📊 Safe Cities
Miami is less safe than Mexico City by homicide rates, challenging perceptions.
Taking a comparative look at just how safe major Latin American cities are.
Today we’re re-publishing one of our favorite charts of all time. We collaborated with Karla Berman to create this data story.
One would have thought that Miami, the US capital of the Latin world, would be less dangerous than most of Latin America's major cities. However, when compared by the most common measure for how safe a city is — homicides per 100K people, Miami actually ranked worse than Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Santiago, and Mexico City in 2022. In fact, contrary to public perception, most Latin American big cities are significantly safer than many US metropolitan areas.
Now, Latin America clearly has a crime problem — seven of the ten most dangerous cities this year are in Mexico. But Mexico City, which has historically had a bad reputation for crime, has been relatively safe for over a decade.
Mexico's proximity to the USA, the city's fantastic dining scene (for instance, it's home to three of the world's top 50 restaurants according to World's 50 Best), and its reasonable cost of living have all made CDMX one of the hot cities of the moment.
Digital nomads are flocking to Mexico City, which is ranked fourth globally for remote work. This has helped it become a tech and entrepreneurship hub.
The title of tech capital of Latin America goes, undoubtedly, to São Paulo. Most of the region's unicorns and the world's most notable fintech company, Nubank, were founded there. Becoming a city as safe as Boston certainly played no small part.
But São Paulo used to have a 10x the murder rate in the early 2000s; what happened? According to an analysis by Melina Ingrid Risso, program director of Instituto Igarapé (our source for homicide rates in Latin America), the most likely explanations are the city's police reform and strict controls on firearms.
Of course, progress comes with a cost and some deterrents. Rents have been steadily climbing, and gentrification is taking place. However, such economic development often outweighs the costs: safety is necessary to ensure the billions of dollars invested and the millions of jobs created.