crime and cars in the Central District

Over the past few months, we’ve become regular readers of centraldistrictnews.com.  One of the cool things about dense urban neighborhoods is the existence of hyper-local news sources like this blog.  I also read a local blog for Pioneer Square and occasionally check the prolific neighborhood blogs of Capitol Hill and West Seattle.


The blog covers all sorts of relevant topics like cultural events, new businesses, road construction, local history and large scale development projects.

Of course, one of the downside of dense urban neighborhoods is crime, which is also covered regularly on the site.

The amount (or very existence of) of gun violence is upsetting and I admit that I can’t stop myself for reading it and developing a mental overlay map of where different incidents happened. 

I often wonder how much crime occurred around me, without my knowledge, when I lived in Montreal, Pittsburgh or Boston.  In Boston (Medford, more specifically) we were so tuned out from local news that we missed a local election once. 

We are still excited about our lot and the neighborhood and are optimistic that most changes will be for the better.

The fact is, last year was a bad year for gun violence in Seattle in general, and it wasn’t limited to our current or future neighborhood.  Also, the Central District is a far cry from how bad it was in the late 1980’s.

There are a plethora of reasons why we are choosing to live in the city.  I won’t list them in this post, but one of the biggest ones is proximity to work, amenities and entertainment.  This makes us walk more and drive less and it allocates our time in ways we like.

Thanks to Jack’s parents we own our first car and thanks to my parents, we keep track or mileage pretty closely.  Our car is a fabulous asset that opens a lot of doors to us in terms of visiting people, playing baseball and getting to explore the great outdoors, but since we don’t need it to get to work, or the grocery store or the gym, we don’t drive it on a daily basis.

According to this, the average American male, aged 20-34 drives about 18,000 miles a year.  Most of the time we use our car together, and our mileage for the last year was 6,800 miles. 

When I’m stressed out about urban crime, I try to remind myself that by driving less and walking more, we increase our predicted longevity more than we might decrease it by living a little bit closer to a handful of upsetting crime scenes.