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by Raydovsky 1330 days ago
Most people in the comments are jumping on the guy for "Not doing enough" and calling for more "support services". And housing the homeless and etc.

Why don't big cities in Texas have the same problems with crime? I don't think TX has more social programs than SF.

5 comments

Why don't big cities in Texas have the same problems with crime?

I'm trying to find a source that lists Houston as having meaningfully less crime than SF.

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime vs https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime (This shows SF having considerably less violent crime compared to Houston, but slightly more property crime).

Even in a self reported survey, I don't see much difference from people who live in these places: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...

In the context of this article it would be useful to see stats on the number of shops closing due to police/DA inaction. It’s a very specific issue.
> Why don't big cities in Texas have the same problems with crime?

Well. for one thing, for all the complaints from housing advocates about SF’s inadequate housing density, there are no big, dense cities in Texas, while SF is one of the densest in the US. (The combined city and county is the 5th densest county in the US, the top four all being boroughs of NYC.)

The issues of large agglomerations of suburbia that happen to be in the same political unit aren’t the same as a dense urban core.

Texas does have the same problems. I’m confused. Houston just has lower inequality and Texas cities aren’t as dense.
Texas doesn't have SF's inequality problems, mostly because Texas houses its population and SF refuses to do it.

The expectation that you can have the world's richest people living cheek by jowl with destitute street dwellers, and not have a wave of property crime, is ridiculous. Property crime is going to rise in proportion to the wealth gradient.

It has much colder winters.