Are Big Cities Cesspools?

At (Canadian) Thanksgiving 2024 in rural Canada, a relative asked me how we could walk the dog at night in Toronto. I didn’t really know what to say beyond “I’m more worried about the coyotes than the people.” (We get coyotes even though I live in a pretty dense neighbourhood.) But their concern was the people, of course.

That prompted me to think, for the nth time in recent years, why is it that rural people are so scared of cities? And that thought leads to many other thoughts.

But then, as usual, I ran out of motivation and moved on to other things. But the rural-urban divide just won’t go away. To me it feels like it might be one of the defining issues of North American politics right now.

I was born at a hospital in downtown Toronto and grew up in a neighbourhood a short subway ride from downtown. I moved away for university - I then spent about most of a decade living in other places - but, when I moved back, I lived downtown or near downtown for nearly the next decade. I now live about as far from downtown as I grew up, only on the other side of the city. (Also, the company I work for currently is located in downtown, even though I work remotely, and I worked downtown on multiple occasions when I was young - in high school and then between and after stints at university and living in other cities.)

TLDR: I have spent much of my life living in a large city and often in or around the downtown of a large city. (Toronto is something like the 63rd largest urban area in the world and the fourth largest in North America, depending on where you draw the boundaries. It is notoriously safe to anyone who doesn’t live in Canada but within Canada it is viewed as very dangerous by lots of people.) I am, very simply, a city person.

In all that time, I have never once been the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. (Now, huge caveat: I am a large man. Another caveat: I have been accosted plenty of times. I have been pushed unsuccessfully once or twice. A drunk guy punched me once, though not in Toronto. So I’m editorializing slightly. But I’ve never been a “victim” in the sense we usually mean.)

And yet, the media and those who do not live in cities like mine are constantly telling me how dangerous living in a city is. Not only that, it’s getting it worse!

I see it on the news (not that I watch it), the way crime in cities is always highlighted as bad and getting worse. Turn on any 24 hour news channel and see how long it takes for them to mention a crime in a large city.

I see it online. For example: for years, I admined a YouTube channel about immigration in Canada and a large chunk of the comments were just people ranting about crime in Toronto. Most of these people didn’t live in Toronto. Some of them would admit to not having been to Toronto in years or decades. And yet, they were adamant that Toronto was the most dangerous city in the country.

I see in legacy media. How many stories are there about crime in big cities in our newspapers?

I see it in conversations, like the one I had at Thanksgiving.

And I see it in polls:

Here’s the thing: Cities are not necessarily more dangerous than anywhere else.

It is likely true that they used to be. And there are definitely some cities that are more dangerous than others.

But cities are not “cesspools.” They’re just denser. They just have more people. As a result, there is more opportunity for both intentional crime and unintentional or accidental activity that we have deemed criminal (traffic accidents, fights). And yet, big cities often if not always have way less crime per capita than smaller cities.

Moreover, crime has been declining where I live and where you likely live for most of our lifetimes.

It’s more complicated for our parents because crime did indeed get worse for a few decades. But, of course, this was relative. Compared to the past, crime was lower.

A big part of the current reaction to liberal democracy is a fear of cities and a distrust of the people who choose to live there.

But I suspect it has always been thus:

Ever since cities have existed there have been people in cities finding common cause and desiring common solutions to common problems.

And ever since cities have existed there have been people outside of cities fearful of those cities, the people in them and their politics. These people want to return to an idealized pastoral world where everyone has so much space they don’t need to worry about the needs of their fellow humans.

The thing that bothers me about all of this is that we’ve had so much time to learn the truth - that crime is not caused by density - and yet (seemingly) everyone who doesn’t live in one of the largest cities in their county is convinced those cities are the most dangerous places in their country.

Were Cities More Dangerous in the Past?

So, yes, cities were more dangerous in the past because everywhere was more dangerous in the past. Despite what 24 news and the internet tell you, most of us live in the safest time to be alive in history. (Unless you’re in an active combat zone.)

But whether cities were more dangerous than rural areas in the past is a difficult question that would require a lot of research. Whatever that answer is, I think the perception absolutely existed (as it still does) and there good reasons for it. Here are just two:

• More densely populated areas meant crime was more likely, especially before the existence of professional police. (This is more true the further back in time you go simply because there was a point at which few people lived in densely populated areas, few people lived with “The other.” Even the largest of neolithic cities pale in comparison to the size of our cities or even early modern cities.)

