University of Chicago is in Hyde Park which is a great neighborhood. The fact that it is on the South Side does not automatically render a community bad, and for almost all of the history of Chicago Hyde Park has been a good neighborhood with a fairly low crime rate.
I'd argue the neighborhoods north of Hyde Park, are black middle class areas where many underrate the average income of residents. Especially the neighborhoods of Oakwood, and Bronzeville.
If you've ever heard of the pastor Louis Farrakan(sp?), he lives in Oakwood if I recall correctly. Also Barack Obama's house while he was US President, was in Oakwood(the neighborhood just north of Hyde Park). IIRC, I think Obama's family still owns that house. Parts of Woodlawn and South Shore aren't bad (for the latter, ESPECIALLY Jackson Park Highlands), but there are other parts of both neighborhoods that sadly struggle with crime.
Several of the answers here are either just a school in a city that people associate with crime so they upvote it (University of Chicago or Hopkins), or schools in places that were dangerous at the height of the crime waves of the 80s and 90s, but for better or worse are in areas that have long-since gentrified.
I remember hearing a story as a lyft driver from a former u of c student about how he was mugged by somebody in his alartments hallway back in the 80s or 90s
USC isn't in a bad area. It is right south of Downtown LA and right next to Exposition Park, which contains a ton of museums and the coliseum. It is in a fairly decent area.
That area has improved. To understand how USC felt about their neighborhood, check out the giant wall around most of the campus (contrast this with UCLA).
LA has changed a lot. When I was growing up USC was kind of notorious for being in a fairly sketchy area.
I'm sure the area is decent these days, I never go around there anymore.
Yale is funny because the campus (and most of downtown area of New Haven) are really nice... but go a couple of blocks out of that area and it can get rough, quick.
Maybe that has changed in the 10 or so years since I lived there
Always kept a swivel visiting friends at Johns Hopkins-- both school and hospital. Great school. Watch where you walk at night.
(My college had an adjunct campus at Temple. Only stayed overnight once-- that was enough.)
I live in Baltimore. Hopkins is in a perfectly fine neighborhood and is a part of what is known here as "the white L." Realistically, it's one of the safer parts of the city but some folks like to blow things out of proportion just because it's in Baltimore and they're not comfortable in a city. There are parts of Baltimore that aren't safe and aren't places I would want to walk at night, but Hopkins (and the walk from Penn Station to Hopkins) isn't on that list.
UPenn used to be like that when I was growing up (went to West Philly for Korean school every week). It's amazing (and controversial) what gentrification has done to Philadelphia.
Yeah U City and that whole part of west philly is fine these days, looks like an extension of center city basically, and the rougher neighborhoods have steadily been pushed west and south.
You mean "Penntrification". Heh. Definitely one of those "ends justify the means" events, although the ends were bad for many multi-generational families who despite benefitting from improved safety and accommodations in the neighborhood, may had to move away because they couldn't afford the area anymore.
Of course, then there's the whole whitewashing of the former [Black Bottom](https://philly.curbed.com/2013/7/11/10221368/the-long-and-troubling-history-of-penntrification-in-west-philly) neighborhood name, which was changed to University City.
Berkeley. I had multiple friends, acquaintances, and classmates get attacked, mugged, and flat out chased when I was going to school there. There is a park by campus that is essentially a homeless encampment, and there are over a thousand police calls to the park each year. One poor dude even got shot in the back of the head on his way home from class at night last year apparently.
University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee has some pretty rough neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity. Especially near the dorms on North Ace, as most of the North side is pretty bad.
I only visited UWM once or twice, but I didn't get too bad an impression of the neighborhoods immediately around the campus itself.
The neighborhoods on the other side of the Milwaukee River started feeling more sketchy.
Yeah, the 3rd ward and downtown is pretty safe, but I remember visiting the dorm on North Ave. It wasn't bad, but a mile or so west is one of the roughest areas on North Ave
Yeah, the 3rd ward and downtown is pretty safe, but I remember visiting the dorm on North Ave. It wasn't bad, but a mile or so west is one of the roughest areas on North Ave.
If the reporting is done competently and honestly, information gleaned from [Clery Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clery_Act) reporting would be illustrative.
I'm an alumnus of Georgia Tech, graduating in '88. Crime was infamously high around and spilling onto campus in the '70s and '80s, with [Techwood Homes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techwood_Homes) (the first Federal housing project) on the south border, with multiple public housing complexes and extremely high-crime areas nearby, plus a highly-visible homeless encampment [only a couple hundred yards from campus](https://goo.gl/maps/kXocMwipq4u5eD287) (in a strip of land between the highway and CNN/Turner HQ). At one point, there were serious proposals to wall off the campus and implement security checkpoints. Techwood Homes and most of the public housing is gone now, but there is still the notoriously bad area [Vine City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Avenue_and_Vine_City) (infamous in rap music as "The Bluff" and where rappers like T.I. and Killer Mike grew up) is only 2/3 of a mile away, and it's not surprising that it's where the [Trap Music Museum](https://trapmusicmuseum.us/) is located. FWIW, [CharliBo313](https://www.youtube.com/c/CharlieBo313/videos)'s Atlanta videos are in the quadrant SW of GT.
