<p>The campus is large, and the off-campus student apartments and houses are in a well-defined even larger area north of campus. That area is packed with students watching out for each other, well-policed and as safe as any other university setting. You get 30,000 undergrad and graduate students spread out over a large area and things will occasionally happen, anywhere.</p>
<p>The areas more than a block west of Vermont (the west campus boundary) and south of Exposition Park (the huge buffer park at the south boundary) are kind of seedy, but there is no reason any students would be in those areas. None. No one would accidentally go south or west when they meant to go north.</p>
<p>The 110 Freeway is east of campus, and the area is industrial east of that. So east is neutral, neither attractive nor scary, irrelevant to this discussion.</p>
<p>So it is true that it is kind of ghetto south and west of campus, but who cares?, because there is no reason to go that way for anything. I am glad someone else pointed out that Yale is in a worse ghettoey area. Nobody ever says “I was thinking about applying to Yale, but then I found out it is in a bad neighborhood.”</p>