Mixed Red-light: Los Angeles also seems to match low-end sex to high rates of violent crime, creating numerous red zones. Meanwhile the mid-level "massage parlours" have a racket set up with the local chiropractors that offers them considerable legal shelter. Before he retired, my father became something of a specialist in taxing the mid-to-high sex trades (tax evasion by other groups required less innovation to counter). Like all retail, it needs to be close to the customers, and so is dispersed away from any definable red-light district. His stories of visits to high end defence attorneys are far more harrowing than his more comedic tales about his treatment at various tax-dodging brothels.
Definite Red-light: In San Jose, Costa Rica, there was a clear red light district, which happened to lie along my way home between two expatriate colonies. I got into a knife fight in San Jose's red-light district (in the alley behind "The Red Windmill", which was far less classy than the French establishment that inspired its name), one of the few times I've been assaulted. Nobody intervened or, perhaps more shockingly, even ran away. The police also didn't go into that area. There was "blight".
An additional observation: Amsterdam was, from what I am told, cutting back on its red light district primarily because it was a magnet for human trafficking. This seems like a legitimate concern to me.
(By the way, I've been working almost exclusively in non-English or in very badly translated English for the last several days. If my prose is choppy, and it feels like it is very choppy, this is why.)
no subject
No Red-light: Portland doesn't have a red-light district I can point to (it used to, I think, if my memories of the old Pearl are any guide). The sex trade is dispersed all over the city. Advertising is simultaneously blunt and non-graphic, i.e. the signs are textual but not subtle. I never really hear locals complain; Portlanders are nothing if not blasé about vice. Crime is very solidly in the lower middle of the chart for large US cities.
Mixed Red-light: Los Angeles also seems to match low-end sex to high rates of violent crime, creating numerous red zones. Meanwhile the mid-level "massage parlours" have a racket set up with the local chiropractors that offers them considerable legal shelter. Before he retired, my father became something of a specialist in taxing the mid-to-high sex trades (tax evasion by other groups required less innovation to counter). Like all retail, it needs to be close to the customers, and so is dispersed away from any definable red-light district. His stories of visits to high end defence attorneys are far more harrowing than his more comedic tales about his treatment at various tax-dodging brothels.
Definite Red-light: In San Jose, Costa Rica, there was a clear red light district, which happened to lie along my way home between two expatriate colonies. I got into a knife fight in San Jose's red-light district (in the alley behind "The Red Windmill", which was far less classy than the French establishment that inspired its name), one of the few times I've been assaulted. Nobody intervened or, perhaps more shockingly, even ran away. The police also didn't go into that area. There was "blight".
An additional observation: Amsterdam was, from what I am told, cutting back on its red light district primarily because it was a magnet for human trafficking. This seems like a legitimate concern to me.
(By the way, I've been working almost exclusively in non-English or in very badly translated English for the last several days. If my prose is choppy, and it feels like it is very choppy, this is why.)