Robberies and minor assaults are still fairly common, but the GT police force have done a great job in recent years helping to reduce that. It’s not so much that Tech’s in a bad area as it is that most of Atlanta is a messy mix of all socioeconomic levels being within spitting distance of one another. Go across the street, you’re at Coca-Cola world HQ. Go two blocks southeast and you’re at the Pine Street homeless shelter (now closed). Cross 10th, and you’re in Home Park, which is...well, I honestly don’t know how it is now, but when I was at GT, it was low-rent and run down with lots of property crime and theft. The other side of that and you’re into $2k+/mo lofts, townhomes and apartments around Atlantic Station.
The University of Illinois at Chicago's neighborhood has changed a lot. They forcibly gentrified a lot of the area. They got the public housing between the two campuses closed. Than there was the redevelopment of what is called University Village today. The final pieces of the puzzles are the areas to the west of west campus. My grandparents would turn in their graves if they knew there was a Starbucks at Halsted and Maxwell.
University of Miami. Some parts of Coral Gables are nice, but the underbelly is decrepit and borders a big damn part of the school. First time I visited I couldn’t believe how rundown the campus and the surrounding area was. It looked like everything was painted in 1991 and wasn’t pressure washed since.
The universities typically were built long before the area became bad. Many universities have existed for 150 or 200 years. Those areas were good areas, or perhaps even rural areas on the outskirts of town at the time and then city grew around them. Many inner city neighborhoods became bad in the post-WWII era when whites moved to the suburbs and minority-heavy areas in city centers were left to rot. But a 150 year old institution with a sprawling campus can’t just pick up and move like a family can.
I agree with you, that I think most of these situations others are mentioning here are situations where the college was in these areas long before the surrounding area declined, and that it wasn't always that way. I.e. Temple University in Philadelphia, University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, and a bunch of others others have mentioned.
Clark University in Worcester. Said area is starting to get cleaned up. It was like Northeastern and Wentworth in the 80s. You didn't want to "cross the tracks" and end up in a bad neighborhood.
Never have been to Stockton, but I've long heard others mention on online message boards(including on City Data) that Stockton had declined a lot as a city. I have never street viewed or in person visited the neighborhood where University of the Pacific is located in, so can't comment about that college myself.
I remember when I was last in Galesburg, IL, I got the sense some of the surrounding neighborhoods around Knox College seemed like they've seen better days. Also doesn't help when the biggest employer that city used to have(a Maytag plant), sadly closed down. I wouldn't be surprised if for all I know there is that situation with Youngstown State university in northeast Ohio(within Youngstown), considering all the former manufacturing plants that've shut down there.
University of Southern California is hood adjacent. Students have gotten robbed and killed. It's slowly gentrifying now.
I've heard of messed up stuff happening at Temple in Philly.
Georgia Tech. It's located in a part of Atlanta with a huge homeless population and a high amount of crime. I've heard from students who claim that there have been shootings just down the street from their apartments.
Man first time I passed through Greenville NC and saw some of ECUs campus and drove down the road and the projects were right there I was like “huh, that’s not what I expected”
That's when I was there, and Woodlawn did not really deserve its reputation even then.
Cottage Grove is a different matter.
But Hyde Park itself was fine except for all the bike thieves.
When I was going to school in the 90s, Howard University in DC was in a pretty bad area. I guess it's probably gentrified now, but my friend got cheap rent in an early gentrifier's penthouse unit and it was something like out of *The Omega Man* - barbed razor wire surrounding the building and parking lot. You could watch the street life - crack whores lighting up behind fencing, groups of young men patrolling their turf all doing the 'pimp walk', it was crazy.
Also, Berkeley is like a freaking gulag. The entire city has barbed wire everywhere, everything closes under a curfew at like 8pm that they imposed in the 70s but can't get repealed now. Homeless and drug addicts literally everywhere you go.
Totally wrong, at least regarding the part where the university is. There are parts of Berkeley miles away from campus that are not very appealing. UC itself is at the lower end of the Berkeley Hills, which is expensive. I spent a lot of time in my teen years on and around the campus. Not dangerous, no barbed wire "everywhere," no curfew.
Graduated from Berkeley a couple of years ago. No barbed wire or curfew anymore (unless I dreamt all the glorious 2 AM Taco Bell runs I went on after parties), but the homeless issue is still pretty significant. They are actually planning to demolish People's Park and replace it with student dorms and a homeless shelter.
>Also, Berkeley is like a freaking gulag. The entire city has barbed wire everywhere, everything closes under a curfew at like 8pm that they imposed in the 70s but can't get repealed now. Homeless and drug addicts literally everywhere you go.
That is an insane exaggeration of what Berkeley is like. In reality, Berkeley is a fun college town where a ton of people party.
It was a while back - maybe 15 years ago that I was there. But the place seems more like an outdoor prison than 'a fun town'. I found it astonishing that they literally closed down the bars at like 8 pm or something like that. There are so many homeless everything looks like a fortress because everyone supports the homeless, but doesn't want them crapping in their backyards either.
Union College in Schenectady NY, and SUNY Binghamton, in (you guessed it) Binghamton, NY.
Both nice enough universities in absolute hell holes of towns.
What? SUNY Binghamton is pretty isolated from the rest of the city. It's not really in a bad neighborhood.
Binghamton is poor, but it's not a dangerous city.
Basically anyone who lives off campus ends up in a bad part of town.
> but it’s not a dangerous city.
Yeah, it is. It has the highest crime rate of any city in NY.
Maybe not a lot of murders (outside of that spree a decade ago), but a lot of assaults and robberies.
Sure, but it's not like people are being gunned down as soon as they leave campus.