• City infrastructure was often fare more dangerous to people than rural for at least two main reasons:

  • Building codes were bad or non-existent and landlords build cheaply, badly and up into the sky

  • Fire could spread much more easily.

The infrastructure component obviously has less to do with crime but I suspect it fueled the idea that cities were dangerous. It likely felt like there were way more ways to die or be injured in a city than at home in the country or in the village. This may well have been true.

Definition of City

But whether or not a “city” is dangerous in the present in part depends upon what we are talking about. Everyone’s definition of a city is different.

I have this weird experience watching true crime on TV. Regardless of the program - we prefer Forensic Files but will watch other true crime shows in a pinch - we have to listen over and over again to this cliche: “Things like this just doesn’t happen here.” Given what we watch, it’s usually murder, occasionally serial rape or assault. And there will be this heavy implication that this particular “town” is small. And then I’ll look up the population of the place at 1/3 to half the time it’s, like, a city of 97,000 people in some reasonably densely populated state. (And, usually, they have a way higher crime rate than they think. It’s just not covered the same way.)

There are a lot of people who live in cities who think of their cities as small towns. Of course, these places used to be towns, sometimes even villages, perhaps even in the speakers’ lifetime. But not any more.

You might think 97,000 people still means town and you would be right, at least according to the OECD. According to them, 50,000-100,000 people is a small urban area.

I think that’s ahistorical, for one thing. “Cities” in early conceptions absolutely had less than 50,000 residents. Moreover I think that if you think of the kinds of things you find in a city - not a suburb - you will regularly get many of those in urban areas of less than 100,000 people if they are far enough away from a larger centre. Think of the biggest cities in the smallest Canadian provinces - they are cities in any conceivable sense despite being way smaller than Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal or Calgary.

In Ontario, where I live, we used to have minimum population thresholds for self-definition between 15,000 and 25,000. (In some provinces in Canada, it is 10,000 or even less.) That might strike you as small but it makes sense: Canada has a population that is significantly smaller than the United States or Europe and is spread out over an area larger than either. This means that smaller centres have to have more stuff.

The point is that the definition is of city is nebulous. I believe that most people mean “big cities” when they claim that cities are dangerous but this is also nebulous.

Violent Crime is Not Worst in the Biggest Cities

And the reason this is important is because the most dangerous places in Canada, for example, are indeed cities. However, they are smaller cities. And they are almost exclusively located in the Prairies.

But one thing you’ll notice when you Google crime rates by city in Canada is that each list on each website is different. And that’s because, though these sites are mostly or all using the exact same source for crime statistics, they use different population cutoffs to eliminate smaller cities that would otherwise top the list! (Because they are defining cities however they want. I suspect for clickbait reasons - it makes more sense to have cities people have heard of on your list.)

Using Canada’s Crime Severity Index, these are the list of the 10 worst cities (census metropolitan areas) for crime in Canada as of 2023 along with where they rank among the 100 biggest municipalities in the country:

Only one city in Canada which is Top 10 in population is Top 10 in crime severity. Only 2 cities in the Top 20 are in the Top 10 in crime severity. Only 3 cities in the Top 25 are in the Top 10 in crime severity. What is the correlation between population size and crime?

There is, of course, a well-known demographic factor that is often cited as the cause for why Canada’s most dangerous cities are all out west but I’m not going to get into that because that’s not what this post is about.

The US tracks crime statistics differently than Canada. But let’s look at the same population rankings for the Top 10 US cities in overall crime rate (as of 2019). (Note: crucially this US list only includes cities over 200,000 people which would exclude many of the Canadians cities on the list I used above as well as, likely, many cities that would rank highly if the cutoff was 50,000 or what have you.)

(As an aside, I have been to four of these cities I noticed the homelessness much more than the crime.)

Again, there is no correlation between population size and crime rate. None.

Back when I was a YouTube admin, I’d tell people this all the time. You know how they responded?

Well, a few would express surprise. Perhaps even concede I had a point.

But most people would tell me the data has to be wrong or biased. We see this all the time in US with people disputing national crime statistics but we have it here in Canada too. People so want to believe big cities are more violent that they reject statistical information that tells them they’re wrong and insist that the distorted view from 24 hours news and social media is correct.

So, why do people keep insisting that the reality is not true?

