Crime

Blech. Today, while walking the dog, Andrew ended up escorting home a girl who had just been mugged at gunpoint. (He doesn't carry a phone when he walks, so he couldn't call the police directly for her.) This is one of the extremely negative points about my neighborhood - the crime. In some ways, we live in an awesome neighborhood. We can walk to the grocery store and interesting restaurants, and we have actual sidewalks to walk on. (I'm pointing at you, suburbia, with your sidewalk-free roads.) We have terrific neighbors all around us, so that when I walk the dog I almost always see someone I know. We have the best landlord I've ever had and we are good friends with the tenant upstairs. (It is so cool to have dinner with a friend and then walk back to your place afterwards, down one flight of stairs.)

But there's also a lot of crime in a "transitioning" neighborhood. Houses are burgled, cars are broken into, bikes are stolen. For a while I comforted myself that it was "just" property crime, and it is true that property crime feels different than violent crime. Even then, we lost enough property that I considered making the expense part of our budget. And this is the second mugging in recent times (the other one that sticks in my mind happened outside our house, although I don't know details). I'm not ready to move to a gated community, but at times I can understand why people would see that as more comfortable.