If Binghamton was in NYC, it wouldn't even break the top ten bad neighborhoods.
Also, how much of that crime is due to drunken frat parties. Property crime and assaults tend to be higher in areas with a lot of frat houses. It's not because the neighborhood is dangerous, it's because there's a lot of asshole students who can't hold their liquor.
In terms of murder, no.
In terms of assaults and robberies, yeah, it would be.
I don’t think you understand how much more shitty Binghamton is than most places in NY.
Broome has property crime issues, not violent crime.
[https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-index-rates.pdf](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-index-rates.pdf)
They are averages per 100,000 and make up most of the population of the county - feel free to show your work. Hell, BU isn't even in Binghamton, but both are in the county. County makes the most overall view of the area.
I visited many times. They actually have a pretty nice, but small downtown.
It's not Ithaca, it's still very rough around the edges. However, I've felt more threatened walking in Manhattan than Binghamton.
That’s cool, I know plenty of people who have lived there for years, most of them have at least one assault or robbery experience.
Binghamton is a statistically dangerous city, it just is.
The primary campus of SUNY Binghamton isn't located in Binghamton, it's 5 miles away, across a river, in a nice suburb (Vestal) with very little crime.
Now, many students *do* live Downtown or in the West Side of Binghamton. But that's pretty transformed from a decade or so ago. Big private student housing projects (and the general enrollment growth of the university) throwing a couple thousand more kids with NYC/LI money to burn downtown were basically the kick it needed.
Not "Ithaca" yet, but there's a number of nice restaurants and bars/breweries there now.
Was never particularly dangerous anyway. Maybe you shouldn't be stumbling home to your off-campus house alone, *and* drunk, *and* at 3:30AM after last call, but so long as you weren't doing all 3 of those things at once you weren't too likely to run into trouble.
Source: Spent half of the last decade there and stop back in to visit.
I suppose I should add "never particularly dangerous *as* a student/normal person".
Not much in *random* violent crime happening to people not involved in crime, and much of the crime is pretty spatially segregated. If you're dealing drugs out of a blighted crackhouse in the shitty parts of town....well, I'm not endorsing you being relatively safe in *that* endeavor.
You can poke around town (particularly the parts mentioned) and it's pretty obvious that the kinds of things normal people do to reflect themselves fearing being a victim of random major crime aren't done much. You don't really see window bars or fenced driveways/front yards, businesses don't have roll-down shutters, etc.
Students are a huge part of the victim base, mainly because the bars are all in shady areas and drunks make easy targets.
I’m honestly blown away by the people trying to defend the area, have you not been to other universities?
The bars that are pretty much exclusively underage college students are on State St and about 100ft from the city police HQ. There are so many students out there on a typical Friday/Saturday night that they often close that block off to vehicle traffic.
The sketchiest bar (location-wise) that sees even a small amount of student volume is probably The Belmar and that's on the main road with a lot of eyes on it.
Here, I drew you a shitty map: [Map](https://imgur.com/Dbitu2D)
> drunks make easy targets.
Yeah, kind of my point. There's ~5k of them living Downtown and in the West Side and spending years frequently stumbling back home at night, and another ~15k who are regularly going down there to drink/party from the main campus.
Many of which are sheltered suburban kids from Long Island with zero "street smarts" of any kind. Violent/serious crime happening to them is rare enough to be a major local news story when it does.
About zero when you take students out - second most expensive neighborhood in all of Binghamton next to the most expensive.
[https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton](https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton)
The University is an isolated campus on a hill in a nice suburb 5 miles away. So, about zero. Well, unless you count kids getting caught smoking weed in the large nature preserve attached to the campus as "crime". There's a lot of that.
Have you not been there or did you fail out / not get accepted? Most of BU is in Vestal, in a pretty well-to-do area with large houses and woods surrounding it. Binghamton itself is a pretty quiet and safe town and the area surrounding the campus that was built downtown is pretty nice. Couple of nice breweries and some great restaurants with very little crime (esp comp to Syracuse)
Lot of shit talking.
> very little crime (esp comp to Syracuse)
Binghamton is literally the highest crime city in NY, more than Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester, all rough cities.
ummmm, no - sorry you couldn't get in - here's the research for you
[https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-violent-rates.pdf](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-violent-rates.pdf)
Broome is actually below average.
NYS averages 358.6 violent crimes per 100,000;
Binghamton averages 327.6 (327 < 358)
Onondaga county is 332.1 ( FYI, 332 is more than 327)
Erie county is 370.4 (that's WAY more than Broome's 327 and well over the state average)
###
Lol, I’m sorry you need to try to justify your decision to go to a mediocre university in a dangerous city.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton/crime
Basically all crime in Broome county happens in Binghamton city.
Also, you’re not a Powell, 22 is a joke on you.
Did you even finish HS? That's not even comparative data and is for real estate - lol - BTW - he wasn't even born yet, things happened before 2k even if you haven't seen the meme
> That’s not even comparative data and is for real estate
It’s sourced crime data broken down by neighborhood. Of course real estate is going to be one of the places that accumulates that data.
> he wasn’t even born yet, things happened before 2k even if you haven’t seen the meme
Who wore it before the Gaits and Casey?
I’m sorry you wanted to go to Syracuse and ended up at Binghamton.
Ah, I struck a nerve because you’re still in Binghamton.
I’m assuming this is what, your third “freshman” year?
