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Exactly. People from East Coast cities like Baltimore and Philly think any neighborhood that isn't run-down looking with boarded-up rowhomes is "nice". People from Chicago and NYC think of a ghetto as a place with high-rise brick projects and frigid cold weather 6 months of the year. The only big city in California with very visually blighted run-down ghetto areas on par with Baltimore and Philly just happens to be San Francisco. The city that gets wrongfully gets stereotyped as having "no ghettos" because the dark side of SF is never exposed by the national media because SF's only real money maker is tourism. There currently is nothing as run-down as Sunnydale in San Francisco in Oakland although the O-Town obviously has a higher overall crime rate and has more ghetto per capita than SF. The projects in Oakland have all been renovated and aren't dilapidated like the ancient barracks from the 40's in SF. The projects in L.A. in places like Watts are also in better condition than SF and have bars on the windows unlike many in SF with dozens of boarded up abandoned units. Ironically, West Coast cities like Oakland and Compton don't have much of run-down anything yet those cities consistently boast higher crime rates than every East Coast city except for Camden, NJ in every category except for homicide in the case of Baltimore. Many California ghettos look like regular middle class suburban areas. This is what makes them so dangerous. You could be walking down the street as an out of towner and not know you are in the hood until you turn the wrong corner and see 100+ shiftless teens and 20 somethings posted on the corner; then its already too late and you probably will end up being a victim.
Yep, this is what Watts looks like. It's the most run down area of Los Angeles. Watts is mostly single family homes.
With a few exceptions (e.g. Macarthur Park LA, the Tenderloin in San Francisco), high density neighborhoods in California are middle to upper middle class. They are the places--near the beach, near nice parts of the downtown, near attractive parks--where people with at least some money wanted to live, and developers were happy to oblige. The unattractive neighborhoods were generally left at lower densities.
BTW, Los Angeles has numerous ethnic enclaves, e.g. parts of North Hollywood for Israelis, Glendale for Armenians, Monterey Park for Chinese-Americans, especially Taiwanese. I'm reluctant to call them ghettoes, though, nobody's forcing people to live there and much of the housing stock is perfectly fine.
Actually these place are sort of run-down all-over, but there isnt any neighborhood that really stands out as being particularly run-down/ghetto (as in minority concentration).
Lots of cities don't have ghettos. Newport Beach. Boca Raton , Scottsdale, Beverly Hills, many upscale places.
I think the OP meant major metros. Beverly Hills doesn't have ghettos per se but does have some working class neighborhoods on the southern border with LA proper.
DC still can be pretty grimey. It's not 1991 anymore when tiny DC was averaging around 500 murders a year. San Francisco, which is significantly larger than DC, has never had 500 murders in a year. NYC is more than ten times the size of DC and the biggest homicide tally in NYC was around 2,000 murders. But the District has improved dramatically in the past ten years. Last year was the first year DC had less than 100 homicides since the 60's.
But DC is not a city where you should be caught sleepwalking. These past few days with the below freezing temperatures in the District has everyone in the hood wearing ski masks out of necessity. Its the perfect time to get robbed out here. Even White gentrifiers in "nice" neighborhoods like Capitol Hill are not immune to the very scary real violence still that exists in DC's gentrifying hoods:
Lots of cities don't have ghettos. Newport Beach. Boca Raton , Scottsdale, Beverly Hills, many upscale places.
Naples, FL is another one. You have some very middle class neighborhoods ie Golden Gate or East Naples but virtually nothing that would qualify as 'ghetto'. The closest thing to it is probably 'The Quarter', which is less than a 1/4 sq mi.
I was amused at the fact that the city years ago planted Australian Pines around The Quarter so that it wouldn't offend the sensibilities of wealthier Neapolitans.
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San Francisco, which is significantly larger than DC, has never had 500 murders in a year. NYC is more than ten times the size of DC and the biggest homicide tally in NYC was around 2,000 murders. But the District has improved dramatically in the past ten years. Last year was the first year DC had less than 100 homicides since the 60's. 
