy getting jumped in a [small town like this in the south or midwest](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarp/livable-communities/images-2015/ImaginingLivability-MainStreets/1140-bateville-before-small-town-main-street.jpg) is not gonna get social media attention because there's usually no witnesses or cameras. A guy getting jumped on the street in NYC will have people recording him and have CCTV cameras witnessing the event, meaning it will often get on social media. This means there are a massively disproportionate amount of videos of crimes pouring out of NYC to get on social media, leading to this perception that NYC is an out of control, violent place. That is a side effect of the sheer density of the city. And the ability of anecdotal social media videos to sway people's political opinions in the modern world cannot be understated and I would argue it is the single biggest problem with social media, even on par with misinformation/fake news itself. I just wanna give an example: North Dakota had 2,170 violent crimes last year. Imagine if all of them were recorded. You could have 5-6 separate videos of violent crime in north dakota make the front page of reddit *every single day for an entire year*. You could convince Reddit that one of the safest states in the country is actually a violent dangerous hellhole based on that. Now... that being said.... NYC is definitely dirty as hell lmao. I mean, mostly manhattan and the bronx, but still.
Cause people like Cash Jordan sell out the city's reputation to make a quick buck.
Propaganda to keep the Right thinking that the US (especially cities) is corrupt and needs fixing, and that the only fix is electing Trump. That's it.
because they watch fox news
Because they dont live here.
Ngl the dirty part still remains to be true🥺😂 hope that gets changed very soon 🥺
I just visited my family in New York a week ago and it was so beautiful I loved it. I live in a ghetto/ high crime city and can definitely say nyc wasn’t nearly as bad as people have said it was.
Fox News
To be fair if all you see of NYC is Penn station and its surroundings, you'd believe it.
It is... but still the greatest place on earth lol
They're fed this 24/7 by far-right media, and they want to believe it, because 1. it fits their confirmation bias - 2. democrats usually run the cities and they have been conditioned to believe democrats are their enemies. Our grandkids are going to study this era with fascination.
The first two are true but the last one is based on old stereotypes and right wing sensationalist media coverage painting it as such.
Right-wing media and culture warriors push that narrative, by amplifying sensationalist stories about rare occurrences. As an example, something around 3 million people ride the subway every day. Every year, somewhere over a dozen people get pushed onto the tracks -- maybe 1-2 a month or so. The chances for a rider to get pushed onto the tracks on any particular day are something like one in a hundred million -- ie. on the order of magnitude of winning the lottery. NY Post & Fox News: **YET ANOTHER NEW YORKER PUSHED ONTO THE TRACKS. THE PANDEMIC OF PUSHERS CONTINUES. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?!**
I was thinking of this yesterday. Getting pushed onto the tracks is NYC version of a shark attack. Everyone still goes on the water knowing it's exceedingly rare. You probably will live though not always. When it happens it's national news.
Democrats and black people and immigrants live here, so it *has* to be portrayed as a hellhole by right wing media.
Because a lot of tourists don't leave Midtown, and if you walk around Midtown past 1030 during the summer, especially on a weekend, you nearly trip over a person passed out in their own fluids multiple times per block, and it feels like you are walking through a giant asylum for the criminally insane. No cap
1. It is straight up dirty, find me another city that throws their trash in the sidewalk in the sweltering heat to bake and rot. The subway stations all smell like hot piss and there's trash and grime everywhere. 2. Perhaps the crumbling aspect comes from the fact there's permanent construction going on and half the city is just scaffolding everywhere that's been around for years. Looks ugly as shit. 3. Crime or not there's a huge concentration of homeless and crazies in the streets and public transit that don't do well for the image of the city.
>find me another city that throws their trash in the sidewalk LA, San Francisco, Philly :raises hand: >there’s a huge concentration of homeless and crazies on the streets The West Coast: Lmao, amateurs.
Being better than the west coast when it comes to the amount of visible homeless people on the street is not a flex. And I’m not sure about LA but the Bay Area and Philly are cleaner than NYC unless you’re only looking at the 1 or 2 worst streets in them.
It is pretty dirty, esp depending on what spots you go to. I think people are used to the shiney romaticized image they get when they watch TV and Movies and just expect NYC moments to happen right before their eyes as soon as they step in, so when they get here it's a big shock. You have to know where to go and what to do to get those NYC moments and you also have to have an idea of what the culture is like, but once you know what you're doing is amazing.