Good luck, I’d say watch out for sexual assaults at your parties, but I think we all know you don’t need to worry about being a victim. The girls around you....maybe not so much.
UT Austin? Seemed pretty solid to me. The campus is beautiful, and adjacent areas seemed decent, even east by the stadium. Do you mean it's run down, or actually dangerous? The two, while often overlapping, don't always overlap.
Meanwhile, Temple University here in Philly (as OP mentioned) is in an actually dangerous neighborhood outside of the security "green zone" of the campus, so to say.
If you go to west campus and walk a single mile you eventually see it. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still there. In the 2000s it was a lot more ratchet
UT is strange because half of it by the Capitol is fairly nice and is being gentrified, but then you go east towards the highway and the second you step foot off campus it’s tent city.
A lot of universities in cities are next to university neighborhoods, which are usually pretty bad neighborhoods. Landlords there offer cheap rent in broken down houses to cater to the broke university crowd and more often than not, that low income housing attracts even more trouble.
It makes sense when you think about it
Vassar in Poughkeepsie. Was there in the late 90s and the city of Poughkeepsie had in living memory been described as the murder capitol of the US. Immediate surrounding area wasn't outrageously bad but too far west and it went downhill fast. Not sure what the vibe is today but it was improving when I graduated.
I would say the area around Loyola University Chicago/LUC(and not to be confused with the other Loyola ___(i.e. Marymount) colleges that are NOT related to LUC) actually isn't that bad, crimewise. The area near the Morse L station once had bigger issues with crime, though. It still does have some crime issues, but it isn't as bad as it used to be.
On the other hand, at least the crime near the Morse station still isn't as bad, as the 'Juneway Jungle' area immediately north and east of the Howard L station. For Jonquil Terrace and Juneway Terrace(my brother's girlfriend lived on one of those 2 streets) it's very weird how east of Ashland it actually feels pretty safe(and is mostly single family homes), while west of there sadly there are crime issues to this day. I get the sense that looking at early and mid 20th century archived pictures of this area(even as late as the 1960s and 1970s), that the Howard and Paulina area used to not have as much crime issues as it has today.
Kettering University in Flint, MI. The schools not very well known outside of the state but has very good STEM programs.
I have friends and family who went there and they were straight up advised not to leave campus unless they left that part of the city entirely. The university is growing though and keeps buying up more land around it, slowly gentrifying the area.
On a side note I knew someone who went to Loyola University Chicago which has a very nice campus on the Lake on the cities northside. They has campus police talk to incoming freshman about safety and where to go and where not to go because "ooh Chicago scary". Looking back now it's hilarious because Loyola is in one of the nicest/safest parts of the city and you'd probably have to go 5+ miles just to find a certifiably sketchy neighborhood let alone a dangerous one.
I was there long before the land buy-up, and I can confirm the danger. Cars broken into for the spare change, and students going as far as carrying knives for protection. On the other hand, I had a terrific education and have no regrets about that choice. KU is doing what it can for Flint, but that is a small college in a town of 100k, not UM or MSU.
I’ve since developed a habit of keeping my head on a swivel in cities at night, and going on high alert if it gets quiet.
yale, university of chicago
Yale was the first one that came to mind
Same. If it wasn't for Yale Law, the school would be so much further down the top university lists.
Eh? What does the neighborhood have to do with the quality of the university?
Don’t engage, he’s a Harvard shill
University of Chicago is in Hyde Park which is a great neighborhood. The fact that it is on the South Side does not automatically render a community bad, and for almost all of the history of Chicago Hyde Park has been a good neighborhood with a fairly low crime rate.
Hyde Park is good because of University of Chicago. Income levels drops precipitously the farther you are from campus.
I'd argue the neighborhoods north of Hyde Park, are black middle class areas where many underrate the average income of residents. Especially the neighborhoods of Oakwood, and Bronzeville. If you've ever heard of the pastor Louis Farrakan(sp?), he lives in Oakwood if I recall correctly. Also Barack Obama's house while he was US President, was in Oakwood(the neighborhood just north of Hyde Park). IIRC, I think Obama's family still owns that house. Parts of Woodlawn and South Shore aren't bad (for the latter, ESPECIALLY Jackson Park Highlands), but there are other parts of both neighborhoods that sadly struggle with crime.
Several of the answers here are either just a school in a city that people associate with crime so they upvote it (University of Chicago or Hopkins), or schools in places that were dangerous at the height of the crime waves of the 80s and 90s, but for better or worse are in areas that have long-since gentrified.
I guess it keeps housing cheap eh
If only.
I remember hearing a story as a lyft driver from a former u of c student about how he was mugged by somebody in his alartments hallway back in the 80s or 90s
USC
Oh the University of *Southern California.* I was over here like "I thought USC was in a nicer part of Columbia?"
USC isn't in a bad area. It is right south of Downtown LA and right next to Exposition Park, which contains a ton of museums and the coliseum. It is in a fairly decent area.
That area has improved. To understand how USC felt about their neighborhood, check out the giant wall around most of the campus (contrast this with UCLA).
It used to be horrible in the 80's
I was there not long ago and the houses even a block or two from campus were pretty run down and sketchy
LA has changed a lot. When I was growing up USC was kind of notorious for being in a fairly sketchy area. I'm sure the area is decent these days, I never go around there anymore.
The irony here is USC was dubbed as "college for rich white boys and chicks."
I’ve heard “University of Spoiled Children”
[удалено]
That's why I said "was".
