I have been in this house over 20 years and had a lot of vandalism on either side and could never get a cop out here. I think the vandals knew that.

There was an elderly couple near here. The husband was very ill. One day a small group of kids was bouncing a ball off of their garage doors, which had glass windows.  Afraid to go out herself,  she called the police. When they came, the police chastised the elderly woman saying that the kids need somewhere to play. Play? Really? Since when? No respect for private property. 

We have a terrible parking problem on our street. It is a very tight one way street and it is very hard to parallel park. An elderly neighbor across the street had a handicapped parking spot for his ill wife. People were always crowding his spot. He got tired of it and called the police because of cars parked over the blue line. The police came and spoke with the car owners and also reprimanded the elderly man for bothering them.

Sounds more and more typical of 21st century.
When I was young with my first car I came close to having my battery wires cut and battery stolen. It seems vandals were making money on used batteries. My mother and I parked our cars engine to engine so thieves could not reach the latch. I got a ticket for parking facing the wrong way. Must have been a slow day for cop if he could take the time to get out and put a ticket on my window? My mother went to court and scolded the cop in front of the judge and ticket dropped.

I would never want to set foot within 500 miles of such a place. Unfortunately, Dallas-Ft Worth and San Antonio and El Paso are all within that radius.

Hard core survivalists say I'm way too close to an Interstate highway, as one really should be more than 2 tankfuls of gas from major cities, so the goblins don't show up on my doorstep when the fecal matter hits the air impeller.

Does Texas even have inner cities? It all seems so open.  

Showtalk said:

Does Texas even have inner cities? It all seems so open.

I have heard, but never seen first hand, that there are places in Dallas that you don't go running around in at night. However, Texas was settled much later than the dense eastern cities, so they haven't had as much chance to form true ghettos or slums.

I remember as a kid that my parents described the slums we read about in various literature in places like New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, etc. were much bigger than our entire town and had 100x the population crammed into those spaces.

Most of Odessa and Midland seem to be fairly well mixed although there's always Snob Drive where all the conspicuous consumption people live, and now in rural Midland County off of Hwy 191 are these huge mansions on a lot of acreage that each cost north of $5 million.

But yeah, there are some urban blighted areas just about everywhere.

I think it also has to do with more open space, so your densest cities aren’t packed with people living on top of other people, like in high rises.  Building upkeep is another, as well as job opportunities.  For some reason, some people want to stay close to where they were born, so their cities gradually becoming packed.

Portland has it's problems but not enough to deserve the fear and damage BLM are doing.
One tv station did a segment on the "ghetto" created for blacks who moved to Portland to work in the WW2 shipyards. Well, all the empty land close to the shipyards had been filled by houses, starting around 1900. My grandpa grew up in one and his sister took the blueprints and built hers next door in 1904 when she married a richman. The houses were very small. Kids shared rooms. Many slept in attics. They had indoor plumbing. They felt rich.
The blacks moving to Portland were housed in apartments on the north end of town which had the most vacant land and could be reached without several bus transfers. There were mostly blacks in them but years later I had a white friend in one and it was quite nice.
I get so tired of news media with reporters who didn't grow up in Portland trying to turn everything into something racist. My family came in 1900 with my ggm who looked like the Creole (Russian for mixed race) she was and she entertained many wealthy people in her home on Sundays with the family entertaining with music. Her dh sang opera and each of her children mastered a musical instrument.

Showtalk said:

I think it also has to do with more open space, so your densest cities aren’t packed with people living on top of other people, like in high rises. Building upkeep is another, as well as job opportunities. For some reason, some people want to stay close to where they were born, so their cities gradually becoming packed.

Well, Dallas, Austin, and Houston especially have a jaw dropping array of high rise apartments and condos. Austin now has a new high rise condo building that rivals many Manhattan skyscrapers.

As more and more people fleeing high tax, high restriction states and cities and end up here in Texas, I can easily see within a few more years, the population density in the big cities here turn them into the very same thing so many were fleeing.

And I see them bringing their high tax and spend ideology with them.

There are careers made on racism.  In my experience, most people I know are not racist.  I said that once and was driven out of a room by white people.  Some of the outrage is real and some is manufactured.