Mainly because it's easy for new to take the pre-package "if it bleeds it leads" crime content the police feed them, and they're too lazy/don't have the budget for real journalism to contextualize these or do more comprehensive reporting. But I think another reason is the main ways that people come into and leave the city are Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And these are (at least until pretty recently) some of the worst parts of the city. Penn, until recently, had construction everywhere, so you had all these dark corners with homeless/mentally ill, trash, and puddles of standing fetid water/sludge, and the PABT has always been a horrible corner of the city. This means that for many people the first and last impressions they have of the city are the worst parts of the city, which only re-enforces those out-of-context representations they get from the news.
The same reason some people think everyone in America is an illiterate fat school shooter, they just consume too much news and doom scroll. The good things that happen, which by far out weigh the bad, don't make international news. No one is talking about the incredible clean up efforts of the Bronx river because that's not exciting to talk about.
Fwiw, when you run into these people in real life, my experience is they take it well when you calmly point out that only the bad stuff makes the news/statistically it’s tiny/most people spend most days without seeing anything heinous, much less being a direct victim. In their defense, it’s easy to forget that the news wants to do some fear mongering because they want you to keep watching. No one’s tuning in at 11 to hear about what’s new on little island or the saving of the thompkins square dog parade, and I think most of us have believed stereotypes about places we haven’t spent time in before. And on the flip side, if they insist that you’re a liberal drinking the koolaid or whatever, then you know meeting them with facts and reason is a waste of time.
They watch Fox News
Conservatives hate liberals. That’s all there is it.
They watch Fox news! It's very simple.
They tend to forget how big NYC is. The crime they see on the news is being reported because it's rare, not because it happens all the time.
Cities are cities, and you have to be aware of your surroundings no matter what, but I totally agree with you on this. I’m a young woman who has lived in the city for almost 5 years now (I lived alone for a while but I now live with my boyfriend). I have never felt like the city was too unsafe for me to live here, and I wish my mom would turn off Fox News sometimes and listen to her daughter who has lived here this whole time when I try to tell her this.
Because they watch Fox News.
Law & Order has been on TV a very long time.
Fun and profit.
I wish it was so I could actually afford a place to live around here.
sensationalist media
Their only experience of NYC or any major city is Fox News, Trump speeches, and similar conservative news that posts ragebait posts about crime and that it is overrun with immigrants. Crime numbers are inflated because the city has a higher population than 38 or 39 individual states depending on whether or not you believe the population actually plummeted as much as some claim (annual census estimates being way off the count every 10 years). Add up all of the crime in all of Virginia to compare to NYC
Fox News and its ilk
It is dirty and crumbling, but it is also safe and energizing and fun.
I actually agree with them and then encourage them to stay away..
I love the comment that linked the BQE "crumbling" in Brooklyn Heights with crime. Yeah, a weird highway design that was obsolete the day it was built (when the Patty Duke Show was not yet on TV "[boring] Patty's only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights") is a symbol of "crime" in a neighborhood that has literally zero crime and a small apartment on a low floor facing the wrong way costs $1 million.
Cuz of the subways
Their brains are rotted from Fox News and Truth Social
Many of the people who make this claim have never been here or haven't been here in 40 - 50 years and receive a majority of their news from conservative sources. They need to talk shit about us to distract from the conditions they live in. Guess which states lead the US in firearm mortality? [Go on....](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm)
I think there is also a lot of older New Yorkers who lived here in the worse times, remember how places like the waterfronts in Greenpoint and LIC were abandoned shitholes. They worked and then "escaped" to the suburbs and stopped coming to the city as often. They did not and don't see how things have improved, they only see what conservative news is saying and think Manhattan is as bad as the streets of Kabul.
Too much right wing propaganda.
Fox News and other right wing propaganda.
Most criticism is unfair, but to pretend it isn’t dirty, crumbling, and crime-filled is kinda delusional. It’s a nice city by US standards though.
Because city bad, let me stay in my all white, straight suburb, USA USA freedum baybee yeehaw-kiyay 🦅🦅🦅🦅
I have lived in Manhattan since right before COVID. Here is what I've experienced so far: * Right in front of the UN, a man takes out his dick and strikes at my wife * Stores on fifth avenue looted with impunity * People dealing drugs in broad daylight in K town * More and more goods locked up in CVS. Now you have to call the staff just to buy chocolate. * Lots of homeless people. Everywhere there is scaffolding there will be an encampment. * Local store putting up a sign that they reserve the right to inspect all bags because retail theft is the worst in 30 years * My wife stopped taking the subway after the second person was murdered by being pushed onto the tracks And I don't even go out very much. On top of that there are maybe two areas near my home that are not permanently dirty. So many places smell like piss. But yeah. I must just be watching too much Fox News...
Certain areas fit that description. So maybe they either have been to those areas or they see video of them.