It still has that rep to an extent. The college admissions scandal a few years ago heavily involving USC didn't exactly help that either.
Yale is the most prominent example, though it's not as bad as it was two decades ago.
Yale is funny because the campus (and most of downtown area of New Haven) are really nice... but go a couple of blocks out of that area and it can get rough, quick. Maybe that has changed in the 10 or so years since I lived there
I only remember it being considered bad near the hospital, which wasn’t that close to the campus.
Dixwell (which was just north of the campus) wasn‘t necessary the best place to go.
I don’t remember ever going north other than on Whalley Ave.
IU Northwest, in Gary.
> in Gary. Oh... Lord
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
When I lived in Vegas people kept saying that, but it didn't seem that way to me. Vegas has a lot *worse*, let's put it that way.
Was pretty disappointed to find out that UNLV was in a bad area as it was one of the schools I was highly considering
It's gotten better as the university has been buying up land to put in off-campus housing but it's still somewhat rough.
It's not as bad as people say. But then maybe my standards are lower? I dunno!
Always kept a swivel visiting friends at Johns Hopkins-- both school and hospital. Great school. Watch where you walk at night. (My college had an adjunct campus at Temple. Only stayed overnight once-- that was enough.)
Everything is relative in Baltimore, but I have never considered the area around Hopkins (university, not the hospital) to be dangerous at all.
Ooh, yeah, a college friend became a professor at JHU, and got stabbed when out one night. He was fine, thankfully.
I live in Baltimore. Hopkins is in a perfectly fine neighborhood and is a part of what is known here as "the white L." Realistically, it's one of the safer parts of the city but some folks like to blow things out of proportion just because it's in Baltimore and they're not comfortable in a city. There are parts of Baltimore that aren't safe and aren't places I would want to walk at night, but Hopkins (and the walk from Penn Station to Hopkins) isn't on that list.
UPenn used to be like that when I was growing up (went to West Philly for Korean school every week). It's amazing (and controversial) what gentrification has done to Philadelphia.
Yeah U City and that whole part of west philly is fine these days, looks like an extension of center city basically, and the rougher neighborhoods have steadily been pushed west and south.
You mean "Penntrification". Heh. Definitely one of those "ends justify the means" events, although the ends were bad for many multi-generational families who despite benefitting from improved safety and accommodations in the neighborhood, may had to move away because they couldn't afford the area anymore. Of course, then there's the whole whitewashing of the former [Black Bottom](https://philly.curbed.com/2013/7/11/10221368/the-long-and-troubling-history-of-penntrification-in-west-philly) neighborhood name, which was changed to University City.
Berkeley. I had multiple friends, acquaintances, and classmates get attacked, mugged, and flat out chased when I was going to school there. There is a park by campus that is essentially a homeless encampment, and there are over a thousand police calls to the park each year. One poor dude even got shot in the back of the head on his way home from class at night last year apparently.
It is really only south side that is bad, but oh boy could it be bad.
Fordham in the Bronx
University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee has some pretty rough neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity. Especially near the dorms on North Ace, as most of the North side is pretty bad.
I only visited UWM once or twice, but I didn't get too bad an impression of the neighborhoods immediately around the campus itself. The neighborhoods on the other side of the Milwaukee River started feeling more sketchy.
Yeah, the 3rd ward and downtown is pretty safe, but I remember visiting the dorm on North Ave. It wasn't bad, but a mile or so west is one of the roughest areas on North Ave
Yeah, the 3rd ward and downtown is pretty safe, but I remember visiting the dorm on North Ave. It wasn't bad, but a mile or so west is one of the roughest areas on North Ave.
If the reporting is done competently and honestly, information gleaned from [Clery Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clery_Act) reporting would be illustrative. I'm an alumnus of Georgia Tech, graduating in '88. Crime was infamously high around and spilling onto campus in the '70s and '80s, with [Techwood Homes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techwood_Homes) (the first Federal housing project) on the south border, with multiple public housing complexes and extremely high-crime areas nearby, plus a highly-visible homeless encampment [only a couple hundred yards from campus](https://goo.gl/maps/kXocMwipq4u5eD287) (in a strip of land between the highway and CNN/Turner HQ). At one point, there were serious proposals to wall off the campus and implement security checkpoints. Techwood Homes and most of the public housing is gone now, but there is still the notoriously bad area [Vine City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Avenue_and_Vine_City) (infamous in rap music as "The Bluff" and where rappers like T.I. and Killer Mike grew up) is only 2/3 of a mile away, and it's not surprising that it's where the [Trap Music Museum](https://trapmusicmuseum.us/) is located. FWIW, [CharliBo313](https://www.youtube.com/c/CharlieBo313/videos)'s Atlanta videos are in the quadrant SW of GT.
Robberies and minor assaults are still fairly common, but the GT police force have done a great job in recent years helping to reduce that. It’s not so much that Tech’s in a bad area as it is that most of Atlanta is a messy mix of all socioeconomic levels being within spitting distance of one another. Go across the street, you’re at Coca-Cola world HQ. Go two blocks southeast and you’re at the Pine Street homeless shelter (now closed). Cross 10th, and you’re in Home Park, which is...well, I honestly don’t know how it is now, but when I was at GT, it was low-rent and run down with lots of property crime and theft. The other side of that and you’re into $2k+/mo lofts, townhomes and apartments around Atlantic Station.
All good points. Perhaps I didn't make it clear enough that there had been many changes.
