[adventured]

That's fascinating. I grew up in an area - Appalachia, specifically an area among the poorest regions east of the Mississippi - with entrenched forever poverty, and vast underinvestment in pretty much every way you could name. It never occurred to anyone to put together organized retail crime gangs and endlessly plunder local stores until they were all forced to close.

What other excuses do you have?

[woodruffw]

> It never occurred to anyone to put together organized retail crime gangs and endlessly plunder local stores until they were all forced to close.

I'm not particularly invested in defending SF, but comparing shoplifting in a dense urban center to one of the least densely populated regions of the Eastern US doesn't make a ton of sense. It occurs to me that Appalachia has plenty of entrenched and even organized crime (moonshining being the historical one that comes to mind), but most of it doesn't involve hitting up the store you live a block from.

[happytoexplain]

>I'm not particularly invested in defending SF

It's depressing that we need prefaces like this.

[woodruffw]

It was a little clumsy of me, but I was trying to hedge between the normal reactionary critiques of SF and something more constructive. NYC has plenty of problems, some of which are a lot worse than SF's, but we don't have anything really resembling this.

Why? Probably a lot of reasons. But it certainly doesn't hurt that we have a (mostly court-backed) housing mandate, and the country's largest youth employment program[1].

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/jobs-internships/abo...

[BobbyJo]

There's tons of factors that go into crime, culture is one of them, disenfranchisement is another. None of them cause all cases, that doesn't mean some of them don't cause some cases.