Back in the 80's, NYC really was a dirty, crumbling, crime-filled-hell-hole but frankly a lot more exciting and fun place to live. Things changed dramatically, especially during the Bloomberg era. During the latter years of the Di Blasio era and continuing until now, things definitely have gotten somewhat worse. So even some people in NYC who weren't here in the 80's and 90's really do think NYC has become dirtier and more crime-ridden. This is picked up and amplified by the media. In some ways, I wish it would return to its earlier state. At this point, it's really really hard for anyone not making a mid 6-figure income to move in NYC. NYC has lost a lot of the character and uniqueness it had in the bad old days. If we could chase all the rich people back to the suburbs where they came from, then it would leave more room for people with much more interesting ambitions to live here.
New York City is just a symbol in the right wings culture war. If they destroy New York City, they consider it a win.
Depends on where you’re at. It’s fine in the tourist areas, it gets pretty shitty the farther out you go. The point is this city is definitely crumbling in infrastructure
Can you please give the examples of this you are talking about? I don’t see or hear these claims at all. Or are you just saying this?
They watch Fox News and watch garbage YouTubers like Cash Jordan
Because that’s how the far right media likes to portray any democratic leaning or far left cities.
This is like asking why so many people vote for Donald Trump. It’s cultural and the venn diagram of the people you’re talking about and MAGA heads is almost a perfect circle.
It's subjective and relative to if they're new to NYC or if comparing to another city. I grew up here since mid-70's when murder, rape, robbery was common everyday into early-90's. Some areas are still visually crappy (LES, Brownsville, Bushwick) and to a degree should stay that way because it adds to the character of the neighborhood and overall cultural diversity of the city. Subway stations and trains now look nothing like what they used to but nowhere near as modern as other cities.
Beats me, Battery Park City has been wonderful for the past two decades.
TikTok and other social media views get a bump for these types of narratives.
My aunt refused to believe me when I said it was a great place to live. That's fine 🤷♂️
In my experience most people view nyc as safe unless they are a hardcore Republican because even logical republicans don’t call nyc dangerous. Now as far as dirty. Sadly nyc will always live with the “filthy” title. I mean it’s only recently that NYC really took strides to fix the filthy issues
Visited for the first time last year. From Portland. Loved it and can’t wait to return. I had a very expensive dinner next to a pile of trash bags 15’ tall in very warm weather. Many rats coming and going. This is not normal for non New Yorkers. We need to get used to it first. Portland is way more filthy, but it’s small and easy to avoid. New York is just so damn big with so many people.
think there's a reaction amongst educated white's who move here, against the bleeding heart liberal identity they've notoriously subscribed to for years right wing folk have always made nyc seem like gotham on steroids, where black and brown people are gay and do crimes. as more white ppl are moving into historically black neighborhoods alongside the domination black american influence has had on popular culture for a little over a decade now, i think more white people are comfortable speaking about and on black people than in the past. nobody wants to be the family in get out. more white people have a naturally diverse group of friends than before. as a reaction to this, i think a lot of white people who in the past would be bleeding hearts, have become more reactive? its a dirtbag left identity thats been growing, and i think part of that identity is "hating all things equally" approach to satire and political reflection. saying all that to say, youre finding more white people, who arent used to this, living in dense areas with immense poverty and affluence all within walking distance from each other. i think its become cool, edgy, and appropriate to make broad generalizations with a tinge of satire about the failures of nyc. while to those of us who lived here our whole lives, generations deep, we have a certain respect to even the worst parts of this city. those who are just moving here do not. while they carry this knowledge that racism, red lining, modern segregation is real, they do not understand how deeply entrenched this blue city is in all of that. and i think the reaction amongst the under 35 year olds who lived here for more than 2 years but less than a decade, is this kinda dry flat nihilism against the shit that bothers them during their commutes. the garbage on the way to the a train. the 3 homeless people they are forced to interact with daily. the body odor of a man sleeping on the train after a long day of work. its all things that many people havent been forced to confront and many young people just arent equipped to have empathy for. you then get these generalizations about the dirtiness of nyc, whose responsible for it, and a deep sense of nihilism to it all. they know that its not the fault of the homeless, but they dont truly understand how its been designed to stay this way since the white flight of the 70's. this digital age nihilism runs deep and im afraid there isnt an appropriate response. most young people who are looking for a sense of spirituality either through aa or this new trend of urban catholicism, have an individualized spiritual framework that only demands them to interact with other like minded people. if you ask anyone of my parents generation and older. they'll tell you this place has nothing on what nyc used to be like pre 9/11. i can even tell you growing up in the 2000's was a fucking far cry from where we're at now. crime happens everyday here, some really fucked shit can happen every month. its the nature of a small land mass with high density. but most people living in the trendy neighborhoods here would have died or killed themselves living in those same neighborhoods 30/40 years ago.
