I was in New York today for meetings. Our office is next to the 9/11 memorial pools and so I walked over with a colleague during lunch. It was my first time visiting the completed memorials and it was hard not to feel things as I stood there watching the water fall into the mysterious squares in the middle of each pool. But even more impactful were the flowers that people have inserted into the various names, and the messages that they have left for their loved ones.

Conventional wisdom suggests that cities are pretty dangerous. There's crime, the chance of getting killed, and there are lots of cars, some of which have a tendency to fly off the road and do bad things on occasion. And in some ways, this is true. Here is a chart from Bloomberg showing homicides per 100k people:

What this tells us is that if you live in a large metropolitan area in the US, you have a higher chance of being killed by someone else than if you were to live in a rural non-metro area. However, based on this data, one of the safest places you could actually live is in New York City. This might surprise some of you.

On top of this, if you layer on the chance of dying from a transportation-related accident, the absolute safest place you could live in America is in fact New York City:

This is because New Yorkers are only about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average American. Oddly enough, when you have a city where the vast majority of residents don't drive their own car around, people seem to die a lot less from traffic accidents.

But how does this compare to other cities around the world? Let's take Paris, which is another big and important global city. According to Bloomberg, the risk that Parisians face from possible killing and transportation accidents is about one-third that of New Yorkers. So it's even safer over there.

Turns out that some big cities aren't as dangerous as people might think. For the full Bloomberg article, click here.

So here's the headline: More people are moving to Manhattan than before the pandemic. This is true. But an even more accurate description might be that New York City was losing people before the pandemic and it is still losing people. But things have rebounded since the lows of the pandemic and it is now losing less people. Here are two charts from Bloomberg:

This is generally good news since the increased exodus (to places like Miami) led some to believe that one of the most important global cities in the world was now dying. I never thought that was the case. But there's no arguing against the fact that the fastest growing cities in the US are the ones with more affordable housing and fewer constraints on new development.