“Rural” Bias

I think there’s a “rural” bias in the coverage of crime and vice, but it exists in many other areas of our culture. I think this bias might even predate the industrial revolution but that didn’t help it. People have been claiming urban areas are cesspools since urban areas existed, I suspect.

However, I have air quotes around “rural” because I think this is a really strange bias, not so much in favour of the actual, extant rural world where my in-laws live but rather in favour of an imagined rural world of the past.

And the reason I believe that is, in part due to this fact: in Canada, as of 2021, only 16% of the population lives in communities of 10,000 people or fewer. In the US, where the definition of urban includes smaller centres even than in Canada, 20% are considered rural. This means that 84% of Canadians and 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

Yet, watch TV, listen to the way people talk. There is this group of people who live in large communities - communities I would describe as cities - who believe they live in small towns and believe that life there is simpler, easier, more purely “life.”

There is a cultish belief that rural people are more “real” than city people even though the vast majority of the people who appear to believe this do not live in rural areas. Because only 16-20% of the population live in rural areas!

Most of these people who subscribe to the rural bias do not actually living in rural areas. Many people who disparage cities actually live in exurbs, suburbs or just smaller local centres. And, of course, many of those places actually have more crime than the cities they disparage.

The Elevation of Rural Life?

My in-laws were farmers. Real farmers. Not pretend farmers, real farmers. Grain farmers. (And I have relatives that used to have a hobby farm so I know pretend farmers.) So I have some faint idea of what it is like to be a farmer, but only from stories.

But there are all these people who have never been farmers or cowboys or whatever who behave in public as if they are or they used to be. And these people who cosplay as rural are everywhere.

The current most egregious example is in contemporary country music.

Pat Finnerty of What Makes This Song Stink has done a pretty great job of exposing this, with jokes:

Jason Aldean, performer of the execrable “Try That in a Small Town” is from Macon, GA, which had a population of over 100,000 people when he was born and currently has a population 156,000 people. Forbes says he makes $40 million a year as of 2015. He is not a cowboy or farmer, obviously.

According to this article, he owns at least three houses, one of which is in Nashville (city: 715k, urban: 1.1 million, metro: 2.1), one in Georgia (I assume near Macon but potentially rural) and one in The Bahamas, a country that might have a lot of area that qualifies as “rural” but is, of course, not what anyone in NA means when they say “rural.” (He and his wife have swapped Turks & Caicos for The Bahamas.) Again, he owns at least three houses. This is not someone who is “rural” in any meaningful sense of the rural myth of hardworking simple people.

He didn’t write the song, of course. Of the four songwriters, two have Wikipedia pages.

Kelley Lovelace is from Paducah, which had a population around 30,000 in the 1970s (when I assume he was born). That’s hardly a “small town” in comparison to anything but the biggest cities in North America but it is, at least, not a city of 100,000 people. But, of course, he lives in Nashville, as that’s where the country songwriting jobs are. I have no idea how long he has lived there. My guess is that he’s not a farmer or cowboy.

Neil Thrasher is from Birmingham, which had a population of 340,000 or so when he was born. Its population has declined significantly since then but it is still the 47th largest urban area in the US.

It’s possible that “small town” is code for “southern city” or “red/Republican city” rather than literally meaning “small town.” And, of course, the assumption is that these places are safer and therefore morally superior. Nashville has the 34th worst crime rate of cities of over 200,000 people (roughly 100).

“Lonely Road” is a song based off of “Country Roads” and credited to 10 songwriters. John Denver was born in Roswell, which had a population of 13,000 or so when he was born and maybe that’s small enough to be a town. (Was it back then?) His music, of course, did much to glorify rural America despite Denver being a (shock! horror!) Democrat.

MGK, of course, began as a rapper and then veered into pop punk and has now sung this terrible country song. Jelly Roll also started as a rapper. Both of these guys either genuinely love country music or were astute enough to see the commercial potential of country. (Or, you know, they’re posers.) Jelly Roll is at least from Nashville. (He is actually from a suburb which might have been pretty small when he was a kid.) MGK is from Houston, one of the largest urban areas in North America.

If a rural person was walking (shock! horror!) in a city in the United States and saw someone like MGK or Jelly Roll walking down the street, and did not know they were famous, they would likely think they would mug them. This would only be all the more true if they weren’t white.

