[wolverine876]

> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc.

That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:

Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services?

> every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments

Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).

[jvanderbot]

It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

[wolverine876]

> the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

Did it? Not in NYC. Crime is very low; it's arguably one of the safest places to be in the country.

[Supermancho]

> Not in NYC.

That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

[wolverine876]

> NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century.

Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.

> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

What makes you say that has changed from the past?

[mgce]

I think this discussion is about today. I don't follow your reference to old history or how that affects the general discussion?

[IG_Semmelweiss]

"Crime is very low"

Murder may be low.

Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

[wolverine876]

You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims?

> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

here you go. Unfortunately city agencies seems very good at not tracking and making this info very public. So you have to go find it from 3rd party nonprofits

The relevant bits:

>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)

>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]

In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://cbcny.org/research/straight-from-new-yorkers [2] See article, figure 2.

[wolverine876]

Thanks for the data. I think the first number is especially meaningful.

You don't need all caps or exaggeration - you have data!

[monero-xmr]

The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it.

> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”

> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

[wolverine876]

You still don't have any data supporting your claims that crime is high. All you say is that it's not always reported - which is well known and has been for generations, if not forever.

What shows that it's high? It's circular to say that the unknown numbers are higher, not lower, because you think crime is high.

> a large Democrat-dominated city

What does the political party have to do with it, unless this really is about your politics? Republican areas of the country have higher crime rates, last I checked. If you think there's a correlation between party and crime rate, feel free to show us.

> (Pew data)

It's great to have some data, thanks. I don't know that anything has changed, however, though I imagine numbers were different during the pandemic and immediately after.

Numbers could be better now, for all we know.

[grardb]

When you say "shoplifting," do you mean someone has simply walked/run out of the store without paying for something? If so, I don't really understand what that has to do with safety. Same with plenty of other crimes, such as someone jumping a subway turnstile, graffiti, etc. These things surely lead to a lower quality of life and I'd prefer that they didn't happen, but I personally wouldn't say that they make a city dangerous.

[outop]

> What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street?

In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.

[rsynnott]

_Do_ people feel particularly unsafe in NYC, tho? Like people who live there, not tourists?

(Tourists' impressions of safety are a really terrible guide to anything, and can be dramatically incorrect in either direction.)

[watwut]

All those are low by historical standard.

[AndyNemmity]

Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.

[reducesuffering]

Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.

[elzbardico]

This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well. As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.

As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.

Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.

Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.

Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.

Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.

Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!

[reducesuffering]

If you want to throw out the data because it doesn’t suit your bias, fine, ultimately it’s your safety on the line based on your decision, so you better hope you’re correctly evaluating.

But I also think it’s odd that you think NYC is underreporting murders and not going after serious crimes, when if you go into rural areas, you’ll find many that are a few Sheriffs stretched thin over hundreds of miles, and infinite more potential for “murders going unnoticed.”

https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...

Paints a picture

[wolverine876]

> This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well. As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.

'Everyone knows' is a group of people repeating something to each other enough that they believe it must be true. Those are the things that most need skepticism, an objective factual basis. Look at your comment - there is no factual basis for any of the claims. Some is conspiracy - if they disagree, they are gaslighting, incompetent, etc.

Objective facts are our only salvation from our own delusions - which we're all subject to. There is factual basis to say that NYC is very safe, but it's not conclusive. That doesn't support baseless claims. If you have an alternative claim, there's not reason to believe it without factual support.

Almost everyone you're talking to here lives in the developed world, and it doesn't seem like they 'know' the same thing.

> You can't feel safe in the subway

You can, and many do. I do.

[AndyNemmity]

The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.

Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.

[kurikuri]

“Absolute level of safety” what does this even mean? Per capita crime rates seem quite relevant to this underlying property and can be well defined.

[satvikpendem]

By that logic, somewhere with no people would be the safest area. Good factoid to know but for most people, it's not useful to live with no others around.

[outop]

One of the worst and most tendentious numerical arguments I have ever seen.

[wolverine876]

As any person who lives in a city knows, more people means more safety. It's the empty, dark street - especially non-residential - that you want to avoid. Also, the NYPD is always nearby if that suits you (I've never needed them personally).

[reducesuffering]

> When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.

Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.

[eptcyka]

Instead of crime per capita, what’s the likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime in NYC?

[oblio]

Aren't those inherently related?

[jahewson]

Sorry but moving the goalpost from “one of the safest places to be in the country” to “one of the safest big cities in the country” is not fair game. The US has over 19,000 cities and you discarded all but 91 of them.

