As I mentioned in a comment regarding Josh’s blog post, we took a trip into a reasonably crappy section of town today (7^th St.* and Indian School). Compared to a lot of the places that I’ve been to in Detroit proper, it was pretty nice.

One day about a year and a half ago, John and I had some time to kill while waiting for something or other downtown, so we decided to take a drive to look for the worst parts of Phoenix. We drove around the area of 27^th Ave. to 43^rd Ave. north of the 10 freeway.

The thing is, we couldn’t locate anything that I considered that bad. I don’t mean “bad” as in I’d still like to live there, I mean “bad” as in I’m concerned for my personal well-being. As I’m sure Joshua would agree, there are quite a few places in Detroit where you should be concerned for your personal safety.

Except for the car thefts and the meth labs, living here is probably less hazardous to my health**.

* For those who don’t know, Phoenix is arranged in a grid system. There are a bunch of east/west streets that have names (normal-ish names) and the north/south streets are named using a numbering scheme. Central Ave. runs right through downtown and to the west are the avenues and to the east are the streets. So the first road to the west of Central is 1^st Avenue and the first street to the east is 1^st Street. The street numbers increment outward from there. The system is really cool; you can tell just by the address number approximately where something is.

** For the record, I haven’t actually lived within the Detroit city limits since I was 5 (there are several sections within the city limits that are indeed fine and safe). I grew up (since 5) in the rural suburb of Milford and then moved around amongst some of the others before finally moving to Arizona in 1999.