Reply to Longterm dc area residents, have you noticed decline ?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have noticed no decline, if you worry this much about city living crime and schools, you should move to the burbs or back to your hometown. Leave the real city living to the rest of us. [/quote]

Take a ride with a taxi cab driver who has been working a decade.  [b]He will tell you all you need to know about the state of decline the city is in.  
[/b]
The deniers on this thread are either new to the city or have very, very low standards of city life.  Perhaps the PP is from Seattle or San Francisco and thinks DC is a step up from those dumpsters.[/quote]

I came here in 1985.  It has gone down significantly.  [/quote]

That couldn't be more of an inaccurate statement. Sure, maybe if you've lived in Georgetown since 1985 and never left, you may be "scared" to see a homeless guy playing music..[/quote]

Nope. A homeless guy playing music is not the concern.[/quote]

There is no logical arguement to say DC was safer in 80s vs. today. They're obviously pockets of violence, but as a whole, the city is night and day safer/better.[/quote]

It is safer than the 80s, but not the 00s. And a main problem is that there are not pockets of violence. Violence now takes place throughout the city and in areas that once were safer.[/quote]

People keep saying this but it is utter nonsense.

Violence took place throughout the city in the 80s and 90s, and quite a bit more of it. The only difference (besides the fact that there's significantly less of it) is that in the 80s and 90s people like you wouldn't dare set foot in Columbia Heights or the Navy Yard and now you will.

And show me any evidence that there's significantly more violence in "areas that were once safer." Because the only part of the city violence wasn't common in the 80s and 90s was Ward 3, and guess what, Ward 3 is still incredibly safe and free from violence.

There were 2 (yes 2!) homicides in all of Ward 3 last year. There were 25 assaults with a dangerous weapon. In a Ward with roughly 80,000 residents. Even if there was 1 homicide and 12 assaults per year in the 80s and you fearmongers could say "OMG crime up 100% since then!" it would still be completely irrelevant because 1 homicide and 13 assaults is a rounding error when you're talking about 80,000 people. Your actual statistical chances went up by a rounding error.

And I'm guessing there were far more than 1 homicide and 12 assaults per year in Ward 3 in the 80s and 90s. [/quote]

Now I understand what is going on. Because the privileged are safe in Ward 3, they have no idea what is going on throughout the rest of the city, where murders have skyrocketed and carjackings have more than doubled.

No wonder you all love saying "everything seems better to me."
[/quote]

This is partially true, and definitely this board's heavy Ward 3 population skews both perceptions of and experience with crime.

Although, even with murders skyrocketing, it's not true that the city is more violent now than in the 1980s or early 1990s. The total number of murders this year is half of what it was then, and the population is larger. Or by another metric everyone here seems to love — boarded-up storefronts downtown — today is certainly an improvement over 30 years ago. (Unless you really loved huge surface parking lots that were largely empty at night.)

One issue with discussions of any of this is that no one is comparing today's crime problem to the same past era's crime problem. Some people look at, say, 1991 and say, well, this is much better. Other people look at 2009 and say, well, this is much worse. They're both right.[/quote]

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