[reducesuffering]

I've not discarded them, it's just the the largest portion of data for where people in the US are, which NYC has an objectively good per capita murder rate compared to where most people live in the US. If we want to get data for the US as a whole, please point me in the direction where we can find the safety level of the median person, besides NYC having a 3.3 murder per capita rate while the US is ~6.5. Idk what % it is, but a large portion of Americans live in those lists of 100k+ cities.

[jvanderbot]

When you have so many people per square mile, it slightly skews the metrics. The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.

[wolverine876]

> you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.

People are just reaching for possible straws. Do you have any factual basis to say that? We can make up anything and put the word 'might' or 'maybe' in front of them.

I've spent lots of time in NYC and other dense, major cities, and I think I've seen one crime ($20 stolen). The interstate highway is more threatening, with the aggressive drivers.

Really, go to NYC. Look at the millions of people walking around without a care, going about their days.

[bryanrasmussen]

I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy!

I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?

There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!

You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!

I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.

[wpm]

It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.

I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.

Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

[wolverine876]

> It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).

[bryanrasmussen]

I suppose it is on one hand based on media, NYC is the big bad city, it's the mafia city, if you have a crime based movie it will be in NY, LA, or maybe Chicago as the most popular places.

Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.

I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.

[csomar]

Most crime is marginal even inside cities "infested" with crime. If you are personally affected (statistically improbable), the city/place is already unlivable and it'll go down quickly like some places in South America.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.

> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

[wolverine876]

> There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.

[bluGill]

The problem with numbers as they are only as good as the source numbers and questions you ask..

If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).

Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.

[pmyteh]

One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.

One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.

The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.

The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.

The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.

[jvanderbot]

> seemed to

In GP comment - sorry too late to edit.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-saf...

[whythre]

Accurate crime statistics are… let’s say, ‘discouraged,’ by the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office.

[warcher]

In the end the murder rate cannot be fudged, and it is quite favorable.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...

[raydev]

There's more to "violent crime" than just murder.

[reducesuffering]

Of course there is, however murder is the best simple proxy because it's the most severe and least likely to be disputed that it's fudged. So it stands in well for quick internet comments. When you get into a multi-pronged analysis of 5+ crime metrics, and how you factor each into "safety" and what metric and places go more underreported, etc. well, you have yourself a research paper...

[wolverine876]

What do you conclude from that? Maybe the other crime is even lower.

[ajross]

You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch?

In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.

[fosk]

In places like San Francisco it is an understood phenomenon that crime is underreported because nobody will investigate it anyways so why bother[1].

[1] https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-law...

[ajross]

Your citation for an "understood phenomenon" is a position paper from a lobby group. That's the point: the facts don't match the policy you want, so in our post-reality world the job of lobbyists is to invent arguments to allow people to ignore facts. As folks elsewhere in the thread point out: murder rates don't work with this analysis (you can't "underreport" a body) and murder rates show the same effects.

Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?

[Fomite]

Accurate crime statistics are discouraged by every police department and Mayor's Office in this country.

[bryanrasmussen]

What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.

[TeMPOraL]

If it was a large enough city, you could convincingly argue that there being no crime means crime prevention is massively overfunded and/or excessive in nature.

[zdragnar]

Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.

[wolverine876]

So how do you know the truth? Maybe crime is even lower.

I'm not sure how the no-snitch culture lowers the crime rate; it would seem to lower the conviction rate.

[zdragnar]

It's hard to convict if the crying never gets reported in the first place.

[wernercd]

The problem is the differences...

IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities.

I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments.

Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice".

The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.

[hughesjj]

Citation needed on all of that. It's not just retail closing up in NYC -- the rent is ludicrous, and no one wants to start renting at a lowe rate lest their appraisal goes down and their mortgage lender/city coffers start putting the pressure on the landlord

[sifttio]

Corporate real estate is a different beast. Residential real estate and corporate real estate do not mirror each other in the market. One can be in high demand while the other has excess supply.

Residential landlords are also much different than dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length of lease, laws and many other factors are completely different.

[bombcar]

Perhaps we need to encourage (via taxes?) convertible buildings that can either be corporate or residential with relative ease, similar to how in smaller towns you often have dentists and lawyers operating out of obviously converted houses.

[choilive]

This is primarily a building code issue for residential vs commercial construction.

Office generally try to maximize square footage, this tends to result in floor plans that are very awkward to adopt into residential use, primarily because the building code virtually everywhere has some sort of "natural light"/window requirement.

