the funny thing is... getting people to live closer together encourages empathy.
living in the middle of nowhere reduces empathy... this is why people living in bumfuck are empathy-lacking tools calling themselves 'conservatives'
It seems like a lot of the time they are like "boy, crime is higher".... but if you live in a city that's just a fact of life. It's pretty obvious that there will be less crime out in the sticks. I wouldn't really attribute this to any "blue" policies.
Part of "less crime in the sticks" is a population effect. The rate of violent crime in New York City is 494/100,000 people. The rate of violent crime in the whole state of Alabama, from its stickiest sticks to the 225,000-resident Huntsville metropolis, is 404/100,000, which isn't that different, in my book.
I suspect that's just because of Birmingham, and possibly Mobile. They have pretty bad crime rates, and Birmingham is the state's main "blue city", at least based on how counties voted in the 2024 election.
Birmingham had a violent crime rate of 1440 per 100k, making it one the worst cities in the nation for violent crime.
Mobile had a crime rate of 825 per 100k. Mobile's county was slightly red in the 2023 election.
Meanwhile Huntsville (who was slightly red in that same election) had a violent crime rate of 133 per 100k, and has been proudly claiming a 100% arrest and conviction rate for homicide cases. So to answer @yarr@feddit.nl's question, I guess Huntsville is an example of a successful "red" city (although it may be less successful in coming years due to Trump's NASA cuts).
Rural Alabama (excluding counties that were classified as metropolitan) had a violent crime rate of 248 per 100k, making it less safe than Huntsville but far better than the state average of 494 per 100k.
I'm not going to actually claim that the crime rate is just from politics, Huntsville has a big aerospace industry and it's probably more of an education/class thing than anything else. But regardless those are the violent crime rate numbers for 2023, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.
100% arrest and conviction rate doesnt really mean anything. Sounds like theyre just arresting whoever and corrupting the jury to convict. Iirc only about 1/3 homicides are solvable?
https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/2022/07/no-homicide-case-went-unsolved-in-huntsville-in-2021.html
Here's an article on it, it was actually in 2021 (where the rest of the data was from 2023) so the 100% rate probably isn't the case anymore. Basically they attribute it to having a really low base crime rate compared to other cities, saying that it frees them up to give a lot of attention and resources to each one.
I live in Huntsville. We are not a red city. Best description would be a blue oasis surrounded by red.
NASA is a conspiracy to get smart people to move to the south
We also see that rural crime is undercounted, underreported. Many studies show that (sometimes) rural areas have more crime. Of course it varies by time and location and depends how you define everything.
I wouldn't say there is less crime out in the sticks. But there's less detected crime out in the sticks.
I was biking a dirt road near my rural neighborhood and saw a sign at somebody's driveway that said "if you can read this you're within range" and wondered how country folk got the stereotype of being friendly and kind. I really miss living in the city.
propaganda from the movies and shows. probably they need economic businesses to thier area, so they make up an image so people would go there, but NOT LIVE THERE. Yellowstone being one of those shows, and many other shows make reference of "southern hospitality"
Not saying you're wrong, because I believe I've seen patterns like this (but can also think of quite a fee counter examples). But do you have any evidence for this, or is it just a hypothesis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_divide
the empathy is an inference from a documentary i saw where people have had some success in rural communities changing hearts and minds by befriending them. it turns out its easy to lack empathy for people youve never associated with and you have always been told are less than yourself.
They are blue because studies have shown that proximity to others makes you more compassionate.
where are all these Utopian "red cities" that people are apparently in favor of?
They do not and can not exist. Conservatism is an antisocial and anti-intellectual, authoritarian ideology. This pretty much rules it out of success in most conventional metrics.
Cities are not conducive for fascism, so fash in the USA mostly live outside of cities. They're hoarding their stolen land and screaming into a rural echo chamber. That's the only way they can maintain their delusions.
From what I've noticed, cities tend to be more liberal than rural areas. I can't think of a major city off the top of my head that is a republican stronghold. I've got to go to work but I found these two links which may help.
https://townsoftheusa.com/most-conservative-cities-in-usa/
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/15-most-conservative-major-cities-in-the-united-states-883419/
Miami, maybe. But I think they're still pretty left in comparison to the Rest of Florida
Well there's Dayton Ohio which is a successful red city if you look at how they vote and literally nothing else. Jesus fuck their crime rate says magnificent things about the democrats
With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be "red" (on paper)
Why even propose it? It's illegal. They know its illegal. We know it's illegal. The courts know its illegal, and the courts won't stop it
I think San Antonio is about as red as it gets for a city its size
Salt Lake City obviously but that's a different story
And to be clear, San Antonio may be more red leaning, but is not red still.
Houston is as well considering it's massive but full of mostly sprawled suburbs and tons of oil people or friends/relatives of oil people.
Houston suburbs would not be red if they weren't gerrymandered to fuck
Right here. Scroll down for the list of cities most people are moving to. They're all red. (Or, charitably, blueish spots surrounded by red.)
People must be moving there for some kind of reason. There's jobs. They're safe. They have stuff to do. Some kind of reason.
Myrtle Beach is on that list. People are moving there for the meth and racism.
Forgot to add, these cities are hot moving target cause housing is cheap. They are popular with the wealthy leaving cities and moving to lower CoL areas. It’s not cause they are safe or have jobs. They are affordable compared to bigger cities.
blueish spots surrounded by red.
That's the point tho. Fash don't live in cities. It disturbs their wacky ideology with humans and reality. Fash stay out in the burbs or farther with their privilege and delusions.
But still, the cities on the list are all cities in red states. That's weird.
As someone living in a red state, every city here is referred to as a "blue city", whether people are moving to it or not. State color has shit all to do with it and tends to be how much did we make the assumption land votes.
I clicked through and had to go to a second linked article(!) for the top 5. The #1 is "Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas", which is pretty much a blue city now.
This doesn't really support your claim that "they are all red". Also, we call a "blueish spot surrounded by red" a blue city.
From what I am learning about in this thread is there isn't really the idea of a "red city", so when people talk shit about "blue cities" they are just talking about city life in general. There does not appear to be any very large cities filled with Republicans.
I guess. I still think there's a difference between DFW and, say, the Twin Cities. You won't catch me living in Texas.
A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as "a great place to raise a family". From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:
The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).
The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other "traditional" values.
Miami and Saint David, UT come to mind. Outside the US though, lots of the Balkan major cities are much less liberal than western cities.
Miami is purple at least. The old guard Cubans are Republicans, the last governor race not so representative. St. George in Utah is really nice, though maybe a town more than a city.
Tampa is nice but all of our potentially fixable problems are from the conservative outlying areas, as so much of the government is county not city. it would be much nicer with more money going to transit in particular.
Did anyone else thought about cities with communist mayor when reading about red cities?
Yes the whole red<->blue political spectrum swap in the US is confusing sometimes for us non-US.
Makes sense with horseshoe theory. Red for authoritarians no matter left or right. Red is a warning.
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