Reply to Living in Capitol Hill...Why?

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Reply to "Living in Capitol Hill...Why?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote] Maybe things have changed. We were looking in 2008/2009. Back then we were only considering places walkable to Eastern Market. Safety was "block by block" as our agent explained. I didn't like that concept.[/quote]

First of all, real estate agents usually avoid opining about crime. They can't predict other people's tolerances for crime, nor can they guarantee safety. Discussion of crime if also often used as a coded way to talk about race and socio-economic status, so most agents will not give you these answers because it runs afoul of fair housing laws. Either you've misinterpreted/misrepresented what your agent told you, or you had an unethical agent. If the latter, I'm going to discount him as a reliable narrator of crime on the Hill.

The unifom crime statistics are a much better place to get crime information than your real estate agent. Still, I caution against reading too much into a current year's numbers. Property crime is not violent crime. In fact, car break-ins where something of value was visible within the vehicle make up a great deal of property crime on the Hill. You may be interested to know that Georgetown has high property crime. Again, the details are important, as shoplifting contributes greatly to this statistic. Numbers of crimes do not determine any one person's risk of being victimized quite as well as looking at crime per 1000 residents because differing residential densities change probabilities. Also, in the cases of many violent crimes, the victim and the perpetrator knew each other. It's pretty rare for a professional person not involved in organized crime to get murdered. That's part of why we remember it so well when it happens.

As an experiment, I pulled up the last twleve months of crime numbers from within 1500 ft. of the Wisconsin and M St.s NW intersection [url]\http://crimemap.dc.gov/Report.aspxin [/url]order to compare then to the stats from 1500 feet around Eastern Market [url]http://crimemap.dc.gov/Report.aspx[/url].Using these places for comparison, the crime in these neighborhoods doesn't seem to be dramatically different. At the end of the day, even the numbers are only so helpful in determining what places are high crime. Everyone's perception of risk is different as is risk tolerance. 
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