To ask how ‘rough’ is this rough area?

Ha! I’m pretty sure they were local. They were clearly in their hangout spot. Knew their way around etc.

@RisingSunn HOWEVER everyone else I met were so helpful and nice! I thought I was in a twilight zone.
Offering to help with my buggy. A group of teens insisting my children use the beach taps first.

Those teens would be summer visitors then, not residents!

My experience of Broadstairs was a scantily dressed lady clearly on drugs shouting through the main road - whilst men sitting outside of the pub jeered at her.

HOWEVER everyone else I met were so helpful and nice! I thought I was in a twilight zone.
Offering to help with my buggy. A group of teens insisting my children use the beach taps first.

I actually started looking at their house prices when I got home!

Are there a lot of rats around in the daytime

By any standard, yes that’s a rough area. But people, particularly the MCs, get very uncomfortable about the word ‘rough’. They don’t like us saying it. I’d love to know why.

😆

Are you not English OP?

If a Brit says "not brilliant" it means it's a shithole.

I'd move, come and live with me in my naice market town

Does it smell bad?

Clearly its rough as fuck but you knew that already.

Do the lifts work

That's what I thought too!

Not disingenuous at all - she’s not describing an apartment block in Bloomsbury or in the multimillion pound apartment towers in Canary Wharf, is she? She is not describing a demographic where those with addiction and MH issues have access to private services and resources to support them through those issues - hence it is managed and less visible (and rarely leeches into criminal/ASB territory).

And I didn’t state that it was ‘exclusive’ to poverty, but I am afraid extreme ASB, of the type, extent and quantity described by the OP IS particular to poorer areas.

In fact, if you look at the info in the stats you posted, you can see that the middle income areas still have almost 40% of people reporting that ASB is either a big, or fairly big, problem in their area.

I completely agree that ASB is associated with poverty, but it's completely disingenuous to suggest that it's somehow exclusive to low SES.

Middle class and rich people do drugs too, and can behave poorly, be abusive and have mental health issues.

Obviously the biggest difference is the resources to manage life, so poor people don't really have any respite or buffer - it's a lot more visible, and that in itself has more of an impact on the affected people.

Don't forget that even within very small localities, the area can be massively different.

I live in a town in the SE and "rough" streets and estates are interspersed with very nice areas.

I don't know if it's by virtue of design or whether this is the case in other towns, but there isn't even a single "rough" estate in this city that doesn't have a nice part, with good resources.

On the flip side of that, it can be quite depressing to see run down areas with really poor and badly maintained play equipment, and then houses less than a mile away with beautifully kept green areas and really cool new parks. And they are quiet too, despite being in close proximity to the "rough" areas.

Come on - are you being deliberately disingenuous? Antisocial behaviour is directly linked to poverty. I live in a middle class road - none of my neighbours touch me up for money, have gentlemen callers all hours of the day and night, nor do we trip over the homeless or drug addicted, though there are areas in the local town where individuals impacted by these congregate. The police have never needed to break down the doors of the local properties and, in fact, have only visited our road half a dozen times in 20 years in response to very occasional attempted burglaries.

Of course ‘rough’ means ‘poor’, and all the social and economic impacts that flow from it. I grew up in one of those council blocks and had to step over the comatose tramp lying in his pee who often took refuge in the ground floor stair well on my way to school every morning or when playing.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impacts-of-anti-social-behaviour-on-individuals-and-communities/anti-social-behaviour-impacts-on-individuals-and-local-communities

I have lived in areas considered rough. I would say that term is usually used to mean working class. How “rough” somewhere feels tends to be how much crime you experience as a non gang related person in the area. I’ve lived in areas of high crime but when it’s mostly gang related and had a minimal impact on me personally… apart from the heartbreak of seeing 9 year olds on bikes delivering drugs and the police more interested in occasional arrests than protecting these children.

What you describe sounds pretty tough. But I guess it depends on your experience. If you have friends and family and community it could feel largely great, despite the drug overdoses and prostitution.

It depends a lot as to whether you have kids or not.

I lived for a year as a student in a notoriously rough estate (since been pulled down). Filthy stairwells, dilapidation severe: don’t think the council had maintained it in any way for over a decade. Noise pollution and people openly dealing heroin from certain known flats.

I actually was fine living there as a 20 something student. Had no real problems, never felt threatened or unsafe. I shut the door on it when I got in and didn’t hang around.

But there’s no way in God’s green earth I would have brought kids up there.

But it is not "the poor" it is the anti social - being poor does not mean you grafitti,.damage property, take drugs, act offensively- it does mean that you can't move away from an area with anti social problems though - we need to tackle the anti social problems as people should not have to live with this happening around them.