I’ve been researching places to live besides NYC - it’s simply too expensive here..
I’ve found that Dallas, Atlanta, and St. Louis all have relatively high crime rates. I’m not sure about the rest of the list, but I’d rather raise my children in a safer city...
* Minneapolis
* Indianapolis
* Cincinnati
* St. Louis
* Houston
* Milwaukee
* Dallas
* Pittsburg
* Columbus
* Atlanta
I assume the Columbus in question is the one in Ohio and not New Mexico. Columbus, NM, probably has very affordable housing, but not much else. It does boast a county library that was still using a card catalog the last time I visited it in 2002. However, Columbus is only a little over an hour away from Las Cruces, Mesilla, and El Paso.
What I like best about Columbus, Ohio is its German restaurants.
Crime statistics can be misleading. They’re expressed in terms of crimes per 100,000 population. Atlanta has a population of about 425K in the city limits, 5 million in the metro area. There are a couple million people in the city limits on a given business day, because folks commute. But the crime stats are based on the number of official residents, not the number of people present.
Any big city is going to have more crime than a small town, because it has more people. More people who don’t know each other and can’t rat out a perp to the cops. In a small town, someone’s gonna see you who knows you.
Urbanites know which neighborhoods to live in and which to avoid. Same in any city. I’ve walked, sometimes drunkenly, through most of the high-crime cities in this country, and I’ve never come to harm. Stick with the crowd and stay alert. It’s not that difficult.
Minneapolis is fine as long as you stay out of North Mpls, which thankfully is very isolated.