<p>What you’re describing is something that happens in every major city of any importance whatsoever. The funny thing about your complaints is that rural areas continue to have significant issues with meth labs. By the way, rural areas smell like cow poop.</p>
<p>But I have to laugh at a Nova student scared of the city. How typical…</p>
<p>TractorF - didn’t they teach you at Nova how to be street smart?</p>
<p>You guys have to remember although Columbia and NYU are in NYC. New York City is the safest metropolitan right now. For a city that large the crime rate is very low. There’s police everywhere, and there installing cameras on every corner. And majority of them are undercover. The only people that get victimized are the ones walking alone at night, in a shady area. And if that ever happens call the police and they will take you home or walk with you.</p>
<p>Safe anything does not exist. Can you say that you are 100% that nobody will ever attempt to break into your house?</p>
<p>My daughter used to attend an elementary school that was housed in an old city print shop directly behind the Oroweat bakery- which was next to the transfer station for garbage.
It either smelled like toast or old cabbage. </p>
<p>* there was also just the faintest whiff of seaweed from Elliot Bay.*</p>
<p>I haven’t been to Penn- D1 said she actually liked Pittsburgh more than Philadelphia. ( trying to stay slightly on topic)</p>
<p>New York City is the safest metropolitan right now
cameras on every corner- sounds kinda 1984ish for me.</p>
<p>[CBS</a> News Producer Victim of NYC Subway Assault - Crimesider - CBS News](<a href=“http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20012344-504083.html]CBS”>http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20012344-504083.html)</p>
<p>D2 was pretty comfortable in Mumbai, and I have never been assaulted in Seattle- never been to NYC, but I don’t like underground.</p>
<p>You have to be alert where ever you go- but proximity poverty/wealth increases likihood of criminal behavior- that is just common sense.</p>
<p>
You can’t say with 100% certainty that an airplane won’t fall out of the sky onto your house on a snowy February night.</p>
<p>You look at the odds. You look at the statistics to see what the odds are. I saw a wonderful nursery school program in Chicago where I wanted to enroll my kids. It bordered on the Cabrini Green housing complex which was notorious for gang activity, drug trade and gun shots. I regretfully declined to join the group that many of my son’s friends, and my friends and neighbors joined. I gave them the reason. It wasn’t until they were in a shoot out that they understood what I meant. It did not take a genius to see that the odds of being in that situation were high, given the number of such episodes a year. Yes, it is possible that a shoot out could happen in our apt complex. But statistically, it was not a big chance since historically there have not been any. In the CG area, they were a regular activity. Eventually some of the shots were going to make in the area of that nursery school. Didn’t take a mathematician to figure that out.</p>
<p>When you are looking at colleges, it is the same thing. You can get a general idea of how safe the campus surrounding and the campus itself is. YOu can get actually crime stats for that area pretty easily. Also important is where the upper classmen live. If housing is pretty much just for freshman or for the first two years, you kid is likely to be living in the student ghetto unless you can afford a mainline apt for him. Take a look at the areas where those kids live and judge whether you deem it safe enough.</p>
<p>Lived in NYC my whole life, until my husband moved me out, and I never locked the door. I tried to convince my husband that more kids die in drunk driving accidents than in drive-by shootings but I lost the argument. Now we live in a small rural town (suburb but still small rural town) and I feel safer in NYC than here. When we first moved here I told my husband he wasn’t allowed to travel on business for one year until I went through all the seasons and learned all the sounds.</p>
<p>When I was looking at colleges in the 70s I visited Springfield College and noticed that the windows in the dorm rooms were bricked in until they were about 8" high. When I asked why the tour guide was very honest and said that the local kids were breaking into the dorm rooms through the windows and the school kept making the windows smaller and smaller because the locals kept sending in smaller kids as the windows got smaller. Dropped that school right then.</p>
<p>College kids are easy targets both to the outside world and to each other. Street smarts are needed by everyone, everywhere.</p>
<p>On a related topic - if your student lives off campus the biggest crime sprees are during college vacations when everyone knows the apartments are empty. Have your student take valuables home with them and be certain to lock up securely.</p>
<p>i lived in manhattan for ten years, half of which time was on the bowery (then one of last soho neighborhoods where you could rent an affordable loft - this was great!). during my last three years in the east, i lived in philly in a neighborhood located between between all-black and s. philly italianoso areas). at no time during these years did i ever experience a crime against myself or my property. then for reasons i still don’t fully understand i moved to fresno, california and bought a house in the country surrounded by an idyllic 50 acre vineyard. when the moving van left i went to the store to buy a few items like toilet paper, and returned about an hour later to find that the house had been broken into, my stereo and a few other expensive items stolen, and a plate glass window destroyed when the thieves threw a chair through it to gain entry. i’ll take a vibant, noisy, dirty city with lots of different kinds of people around all the time. as for those quiet “safe” small towns in the country, they just creep me out.</p>
<p>Its the people in the cities who go to the suburbs to break into your house.</p>
<p>^^^
Not necessarily. I live in a suburb that is rather far and removed from the city. We don’t generally have a lot of break-ins but when we do they are usually local teens from our own town or one nearby. A drug habit is a powerful motivator for someone to break-in and steal valuables. And drugs are rampant in the suburbs.</p>
<p>Drugs are also rampant in some rural areas, and other crime follows. My wife’s family owns a farm in a quiet, “middle America” corner of northern Illinois, not far from Ronald Reagan’s birthplace. It’s not occupied year-round, but we use it as an occasional get-away place. A few years ago it was broken into twice within the space of two years, and valuables were stolen. The sheriff later arrested a group of young “adults” (chronologically speaking) who were living in a rented farmhouse about 5 miles away. They had a meth lab on the premises. In addition to selling meth, they made their living burglarizing farmhouses in the area. I definitely felt safer leaving valuables in our NYC apartment than at the farm in rural Illinois.</p>