I'm not going to try to persuade you either way, I'm just gonna keep it real:

If you live in Dewitt and keep to the hill and restaurants you'll be fine safety wise. I walked from campus to my place off Westcott repeatedly in the middle of the night and I was perfectly fine, besides avoiding the people who rummage through everyone's recycling looking for cans in the middle of the night. On the other hand the first week I moved here my boss gave someone a ride home to [I can't remember if it was the north side or the south side, maybe it was the west side, fuck it, all the sides are ghetto] and ended up getting a stray bullet through their car door. They could've died.

Look, I'll be brutally honest. I moved here from Seattle and I absolutely hate it. It's a depressing, impoverished city. The winter is so harsh it's unbelievable, and when summer comes everyone's so stir crazy from 9 months of cold that they go berserk, but I'll say now that I don't think your experience will be the same. You won't be likely to encounter what I have as there are 2 syracuses: the college, and the city.

I'm not a student, so I've only come into contact with the world you won't. It's a world of poverty. Of drug addiction. Disenfranchisement that doesn't care what race you are - at all. There's a sort of grasping quality to the people here. I don't know if I can quite put it into words, but everyone has a scheme or plan to escape. They'd sell you out in a heartbeat if it meant they could escape being here. Anything. And while I may seem like I'm just talking shit I do respect the people here. The people here have an intense strength about them. To survive a winter here living in low income housing without a car or any money you have to be strong and rely on each other. Those two statements seem contradictory, and they are. This city is.

Of course there are more well off people, but they don't actually live in Syracuse. They live in Dewitt. The people on the city council? Dewitt. The cops and lawyers downtown? Dewitt. The professors? You guessed it, Dewitt. And they're the worst kind of "rich". The sort that flaunts any sort of power or money regardless of how trifling because it is a means to achieve the feeling of having escaped (of course without escaping).

In between those two extremes are the hardcore kids who just seem to go to shows all the time and get tattoos. Some are students and some aren't. I simultaneously get their lifestyle and don't. Not much to say about them, but they're here.

The area does have Wegman's (the best grocery store) and some of the best vegan food I've ever had in a restaurant anywhere. There are activists and artists as well. The surrounding suburbs are actually quite nice, and further out the countryside is unbelievably beautiful (check out tinker's falls). I think in your case you would be able to live in the parallel world of the university and Dewitt kind of scene and be fine, even thrive (if you buy boots and a nice coat).

To be honest, I just want someone else to know how I feel about this place, because right now I'm trapped here and it feels like I'm dying.