Why are Greyhound bus stations almost always in poor, high crime neighborhoods?
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I feel like most of the comments here kind of miss the obvious; the stations are usually old and have been there long before the neighborhood was poor and/or high crime.
I found one comment that barely touched on it here, but per Wikipedia, greyhound has been around since 1914, and “[by the beginning of WWII, the company had 4,750 stations…](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_Lines?wprov=sfti1)”
That’s a lot of stations that were built in cities all around the country, and at the time a lot of middle class people in those cities were near the traditional urban core. Suburbanization hadn’t happened yet, the interstate system hadn’t been built, and trains/busses were the primary form of intercity travel.
However, once those things occurred, you had middle class flight, white flight, etc. to the suburbs plus increased car usage and plane usage, and the socioeconomic profile of many inner city neighborhoods where Greyhound had invested in stations slowly changed and in many cases deteriorated.
By the time the area around a Greyhound station became “poor, high crime neighborhoods”, Greyhound was no longer in a financial position to move, and the economic status of their customers had also changed so it would’ve been pointless to move anyways. Many middle class people would no longer use intercity bus service as they had before the mid-1970s, as it became most people’s “last resort” to get somewhere.
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