This song is based off of “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder of Saginaw, Michigan. Wonder grew up in Detroit and was famously famous by his tweens.

LoCash (aka the Locash Cowboys) started in Nashville. I do not know where either is from. The video does a good job of pointing out how these guys don’t seem to live the aesthetic they are celebrating. At least one of them lives in the outskirts of Tampa, in what appears to be a rural area. So I guess that’s…something. (And Tampa is safer than Nashville, for whatever that’s worth.)

These people sing songs about rural life but they are not from small towns, they live in mansions in the suburbs or in the Caribbean, they drive expensive foreign cars and fly on private jets. They’re actually not that far off Rush Limbaugh in terms of how their “art” doesn’t reflect their life. (They are all much better people, I have to assume, than Rush Limbaugh. It’s more that they are espousing values they don’t live by as Limbaugh did his whole life.) They are cosplaying at good, simple rural Americans. But they are the suburban rich.

Another example that I’m assaulted by regularly is in advertising.

My partner grew up on a farm. A real farm. It’s located something like 10 minutes outside of a “city” of 4500 people which certainly meets my personal definition of a town. (I’m pretty sure it would meet your definition of a town too. It’s only a “city” because Saskatchewan’s entire population is smaller than that of the three largest cities in Canada and the five largest urban areas.) She is a fan of curling, a sport with much more popularity in rural areas. So we watch curling during the winter.

The curling ads are…something. There are ads for farm equipment, often equipment that few people in Canada could afford.

“The Farmer’s Creed” was written for New Holland 50 years ago. It is very much rural propaganda to my mind but at least it was written at a time when the world was more rural.

The version of this ad that I most often see highlights combines more than anything.

Combines can cost over a million dollars though you can used ones for under $100k if they are on the smaller side. There’s clearly a huge market for these.

So what’s happening is that machines that are being sold, mostly, to companies, are the vehicle for pro-farmer propaganda that may have once had a place in our society but now is rather conspicuous to a city boy like me.

In 2021 there were 262000 farms in Canada. That sounds like a lot. But of course there are something like 16 million households in Canada. 1.7% of all households were farmers in 2021. But if you listen to the farmer’s creed or watch these ads…it sure feels like the market must be bigger than.

So why advertise super expensive farm products to such a small market on national TV?

Well, yes, curling is more popular among farmers, sure.

But think it is in the interest of the companies that sell these giant machines to romanticize farm life. Because they also sell smaller machines that some people can afford. They sell them to rural people, sure. But they also sell them to the rich, who live on large properties in the suburbs and exurbs, who like to play at being rural. Like Jason Aldean and Locash and, presumably, some of their fans.

And, just like with the poor and middle class voting for lower taxes for the rich because they think they will be rich enough to benefit in the future, there are those who just aspire to own enough land to buy this equipment. Of course, most of them never will.

It Bleeds, It Leads

So there’s this rural bias. But I don’t think we should ignore the simplest explanation, either, which is that we are all attracted to more negative news.

And, well, the biggest cities have the most people and so they will have the most negative news. And nobody cares what the rate of crime is, they care about individual crimes. And there are, almost always, more total crimes in giant cities than there are in small cities. And it’s more likely that those crimes will be committed by Others, because the biggest cities are usually the most diverse cities.

With or without the rural bias I perceive, there is the simpler bias of humans caring about individual instances over statistics.

But the thing is: we’re wrong. The largest cities aren’t more dangerous and rural life isn’t better, safer or somehow closer to “real life.”

I grew up hating living in a city, believing that I should have been born in a small town. I believed I would have fit in better in a small town, I would have been happier. But that was nonsense, probably a product of propaganda.

Later, I lived in a “city” that was really a small town, population under 5000 and that includes a university. (To give you some idea: at the time it only had a couple of intersections with lights, total.) And you know what I discovered? I missed living in a city. A lot.

And that’s because cities are great. They have the stuff I want: restaurants, bars, professional sports teams, concerts, the opera, the symphony, film festivals, and so much more. My city also has just a ton of parks.

Now, you don’t have to want to live in a big city. Frankly, if more people lived this rural bias and moved to the country, it would work out for me, as prices would go down here.

But I ask that you recognize that big cities are not actually cesspools or dens of iniquity or whatever. I don’t slag on small towns. I don’t claim they’re terrible places to live. Stop claiming big cities are terrible.