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As a rule, west coast ghettos "look" safer than their east coast and midwestern counterparts. LA's ghettos don't look very scary in general.
As for which ghetto is safest... I guess that would all depend on what you define as a ghetto. In the current common usage of the word, ghettos are partially defined by their lack of safety which renders the question somewhat oxymoronic.
As a rule, west coast ghettos "look" safer than their east coast and midwestern counterparts. LA's ghettos don't look very scary in general.
As for which ghetto is safest... I guess that would all depend on what you define as a ghetto. In the current common usage of the word, ghettos are partially defined by their lack of safety which renders the question somewhat oxymoronic.
This is one of the rougher parts of north Minneapolis, it is less safe than it looks though. Minneapolis has fairly tight housing code enforcement so poor areas tend to look more well to do than they are:
Most major cities and metros in the nation are going to have "ghettos" that don't look like some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Many ghettos in the nation usually resemble working-class to lower middle-class areas.
The same thing applies to places in St. Louis, Miami, Oakland, Cleveland, etc. Even Detroit has blocks that are considered crime-ridden, but look more neat compared to the other abandoned and maybe less dangerous areas.
In reality its the type of neighborhood you don't visit unless you know somebody from there in large part it's because there's only one way in and one way out. The apartment complexes in particular are bad news...
Architecturally speaking, tougher neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia tend to be better than most. Many of the worst neighborhoods look tough, but the buildings are far superior than most of the newer value engineered garbage out there (even if it is a little shinier and new), even if they are a little more worn than their counterparts in more gentrified neighborhoods.
I've seen a lot of newer housing projects that are brightly colored and landscaped, but I think most people see through the brightly colored lipstick on a value engineered pig. At least I hope they do.
In my opinion (and I've seen the same trend with most of the posts in this thread), even lower income neighborhoods are nicer when they're organic and part of the city and its street grid. Many cities tried to build their housing projects as sort of walled-off compounds within the city. This usually involved creating a super block with buildings oriented toward a central playground, "park," or courtyard and their backs turned against the street. In my experience, these are the worst projects and create a dead zone on the streets around them. Organic lower-income and even high crime neighborhoods like most of the ones described in this thread 1) function better than a walled off project compound, and 2) stand a better chance at revitalization down the road.
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