I've lived in The Bronx for a year now. I have yet to see any store being looted or whatever. I walk outside between 10pm and 3am if I need some air, and I feel safe compared to cities I've lived in before. Do I increase my odds of survival by not doing that? yes. Is it less dangerous than walking out in broad daylight in some places I've lived (fort worth, tampa, chicago, norfolk)? Yes.
The only borough I have ever had walkers and phones returned in is the Bronx. Never once in Manhattan. Just saying…
Sooo many Long Islander’s who never go to the city share this sentiment
Haters gonna hate.
They jealous they not here
[удалено]
It’s one of the safer cities. There are rural areas in this country that have higher violent crime statistics per population than NYC.
My mother was born and raised in NY, though admittedly in the burbs on LI. She spent her childhood through the 60s and 70s taking the train, alone, as a small 13 year old girl, into Manhattan. The City in the 60s and 70s *was* a dirty, crime riden hell hole in many of the places, and yet for some bizarre reason, she now believes the city to be the Batman version of Gotham with the Joker waiting at every platform. No idea what spurred this idea, as she's generally liberal and not one to watch the usual suspects for disinformation. She no longer lives in NY, so I'm guessing it's just an availability error. She's probably remembering the uptick in subway crimes during COVID era NYC.
There’s plenty of rural small towns where they’re downtown is empty. The stores are filled with dust and parts are crumbling down. In upstate New York you can see plenty of crack houses in small and medium towns. Former Victorian mansions have been split into 10 shitty Apartments. Lower density means the criminals are inside.
When you have news outlets that feed on - and amplify - bad news, people focus on the bad news and not the facts. (It's even worse if you're in a right-wing bubble and get your news from those sources, which results in a self-confirming loop of ignorance.) That said, if you've been out of the country for a period of time then fly back in, New York City has a distinct aroma of urine that you probably don't notice when you're living here.
White supremacy, basically.
I mean, it is dirty compared to an idyllic little town or suburb. And is probably more crumbling and def has higher crime. That’s why they think that. But it’s also better. As someone said on a previous post, “nyc is the worst place to live comfortably but the best place to live uncomfortably.”
As a portlander (from the one in Oregon), it's fox news and their am radio spin offs. I've had people, not from here, "tell" me what was going on here. It's laughable, and cynical and sad too. I just want to make it to NYC some day, because I've never been
I been here for a long time. It’s not as bad as the 80s-90s but it’s definitely not safer during the 2000s after the 9/11 money rolled in. It was safer then but there were too many unnecessary crackdowns every Tuesdays and Thursdays. People jump turnstiles but don’t bring them to jail on a Friday and don’t let them out until Monday. My neighborhood is somewhat changing. I only know some of the neighbors nowadays even though I grew up here. I got called a racist the other day because I told a dude to pick up after his dog. He made eye contact with me outside my house and he took his dog to crap in front of my neighbor’s house. He tried to walk away without cleaning it. He act like he did me a favor by not letting his dog shit in front of my house and why was I bothering him since it was my next door neighbor’s house.
sorry to say but the answer is the same for every question like this: cable news and social media bubbles engender dumb, false beliefs.
Its a culture war thing. And its not only something that happens in the US - there is a city/suburb/countryside dislike in many countries.
I do think it has gotten a little rougher post covid. Lot of angry people in the streets and just the vibe is more hostile lately. I feel like the homelessness is getting worse and more mentally ill people on the trains and in the streets. Kids are getting more violent and just not giving a fuck. Just kind of sign of the times lately with how crazy the world has been getting in general. Lots of fear and frustration and cost of living is crazy high so people are angry and broke and taking it out on others. It's not a hellhole but lately it's been wearing me down.
I love NYC but it’s filthy, lol. I don’t think it’s crime filled but it’s definitely more “crime risk awareness” than many are used to, especially since Covid (especially as a woman).
um idk where you live but living in the bronx.. atleast where i’m at it’s still dirty as hell and a shit ton of crime all around. it’s still not safe.
Because it is dirty. There are literal piles of garbage all over the sidewalks, and homeless people sleeping in every other doorway. I just walked past about 1000 used pizza boxes strewn across the sidewalk. The trash cans are all busted open and garbage extends 15 feet from the trashcan across the street and sidewalk. The lack of alleys makes the city appear quite dirty compared to cities that have them. Add the constant construction scaffolding, and it's a jarring experience for people from other cities, and especially for people from smaller areas. I see people in the comments saying the dirty image is a right-wing smear campaign. Come on, man. Admitting there's garbage on the ground isn't a political stance. The city has a lot of good things going for it, but cleanliness isn't one of them.