Is Broward County That Bad??

[LifeIsGood01]

Originally Posted by thrillobyte

I've been watching "Police Women of Broward County" and most of the areas they go into look like Port au Prince. Not referring to race so much here as the buildings and houses and the area in general--it looks like something out of a third-world country. Is it really that bad there?

It's a great place and I find the Haitian community to be more respectful and hard working than some other minority communities. You can usually tell because the older ones dress like they are from Haiti, the men wear dress pants and the women wear skirts.

and most places in Broward are very nice. In fact you go into a black neighborhood or mixed and the homes are well kept and you would never think it's a bad area.

It's not like the northeast where you have cities like East Orange or Camden NJ where the whole city is a mess and I would not live there for free.

[Fl1150]

Originally Posted by so954

It's a great place and I find the Haitian community to be more respectful and hard working than some other minority communities. You can usually tell because the older ones dress like they are from Haiti, the men wear dress pants and the women wear skirts.

and most places in Broward are very nice. In fact you go into a black neighborhood or mixed and the homes are well kept and you would never think it's a bad area.

It's not like the northeast where you have cities like East Orange or Camden NJ where the whole city is a mess and I would not live there for free.

I mean I have seen ruins of the rust belt and I don't nothing compares here to the demise of American Manufacturing. Thousands of abandoned factories and the whole towns look like they have been deserted.

[HotandHumid]

Originally Posted by thrillobyte

I've been watching "Police Women of Broward County" and most of the areas they go into look like Port au Prince. Not referring to race so much here as the buildings and houses and the area in general--it looks like something out of a third-world country. Is it really that bad there?

The only way you are going to avoid crime and run down areas in Broward County is to live in a high rent, expensive gated housing complex and because you have to go out of it usually to go to work, get groceries, etc., you're going to encounter lots of run down areas sitting just a street or two away from nice areas which means you get a spill-over of the criminal element into the nice areas.

Wilton Manors is considered a nice, mostly middle upper glass housing area but it sits just south of Oakland Park where there are a lot of run down houses and just east of a large area where a lot of poor Black people live in run down housing where there are teenagers riding around on bikes asking people if they want to buy drugs. Someone ran into one of the nice coffee shops on Wilton Drive last week and stole the tip jar off the counter that was filled with tips left by customers for the workers who had served them there.

Also, you can't go by crime statistics here because I know several people who called 911 and had the police come by because of situations where the caller had been threatened with bodily harm in front of witnesses and when the people who called 911 went to file restraining orders against the people who had been threatening them after they thought the police officers they met with had filed reports, there was no police report about the incidents on file, although 911 did have records of the calls when it was checked into.

Seems to that to make it look like they're doing their jobs of keeping crime down, several police officers seem to have been instructed not to file reports after they were dispatched by 911 because filing a report makes the crime rate statistically go higher, and when you figure that selling real estate is the main source of income for middle and upper middle class individuals who actually work here since there's nothing much in the way of corporate office work or manufacturing in Broward County, it's more favorable to real estate sales in this area to keep crime rates lower on the books than they actually are.

[HotandHumid]

Originally Posted by TriMT7

Yeah, there's a ghetto in the county. But it's not like the whole county is not like that anymore than Manhattan can be judged by Harlem.

The big Ghetto area in Broward County sits right on the edge of new expensive apartment complexes with rents that start at $1,000. that are located just north of Broward Boulevard on Federal Highway.

Just a couple of blocks east of this is the Ghetto that runs for several miles north. No, it's not filled with burned out empty buildings like you see in photographs of some areas of New York but that only because the main business district in that area on Sistrunk Boulevard had many of it's buildings torn down years ago and now there are vacant lots next to mostly empty buildings on Sistrunk bordered on the south end all the way to Broward Boulevard with a neighborhood that's filled with public housing projects with streets that see flooding during heavy rainstorms.

Those government housing projects run all the way north to Sunrise Boulevard which is running neck and neck with Oakland Park Boulevard for being one of the ugliest sections of boulevards in Broward County as both are filled with run down looking businesses with lots of ugly signage, an absence of decent landscaping, lots of empty storefronts and empty lots where buildings were torn down. Only the sections of those boulevards east of Dixie Highway are kept up as the rest of those boulevards from Dixie Highway to I-95 are garish urban nightmares.

The housing projects end at Sunrise but the mostly now Haitian neighborhood that runs from Sunrise to Oakland Park Boulevard that sits between Powerline Road and I-95 isn't anything to brag about. It looks to be populated by poorer individuals who receive section-8 housing assistance in the form of vouchers they give to their landlords who do the barest minimum possible in the way of keeping up their properties.

The main street that runs east and west through this area, which is 19th Street, is mostly lined with duplexes and small apartment buildings that have mostly dirt or tar front yards where lawns and landscaping are basically non-existent and chain link fences on empty lots in the area are clogged at their bases with piles of litter thrown from cars.

Someone once told me that large swatches of Haiti are barren of trees that used to grow in abundance there because they were cut down for people needing wood to cook by and for making the wooden frames used by Haitian artists who either export their work or sell it to tourists so that's probably why the Haitian residents in Fort Lauderdale don't make more of a fuss with their landlords and the City of Fort Lauderdale about their neighborhood being so run down looking and many Fort Lauderdale city officials don't seem to attend to things their elected to do as is evidenced by the pile of empty plastic bottles and other litter that's piled up on 5th Avenue in the Cul-de-Sac on the north side of 13th Street in a predominately Haitian and African American neighborhood.