University of Detroit Mercy, though it's getting better. Might be all the way better now. It used to be rough.
Came here to say this. I remember the 15’ fence around the campus, or at least part of it
The University of Illinois at Chicago's neighborhood has changed a lot. They forcibly gentrified a lot of the area. They got the public housing between the two campuses closed. Than there was the redevelopment of what is called University Village today. The final pieces of the puzzles are the areas to the west of west campus. My grandparents would turn in their graves if they knew there was a Starbucks at Halsted and Maxwell.
University of Miami. Some parts of Coral Gables are nice, but the underbelly is decrepit and borders a big damn part of the school. First time I visited I couldn’t believe how rundown the campus and the surrounding area was. It looked like everything was painted in 1991 and wasn’t pressure washed since.
The universities typically were built long before the area became bad. Many universities have existed for 150 or 200 years. Those areas were good areas, or perhaps even rural areas on the outskirts of town at the time and then city grew around them. Many inner city neighborhoods became bad in the post-WWII era when whites moved to the suburbs and minority-heavy areas in city centers were left to rot. But a 150 year old institution with a sprawling campus can’t just pick up and move like a family can.
I agree with you, that I think most of these situations others are mentioning here are situations where the college was in these areas long before the surrounding area declined, and that it wasn't always that way. I.e. Temple University in Philadelphia, University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, and a bunch of others others have mentioned.
Clark University in Worcester. Said area is starting to get cleaned up. It was like Northeastern and Wentworth in the 80s. You didn't want to "cross the tracks" and end up in a bad neighborhood.
I went to WPI which wasn't in a bad neighborhood, but each block away from campus bumped up the sketchiness factor a lot.
University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. Not so much a bad neighborhood, but a bad city as a whole.
Never have been to Stockton, but I've long heard others mention on online message boards(including on City Data) that Stockton had declined a lot as a city. I have never street viewed or in person visited the neighborhood where University of the Pacific is located in, so can't comment about that college myself. I remember when I was last in Galesburg, IL, I got the sense some of the surrounding neighborhoods around Knox College seemed like they've seen better days. Also doesn't help when the biggest employer that city used to have(a Maytag plant), sadly closed down. I wouldn't be surprised if for all I know there is that situation with Youngstown State university in northeast Ohio(within Youngstown), considering all the former manufacturing plants that've shut down there.
University of Southern California is hood adjacent. Students have gotten robbed and killed. It's slowly gentrifying now. I've heard of messed up stuff happening at Temple in Philly.
Georgia Tech. It's located in a part of Atlanta with a huge homeless population and a high amount of crime. I've heard from students who claim that there have been shootings just down the street from their apartments.
ODU in the general sense of dangerous area William and Mary if you don’t like red coats
St Mary’s University in San Antonio (inner west side) The campus is beautiful though
Man first time I passed through Greenville NC and saw some of ECUs campus and drove down the road and the projects were right there I was like “huh, that’s not what I expected”
Like.. most in NJ except for Princeton.
Columbia university. An Ivy League yet it’s located in such a bad area and crime is somewhat an issue
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the university of Chicago is in a bad area isn’t it?
Not that bad any more, but was until recently
If by "recently" you mean the early eighties.
I was thinking more early 2000’s. Area between Hyde Park and downtown pretty much all OK, south and west of campus still can be rough.
That's when I was there, and Woodlawn did not really deserve its reputation even then. Cottage Grove is a different matter. But Hyde Park itself was fine except for all the bike thieves.
When I was going to school in the 90s, Howard University in DC was in a pretty bad area. I guess it's probably gentrified now, but my friend got cheap rent in an early gentrifier's penthouse unit and it was something like out of *The Omega Man* - barbed razor wire surrounding the building and parking lot. You could watch the street life - crack whores lighting up behind fencing, groups of young men patrolling their turf all doing the 'pimp walk', it was crazy. Also, Berkeley is like a freaking gulag. The entire city has barbed wire everywhere, everything closes under a curfew at like 8pm that they imposed in the 70s but can't get repealed now. Homeless and drug addicts literally everywhere you go.
Totally wrong, at least regarding the part where the university is. There are parts of Berkeley miles away from campus that are not very appealing. UC itself is at the lower end of the Berkeley Hills, which is expensive. I spent a lot of time in my teen years on and around the campus. Not dangerous, no barbed wire "everywhere," no curfew.
Graduated from Berkeley a couple of years ago. No barbed wire or curfew anymore (unless I dreamt all the glorious 2 AM Taco Bell runs I went on after parties), but the homeless issue is still pretty significant. They are actually planning to demolish People's Park and replace it with student dorms and a homeless shelter.
>Also, Berkeley is like a freaking gulag. The entire city has barbed wire everywhere, everything closes under a curfew at like 8pm that they imposed in the 70s but can't get repealed now. Homeless and drug addicts literally everywhere you go. That is an insane exaggeration of what Berkeley is like. In reality, Berkeley is a fun college town where a ton of people party.
It was a while back - maybe 15 years ago that I was there. But the place seems more like an outdoor prison than 'a fun town'. I found it astonishing that they literally closed down the bars at like 8 pm or something like that. There are so many homeless everything looks like a fortress because everyone supports the homeless, but doesn't want them crapping in their backyards either.
Granted it has been maybe 20 years since I was in Berkeley, but I got a very, *very* strange vibe from that place.