This means that purpose built residential high rises tend to be "skinnier" to have more windows per sq. ft of floor space. Not to mention the very expensive changes (hvac, plumbing, etc.) required to support residential use.

If the building code was changed so that the requirements for office and residential use buildings were closer then it would make future buildings more easily convertible between those use cases. It does not solve the problem of the existing buildings however..

[hughesjj]

I don't get how any of that is relevant when my claim is that the corporate rental rates is also too high and the financing for rentals shares the same concerns w.r.t rentable price regardless if it's residential or corporate landlords

[tylerFowler]

Fwiw it's almost exclusively international developers running the conversions in Kansas City. I think Greystar might be the one with the largest footprint there.

[Supermancho]

Takes a few seconds. All major cities (even Fargo ND) have seen increased theft. This is unsurprising due to the economies in western countries (which is all i can speak to).

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre....

[entangledqubit]

I believe that some retailer special interest group put out some numbers that did not support any real increase in shoplifting/shrinkage. Initially they made a claim otherwise but they ended up backpedaling. Oddly, the numbers around shrinkage from self-checkout seems to be persistent though.

[causality0]

I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?

[talldatethrow]

I was at a hardware store when someone walked out with a compressor.

I said to the clerk "that's a 99-2003 GMC Sierra in case you want to tell them when you call it in"

And he replied "oh we don't even call the police.. they won't do anything"

I was so angry I called corporate on the way home. Corporate told me "oh yes that's right, that's our policy. We have insurance for that!"

I said "that's great you have insurance, but I'd like my police department and newspaper to know my town is going to hell..."

[pstrateman]

Yes because the police stop arresting people for it.

If you don't prosecute, it effectively stops being illegal.

[beepbooptheory]

If true, maybe. But this very point makes this whole line of argumentation unfalsifiable and in that a little limp...

[lmm]

In the UK crime statistics are collected from a survey of people's experiences of crime that's completely independent from police/arrest records. Does the US not do this?

[pstrateman]

Of course it's falsifiable, start prosecuting again and see if the arrest rate goes up.

[bombcar]

Most of the time. Certain crimes (eg public intoxication) often have an arrest followed by letting the person go when they’ve sobered up, so no official prosecution but not no arrest.

[pstrateman]

Public intoxication would seem to be the only example of that though.

Can you think of any other?

[wolverine876]

Do you have evidence of that?

[zarathustreal]

..my friend, what world do you live in where civilians are gathering their own evidence, of any kind, much less evidence related to police behaviors?

[x0x0]

Lots of crime doesn't get reported.

The police where I live are transparently useless. Someone tried to steal my car at bart. Even my auto insurance didn't bother asking for a police report while paying out $3k for a repair to the door. Everyone involved understands it's an utter waste of time and not a thing will happen.

For at least n=1, no crime happened.

[nathan_douglas]

Twenty years ago, in a small college town, my car was broken into and the stereo stolen. I called the police out and the cop said, “okay, what do you want me to do about it?”

Well, I don’t know. What should be done about this? I guess I thought my report might be tabulated, that perhaps a pawn shop or two might be called. My wife and I were living financial-aid-reimbursement-check to MGIB check to work-study check at the time. We got the one of the cheapest car stereos we could find, but it still hurt. We had just gotten it installed literally that day, and the next morning it was gone.

I’m sorry to have wasted your time, officer. There’s probably a kid with a one-hitter that you could arrest on your way back to the station.

[causality0]

That's very interesting. It would explain why the "high level" takes such as papers and articles keep saying crime is plummeting but all the anecdotal accounts are "crime is getting worse and worse and nobody does anything about it".

[x0x0]

Well, there's also hard data like this:

https://www.cjcj.org/media/import/documents/san_franciscans_...

Take a look at the chart on page 2.

[wolverine876]

But that's been true for generations. It wouldn't explain some perceived surge now.

What does explain it is what explains many other things that don't match facts, about the economy, vaccines, climate change, election legitimacy, Obama's birthplace, etc. Whatever the conservative message machine focuses on, generally a large portion of the population believes.

[vundercind]

This is everywhere, and not a new thing.

[wolverine876]

Crime is historically low in many cities, including NYC. Visit and you'll see what I mean.

[curtisblaine]

Not so easy. A lot of crime in zones with high density of immigration goes unreported because immigrants are illegal. A lot of crime in shit neighborhoods goes unreported because of "code of silence" mentality.

[wernercd]

Crime is historically low... as crimes like theft are decriminalized.

It's easy to say there's less crime when you make stuff not a crime.

For reference: all the stores closing because of all of the theft not being prosecuted or that's no longer enforced.

