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Today's paper reported a "56 percent increase in apartment burglaries in NW Austin, with 116 since January. The area has seen an 80 percent increase in all burglaries, including cars, homes and businesses this year police say".
The story was on page 2 of the metro section, kind of easy to overlook, so I thought I'd point this out here.
Edit: I just watched the KVUE news recording they said that apartments on Jollyville, Duval and Riata have been hit the most. The break-in's happen mostly during the day when people are away from work.
Well that kind of sucks. I was considering a move into that area too. Is that a bad part of town normally? Or is it just because of the recent influx of new residents?
Well, it is the 6 of one or half dozen of the other......56% sounds big, but is 116 big? It could be that that area was just exceptionally safe before, so it doesn't take much to make 56%....
But I don't know what an average number is for other areas, since you would have to normalize it to the number of apartment units/dwellers.
Well that kind of sucks. I was considering a move into that area too. Is that a bad part of town normally? Or is it just because of the recent influx of new residents?
No, not a bad part of town at all. Probably not because of new residents, either. Property crime in Austin can be high even in nice areas, while violent crime remains much lower. The perps often don't live in the area, but use thoroughfares like 183 and 360 as getaway routes. Because many complexes are right off the highway or access road, they are easy targets. In the 90's, I lived right off of 360 in NW Austin... fantastic neighborhood. My car got broken into twice, and there were buglaries regularly in the complex.
It got much better property-crime over the following decade, from around 1996 on. However, with the economy tanking, it looks like crime is picking up again.
It's true, reporting it in percentages makes it sound worse. Some of the zip codes in that area had 30 to 129 total burglaries last year. The worst zip code in town 78741, East Riverside Drive, had 872.
The KVUE report indicated that some gated communities had been hit. I read some apartment reviews for Riata that indicated the gates were often broken and left open.
Here is a video of the KVUE news report. http://www.kvue.com/news/local/stories/071509kvue_northwest_burglaries-cb.4258b4b6.html (broken link)
Quote:
There have been 206 residential burglaries in Northwest Austin since the beginning of the year -- 116 of those have taken place in apartment complexes
The house we rent in Jollyville was robbed last Jan. one month after we moved in. There was a rash of burglaries and vandalism committed in the neighborhood by a couple teenagers only months prior. :T So, we suspect we were hit by the same group. All that was taken was a junky workplace laptop that barely worked and a few season 1 DVD sets, so it wasn't a huge loss. It did cause us a lot of stress for months though, since the robbery occurred while we were asleep.
What I have learned from the experience is that I will not buy a house with sliding glass doors; way too easy to break into.
Riata is such a huge apartment complex that the gates are almost meaningless. It is almost like a mini-city over there.
Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this is an inside job, by someone living there.
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