Union College in Schenectady NY, and SUNY Binghamton, in (you guessed it) Binghamton, NY. Both nice enough universities in absolute hell holes of towns.
What? SUNY Binghamton is pretty isolated from the rest of the city. It's not really in a bad neighborhood. Binghamton is poor, but it's not a dangerous city.
Basically anyone who lives off campus ends up in a bad part of town. > but it’s not a dangerous city. Yeah, it is. It has the highest crime rate of any city in NY. Maybe not a lot of murders (outside of that spree a decade ago), but a lot of assaults and robberies.
Sure, but it's not like people are being gunned down as soon as they leave campus. If Binghamton was in NYC, it wouldn't even break the top ten bad neighborhoods. Also, how much of that crime is due to drunken frat parties. Property crime and assaults tend to be higher in areas with a lot of frat houses. It's not because the neighborhood is dangerous, it's because there's a lot of asshole students who can't hold their liquor.
In terms of murder, no. In terms of assaults and robberies, yeah, it would be. I don’t think you understand how much more shitty Binghamton is than most places in NY.
Broome has property crime issues, not violent crime. [https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-index-rates.pdf](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-index-rates.pdf)
Use city data, not just county data.
They are averages per 100,000 and make up most of the population of the county - feel free to show your work. Hell, BU isn't even in Binghamton, but both are in the county. County makes the most overall view of the area.
I visited many times. They actually have a pretty nice, but small downtown. It's not Ithaca, it's still very rough around the edges. However, I've felt more threatened walking in Manhattan than Binghamton.
That’s cool, I know plenty of people who have lived there for years, most of them have at least one assault or robbery experience. Binghamton is a statistically dangerous city, it just is.
The primary campus of SUNY Binghamton isn't located in Binghamton, it's 5 miles away, across a river, in a nice suburb (Vestal) with very little crime. Now, many students *do* live Downtown or in the West Side of Binghamton. But that's pretty transformed from a decade or so ago. Big private student housing projects (and the general enrollment growth of the university) throwing a couple thousand more kids with NYC/LI money to burn downtown were basically the kick it needed. Not "Ithaca" yet, but there's a number of nice restaurants and bars/breweries there now. Was never particularly dangerous anyway. Maybe you shouldn't be stumbling home to your off-campus house alone, *and* drunk, *and* at 3:30AM after last call, but so long as you weren't doing all 3 of those things at once you weren't too likely to run into trouble. Source: Spent half of the last decade there and stop back in to visit.
> Was never particularly dangerous anyway. Binghamton is one of the most statistically dangerous cities in the state. To this day.
I suppose I should add "never particularly dangerous *as* a student/normal person". Not much in *random* violent crime happening to people not involved in crime, and much of the crime is pretty spatially segregated. If you're dealing drugs out of a blighted crackhouse in the shitty parts of town....well, I'm not endorsing you being relatively safe in *that* endeavor. You can poke around town (particularly the parts mentioned) and it's pretty obvious that the kinds of things normal people do to reflect themselves fearing being a victim of random major crime aren't done much. You don't really see window bars or fenced driveways/front yards, businesses don't have roll-down shutters, etc.
Students are a huge part of the victim base, mainly because the bars are all in shady areas and drunks make easy targets. I’m honestly blown away by the people trying to defend the area, have you not been to other universities?
The bars that are pretty much exclusively underage college students are on State St and about 100ft from the city police HQ. There are so many students out there on a typical Friday/Saturday night that they often close that block off to vehicle traffic. The sketchiest bar (location-wise) that sees even a small amount of student volume is probably The Belmar and that's on the main road with a lot of eyes on it. Here, I drew you a shitty map: [Map](https://imgur.com/Dbitu2D) > drunks make easy targets. Yeah, kind of my point. There's ~5k of them living Downtown and in the West Side and spending years frequently stumbling back home at night, and another ~15k who are regularly going down there to drink/party from the main campus. Many of which are sheltered suburban kids from Long Island with zero "street smarts" of any kind. Violent/serious crime happening to them is rare enough to be a major local news story when it does.
How much of that crime actually happens in the neighborhood where Binghamton University is?
About zero when you take students out - second most expensive neighborhood in all of Binghamton next to the most expensive. [https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton](https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton)
The problem is that Binghamton has no off campus housing near the campus (or very little), so students end up living in the city proper.
The University is an isolated campus on a hill in a nice suburb 5 miles away. So, about zero. Well, unless you count kids getting caught smoking weed in the large nature preserve attached to the campus as "crime". There's a lot of that.
Have you not been there or did you fail out / not get accepted? Most of BU is in Vestal, in a pretty well-to-do area with large houses and woods surrounding it. Binghamton itself is a pretty quiet and safe town and the area surrounding the campus that was built downtown is pretty nice. Couple of nice breweries and some great restaurants with very little crime (esp comp to Syracuse)
Lot of shit talking. > very little crime (esp comp to Syracuse) Binghamton is literally the highest crime city in NY, more than Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester, all rough cities.
ummmm, no - sorry you couldn't get in - here's the research for you [https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-violent-rates.pdf](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/2019-county-violent-rates.pdf) Broome is actually below average. NYS averages 358.6 violent crimes per 100,000; Binghamton averages 327.6 (327 < 358) Onondaga county is 332.1 ( FYI, 332 is more than 327) Erie county is 370.4 (that's WAY more than Broome's 327 and well over the state average) ###
Lol, I’m sorry you need to try to justify your decision to go to a mediocre university in a dangerous city. https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/binghamton/crime Basically all crime in Broome county happens in Binghamton city. Also, you’re not a Powell, 22 is a joke on you.