IE: California where theft of under $1000 is no longer enforced.

[rovolo]

The CA $950 threshold is when the theft switches from a misdemeanor to a felony:

https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...

In comparison, Texas has a $2,500 threshold for upgrading from a misdemeanor to a felony:

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...

[zdragnar]

That doesn't answer the parent's point. It doesn't really matter whether it's upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony or not if it doesn't get prosecuted in the first place.

[wernercd]

So instead of it being $1000... it's $950... that's like me calling an item $10 when in reality its 9.99. The point still stands.

"Texas" Texas also has stand your ground laws and castle defense... so it's a lot easier to stop criminals. IE: Florida where a sheriff said "We have free gun classes so you can help save tax payers money when defending your property by not missing" (paraphrased).

The point still stands: CA took a $50 limit, bumped it up to $950, elects DAs that don't prosecute misdeamenors - and, as such, store owners don't report crimes that won't lead to prosecutions. Why waste the time? - so when you look at it from a statistical perspective? Oh look... crime numbers are down.

Never mind that more stuff is being stole on a more consistent basis... the lack of higher level crimes (Fewer felonies) and the lack of prosecutions (Why prosecute a misdemeanor as a DA... and why report stuff to police that won't get prosecuted as a business owner...) look better on paper but businesses and people are more unsafe than ever.

[wolverine876]

I'm talking about objective facts. You can make up reasons, but so can anyone about anything - they don't mean anything without a factual basis.

Where in NY are these stores closing?

[chiefalchemist]

A Walgreens or CVS closed near my GF's flat in NYC. She's within 10 blocks of Central Park. The chain said it was due to too much shrinkage. It's been discussed on WNYC as well, tho those experts claimed most shrinkage is employee related.

I live closer to PHL and hear similar claims / rumours.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/it-s-started-shoplif...

[dundun]

I'm going to fight tooth and nail when someone calls NYC unsafe, but it's going to be very difficult to argue against the store closings because of theft (as at least one factor).

I've personally witnessed three blatant thefts in the last few years from my local Duane Reade (that closed down in April). Every time the clerks are like "pretty sure that was the same guy from yesterday". It's never violent or scary. It's just like watching a fight between homeless people in a subway station -- you look, think that's odd, and move on.

> Where in NY are these stores closing? 4 different pharmacies that have closed down since the pandemic just on my path to work, including two a stone's throw from the NY stock exchange. https://maps.app.goo.gl/fJcHCgjVacP5pEuHA https://maps.app.goo.gl/kmDXnjHruMCvS2CA6

I suspect it's not all shrinkage though. I imagine continued trends where we buy more and more things via online retailers like Amazon and the growth of online/by mail pharmacies has contributed too. CVS/Duane Reade are still opening new locations too, so it can't be all that bad.

[malfist]

Ah yes, New York, home of "stop and frisk" and it's other soft on crime policies.

[gottorf]

NYPD hasn't been stopping and frisking in a while.

[wernercd]

"stop and frisk" 1990 called and wants its talking point back.

S&F has been "unconstitutional" for over a decade - and that's not counting Defund The Police shenannery, open border policies and stuff like "bail reform".

IE: Illegal immigrants attacking police and getting released without bail.

[tylerFowler]

True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

[masom]

"older" and "newer" is the construction type.

Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.

The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.

The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).

It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.

[bobthepanda]

i think the best way to describe it is to consider what an office in these types of buildings looks like.

consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.

now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?

[tylerFowler]

Well.. yeah when you put that way I see what you mean. No those types of buildings wouldn't be very amenable, I suppose I had assumed we would already exclude those from consideration.

Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.

[bobthepanda]

the problem now is that in 2024, these Office-Space style buildings are getting into their 40s and 50s, and with the glut of new class A office space being made available in more contemporary bright, airy open styles, that's the kind of building that is going to be a struggle to fill with new office tenants or convert to residential.

[wolverine876]

I don't mean this in the usual snarky way, but read the OP. It goes into detail with a developer about these issues.

[rvba]

> who wants to work somewhere with no services

Nobody wants to work there, yet lots of people work there since they need money. And it's the employer who chooses the location. Of course top talent does not need to work in a crappy company, but that's the theory. Also empty space = less trafic. And you can get food delivered. If you can afford it.

People are foreced to work in crappy open plan offices all the time.

[underlipton]

Not easier, maybe slightly more economical. One could easily turn the less-desirable inner spaces into common areas or something else economically-sustainable, like public storage, co-working spaces, etc.