I'm at my daughter's house in Cleveland. She lives right in the city, on the West Side (a very nice area called West Park). It's a major change from my house, which is located on an acre of land, and heavily wooded.
From her dining room (I'm supervising my granddaughter's homework), I can see the street traffic. The view from my front yard looks like this:
Yes, that is lawn furniture - no, when this photo was taken a few years ago, the snow was not something I anticipated.
In both places, Rock Hill, SC and Cleveland, OH, there is little violence or crime close to home. We pay a price for that. Housing is not cheap (on the other hand, not prohibitively expensive, as it is in CA or NY. Prices for quite nice homes are 1/4 to 1/3 as pricey.
The tough 'gangsta' life is more of a local phenomenon. It's largely confined to those sections of town that tolerate the indiscriminate use of alcohol/drugs, have - shall we say - relaxed attitudes to buying goods that have "fallen off a truck", and expect to get most of the household income from the government. In those homes, Black or White, the expectation is that you have to stick up for your own, that everyone is out to get you, and that all the people you meet are crooked.
In our home neighborhoods, there are far more single-parent families than there used to be, less church-going, and more of a willingness to overlook deviations from traditional morals. And, yet, for most families, the norm is to be largely self-supporting, quiet, and civilized.
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