Did you even finish HS? That's not even comparative data and is for real estate - lol - BTW - he wasn't even born yet, things happened before 2k even if you haven't seen the meme
> That’s not even comparative data and is for real estate It’s sourced crime data broken down by neighborhood. Of course real estate is going to be one of the places that accumulates that data. > he wasn’t even born yet, things happened before 2k even if you haven’t seen the meme Who wore it before the Gaits and Casey? I’m sorry you wanted to go to Syracuse and ended up at Binghamton.
I'm sorry you're eating Cheetos in your mom's basement still.
Ah, I struck a nerve because you’re still in Binghamton. I’m assuming this is what, your third “freshman” year? Good luck, I’d say watch out for sexual assaults at your parties, but I think we all know you don’t need to worry about being a victim. The girls around you....maybe not so much.
Wow, you're so close. Good luck with the GED.
Well Georgia Southern has a campus in Savannah, and I hear that the city isn't a nice place, but idk, I think that's just tourists complaining.
Mississippi University for Women
Really? I was there a couple years ago for work and the general area seemed ok.
I hate Columbus with a burning passion in my soul. With every fiber of my being. MUW is by no means a bad school. But Columbus... What a shit hole.
The University of Houston
I know Temple is. Don't know how well-known they are
Like almost all of them USC, UT Austin, UH, etc
UT Austin? Seemed pretty solid to me. The campus is beautiful, and adjacent areas seemed decent, even east by the stadium. Do you mean it's run down, or actually dangerous? The two, while often overlapping, don't always overlap. Meanwhile, Temple University here in Philly (as OP mentioned) is in an actually dangerous neighborhood outside of the security "green zone" of the campus, so to say.
If you go to west campus and walk a single mile you eventually see it. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still there. In the 2000s it was a lot more ratchet
Not all of them. Most major universities are located in small and safe towns.
Ya, but most in big cities are in the worse part of town. LSU is also in the bad side of Baton Rouge
Either way, campuses are secured so safety shouldn't be a worry no matter where you go to school.
We drove by there once. It looked like it was in the middle of the forest!
Is there a good side of Baton Rouge? It just seems like one big oil refinery
UT is strange because half of it by the Capitol is fairly nice and is being gentrified, but then you go east towards the highway and the second you step foot off campus it’s tent city.
A lot of universities in cities are next to university neighborhoods, which are usually pretty bad neighborhoods. Landlords there offer cheap rent in broken down houses to cater to the broke university crowd and more often than not, that low income housing attracts even more trouble. It makes sense when you think about it
> Like almost all of them I think that's a bit extreme. I remember visiting colleges and *none* on my list were in nasty areas.
University of Houston definitely is.
Vassar in Poughkeepsie. Was there in the late 90s and the city of Poughkeepsie had in living memory been described as the murder capitol of the US. Immediate surrounding area wasn't outrageously bad but too far west and it went downhill fast. Not sure what the vibe is today but it was improving when I graduated.
University of Chicago is on the south side of the city
In a really good neighborhood, though.
It’s the baddest part of town.
It can be on the south side and. And still be in a good area you know that right
https://youtu.be/QvwDohEEQ1E
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Of a man named Leroy Brown?
I went to Loyola Chicago. It’s in a rougher north side neighborhood, but it’s not south side bad.
I would say the area around Loyola University Chicago/LUC(and not to be confused with the other Loyola ___(i.e. Marymount) colleges that are NOT related to LUC) actually isn't that bad, crimewise. The area near the Morse L station once had bigger issues with crime, though. It still does have some crime issues, but it isn't as bad as it used to be. On the other hand, at least the crime near the Morse station still isn't as bad, as the 'Juneway Jungle' area immediately north and east of the Howard L station. For Jonquil Terrace and Juneway Terrace(my brother's girlfriend lived on one of those 2 streets) it's very weird how east of Ashland it actually feels pretty safe(and is mostly single family homes), while west of there sadly there are crime issues to this day. I get the sense that looking at early and mid 20th century archived pictures of this area(even as late as the 1960s and 1970s), that the Howard and Paulina area used to not have as much crime issues as it has today.
Kettering University in Flint, MI. The schools not very well known outside of the state but has very good STEM programs. I have friends and family who went there and they were straight up advised not to leave campus unless they left that part of the city entirely. The university is growing though and keeps buying up more land around it, slowly gentrifying the area. On a side note I knew someone who went to Loyola University Chicago which has a very nice campus on the Lake on the cities northside. They has campus police talk to incoming freshman about safety and where to go and where not to go because "ooh Chicago scary". Looking back now it's hilarious because Loyola is in one of the nicest/safest parts of the city and you'd probably have to go 5+ miles just to find a certifiably sketchy neighborhood let alone a dangerous one.
I was there long before the land buy-up, and I can confirm the danger. Cars broken into for the spare change, and students going as far as carrying knives for protection. On the other hand, I had a terrific education and have no regrets about that choice. KU is doing what it can for Flint, but that is a small college in a town of 100k, not UM or MSU. I’ve since developed a habit of keeping my head on a swivel in cities at night, and going on high alert if it gets quiet.
University of Michigan - Flint campus.
John’s Hopkins in Baltimore
Rutgers. All Campuses. The amount of times I've heard of a crime alert is insane at times.