I had a few questions swimming around in my head while I drove to work from my recently purchased home in central New Orleans. I managed to buy a small 2 bedroom home recently for $498,000, in at best would be referred to as a "transitional neighborhood". As I passed vagrants and drug dealers just a few houses down from my driveway, Coolio’s “Gangsta Paradise” came on my Spotify and I had a lightbulb moment.
I spent a semester abroad in Europe my last year of college and before I left, my parents gave me their version of “1000 Ways to Die While Abroad” speech that included some favorites like human trafficking, airplane crashes, kidnapping, terrorism or just accidentally falling off the face of the earth. And while I understand that their anxiety came from a place of love, I had to remind them that they were the ones that decided to raise me in one of the scariest cities in the country.
Now, that statistic isn’t something I am particularly proud of, but I just wanted to say to my parents “I manage to survive this shit everyday, Europe is going to be a breeze.” And nothing did happen to me while I was there, partly because of the lessons my parents instilled in me before leaving, and partly because I have already been hardwired to trust no one and to protect myself when out in public. Thanks NOLA.
It’s a great town, no doubt, but if you try to argue that New Orleans is “safe,” you would have to find some very slanted research. 2013 showed 42 murders per 100,000 residents, for an overall total of 155, and if that sounds low to you, you should know it is 8 times the national average. In 2012, we actually celebrated an 18 day stretch with no murders were reported. We celebrated because at the beginning of the year, we had at least one murder every day.
I say that New Orleans is a gangster’s paradise because it is prime real estate if you are planning to become one. It’s seedy, there’s debauchery, there’s corruption, there is a general sense of uneasiness when walking down a darkened street in the French Quarter. I by no means have any “street cred” and maybe you don’t either, but my life has been touched by the senseless violence of this city and with statistics so high, I can only imagine yours has been too. Maybe yours hasn’t, maybe it has been too many times, but if you are living and surviving here, you’re beating the odds. So congratulate yourself.
