NO, THE BIG CITIES ARE INSUFFICIENTLY SAFE.

Consider Chicago.

Yes, often in those districts that keep voting Democrat, in part because no other political party has offered a better value proposition.  Enterprise zones, less restrictive zoning, and no broken windows, anyone?  I mean, stopping crime is one of those eighty-twenty issues, and those fifteen square miles of privilege aren't as safe as they once might have been.

Meanwhile, the federal immigration authorities are openly playing to disaffected Chicago cops in recruiting additional officers, the city and state are going broke with no printed Biden bucks on offer, and Young Voices writer Ed Tarnowski offers the simple truth.  "The American City Cannot Blossom in Lawlessness."

American cities are failing to keep residents safe and make metropolitan living broadly desirable. America is the wealthiest nation in history – our cities should be beacons of innovation, creativity, and human potential. And while most of our metropolises face many roadblocks that restrict thriving urbanism, one thing is clear: The American City cannot blossom in lawlessness.

It’s a common pastime in urban circles to poke fun at those who fear city life. And often, those fears are exaggerated, frequently shaped more by sensational media than lived experience. City dwellers take pride in their neighborhoods and know they are typically not the war zones often portrayed on cable news and in clickbait articles.

Nevertheless, Americans should never settle for “not a war zone” as the standard for where they work, live, and create. Concerns about crime and disorder are valid; statistics make that clear. Until they are meaningfully addressed, trust and a sense of safety will remain out of reach. People cannot be expected to embrace public spaces if they are constantly worried about harassment, or worse, threats to their lives and families.

That's standard stuff in conservative circles.  It's refreshing to find the same sentiments from Noah "Noahopinion" Smith.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

A fair amount of research around the world shows that shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.

Consider, dear reader, that "dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents."  My intuition suggests that a lot of car crashes, to use Strong Towns's preferred locution, occur on weekends at bar-closing time, and motorists have agency to time their trips to avoid the more dangerous roads, intersections, and times of day.

Mr Smith continues,

I’ve called for a bunch of changes to make our cities better places to live. Most importantly, we need more housing density and better transit. These are the two main goals of the YIMBY movement. I also want more commercial density — lots of shops in walkable downtown areas — which is something YIMBYs should focus on more than they do. I don’t think American cities are going to become like Tokyo — or Paris, or Singapore, etc. — anytime soon. But I think places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia can move enough in that direction to make a big difference in America’s quality of life, and probably in our economic productivity as well.

But we’ll need to change a lot about our society in order to get there. Usually, when I talk about urbanism, I talk about land use deregulation, increased transit funding, and transit cost reduction, so that we can build dense housing and transit cheaply and abundantly. And I think those policies are incredibly important. But when I suggest these policies to conservatives, or even just to politically neutral NIMBY types, the response I always get is that Japan and Europe can have nice cities because they have public order. They point out the vast disparities in violent crime between America and the rich nations of Eurasia.

The centrifugal effects of improved rapid transit on the rent gradient and housing density can wait for another day.  It is to the perception of panhandlers on the streets and muggers on transit that he speaks.

In fact, there’s evidence that crime represents a sort of “congestion cost” that makes cities function less efficiently.

But there’s another effect here that’s political in nature. Both violence and general disorder probably discourage locals from supporting both housing density and public transit — in other words, they give rise to NIMBYism. Transit, especially if it’s made free or if fare-jumping is easy, allows both criminals and drugged-up disorderly types to reach otherwise peaceful neighborhoods. And since apartment complexes A) are cheaper to live in than single-family houses, and B) usually come with inclusionary zoning requirements that require any new complex to include some poor tenants, they also mean more poor people in the neighborhood. If a city has poor public safety and public order, this means increased danger — or at least increased anxiety — for existing residents.

This turns some people NIMBY out of concern for public safety. And NIMBYs themselves are the main obstacle to building denser cities in America. When NIMBYs tell you that America isn’t safe enough for density, they are describing their own motivations and concerns.

It’s important to note that it barely matters whether NIMBYs are right about the effect of apartment construction and transit on local crime. For example, while there are certainly a number of studies finding that adding transit increases crime near bus stops and train stations, the estimated effects are generally small, and a few studies find no effect. But the claim that trains bring crime to safe neighborhoods is incredibly common in American politics. Without a widespread perception of public safety and order, people will keep using NIMBY anti-development policies to try to keep anyone away from them who even might commit a crime or make a scene on the street.

We can try to simply yell at fearful NIMBYs to stop being a bunch of NIMBYs and call them racists and segregationists and petty landed gentry, but this approach historically has poor results. Instead, the country should address their concerns about violence and disorder, in order to build a constituency for urbanism in America.

Well, yes, didn't "civilized" originate as a description of a person suitably mannerly to live in a city?