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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

According to Wikipedia, "Oakland has the fifth largest cluster of 'elite zip codes' ranked by the number of households with the highest combination of income and education". That's a good sign.

On the other hand, Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US. One recent report put it at #2 [1]. That's generally not a good sign.

Is there much interaction between the high income/high education areas (presumably where you'd want to put your start up), and the high crime areas?

BTW, in addition to having one of the highest crime cities in the nation with Oakland, the Silicon Valley area also has one of the lowest. That would be Sunnyvale, which was the 10th on this recent list of safest cities in the US [2].

[1] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dang...

[2] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-ci...

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To answer part of your question, the high-income/education zip codes are residential neighborhoods in the hills and more northern neighborhoods. This has been the case for a century. The zips on the lower end are also residential neighborhoods, but in the flats of the East and West parts of town. This area has been in stagnation since the early post-war years. Neither interact with each other almost at all, rarely even sharing schools.

Neither are areas where any business would establish itself, because most all of Oakland are old fashioned post-war neighborhoods. Downtown Oakland, and the meat of the city's desk & cubicle type of office spaces are in the center near the lake and the bridge. This is a very small area without a whole lot of commercial development starts, current or planned. A surprising amount of high density residential real estate priced for upper-middle class types are slowly appearing. These projects are eating away at the old retail/warehouse space that would typically be turned into new commercial development. There is an alternate universe where Twitter moved to Oakland/Emeryville and brought the mid-Market/Castro-East craziness with it...

[Also, there is plenty of violent crime throughout the Valley. It doesn't show up very well in crime statistics and reports because how closely intertwined it is with the poor, semi-homeless and meth. Nobody likes to talk about it, and it is very good at hiding in the bushes (literally).]

Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US.

This comes up every time Oakland appears on HN. Oakland is a large city, and there are dangerous portions, and most of the violent crime happens there. The downtown area, where I've worked for 13 years, is relatively safe. I saw more crime in Berkeley in my 13 years working there.

Many people in the suburbs in the outer Bay Area are actually afraid to come to downtown Oakland. I only found out about this because many of the people that I work with told me, years after my company moved from Berkeley to Oakland. They also said that none of their fears came true and they were surprised.

Oakland has a rep. A bad one. It's a pretty safe place, but as always, the situation is complex and you can't distill it down to a sound bite.

Btw, I've walked to work (2 miles each way) through city streets for 13 years. Never had a problem, nor have I seen any problems. In my relatively few visits to SF, though, I saw a homeless person almost beaten to death near Golden Gate park. I've seen other stuff there, too. SF feels much more dangerous to me. But, maybe that's just my fear of the unknown, eh?

Being in danger in Oakland is related to being part of a dense network of dangerous people. If you're not in that network, you're not in danger. I don't know why those people make their home in Oakland, but basically if you're not a criminal or friends with criminals than you'll survive.

Is this really true though? I mean even if you are not in that crowd you could just happen to be a witness to a crime. In that case I imagine they might not be so happy about it.

Or, probably more commonly, if you have nice things you could be a victim of theft.

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