u/QuinnFromVivint

We ran 2024 FBI burglary data against housing age across 177 US cities, and the pattern is pretty clear: The newer the homes in a city, the fewer break-ins on average.

Cities where most homes were built after 2000 averaged 14.8 burglaries per 100,000 people, while cities full of pre-1960 homes averaged 36.6. that's more than double, just going by build era.

But then there's Seattle. It has a well-above-average share of newer homes (37.5% built after 2000), and it still scored the highest burglary rate in the whole study at 97.8 per 100,00. Denver, Houston, and Austin shoed the same trend on a smaller scare: High break-in numbers despite new constructions.

So a recent build date clearly isn't doing the work people assume it is.

The reason makes sense once you think about it. A newer home might come with a better deadbolt and a tighter frame, but build quality isn't the same as ana alarm system or a camera that alerts you to danger in real time.

Did you assume your newer place made you safer? And has that ever actually been put to the test?

We ranked 94 US cities on how safe and renter-friendly they are for apartment living, and Omaha came out on top, with Tampa right behind it. Both scored well on low property crime plus rent that isn't brutal.

Oakland and Memphis landed at the very bottom, mostly because property crime there is high enough to outweigh the fact hat they're actually petty affordable to rent in.

This measurement isn't purely a crime ranking. Property crime counts for most of the score, but rent prices, how many people rent, and how much a city searches for apartment security all factor in too.

So a city can rank well partly for being cheap and renter-heavy, not just safe.

If you just want the lowest burglary rates, Port St. Lucie, Virginia Beach, and Jersey city came out lowest of everyone analyzed. Seattle, Memphis, and Oakland had the highest.

You can see where your city landed across all four factors in the full ranking.

When you picked where to live, did safety actually factor into it, or did rent and location win out?

We ranked a batch of mid-size US cities based on affordability, safety, and how hot the housing market is. Rochester, NY took the top spot in 2026, followed closely by Savannah, GA.

Rochester won mostly on momentum. It had the hottest housing market in the whole study, so demand is climbing, but prices haven't blown up the way they have in the big metros yet. Savannah stood out due to safety. It has the lowest property crime and the lowest violent crime rate of any city we looked at.

The affordability of houses in these cities also looked very interesting to me.

For example, Birmingham and Akron both came in around $133K to $134K for an average home, when the national average is about $512K. THat's a huge difference from what most people are paying right now.

Have you ever thought about moving to a smaller city? And if you have, what's pulling toward it, or what's making you hesitate?

Many security cameras don't start recording until they detect motion, and there's a tiny lag between that motion and when the recording starts. So by the time the camera is rolling, you're already missed the first moment.

But preroll fixes this issue.

With preroll, your camera always saves footage from a few seconds prior to any recorded activity. This means instead of a clip that begins with someone already on your porch, you get the lead-up, like the direction they came from or the car they stepped out of.

Preroll needs constant power, which is why a lot of battery cameras skip it or offer a shorter version. Hardwired cameras handle it better since they don't have to preserve battery life.

Standard preroll varies in length from 2 seconds to 6 seconds. Vivint's Outdoor Camera Pro and Doorbell Camera Pro do 8 to 10, which is roughly double most other cameras.

Have you ever reviewed security footage only to find the most important moment was missing?

Vivint pulled about 1.88 million property crime reports across 18 metros and matched them to neighborhood names, and the gap between names is wild.

Neighborhoods with the name "Lake" are the safest in the country, with property crime running 40% below it's metro average.

They had the lowest home break-ins, theft, and car break-ins, followed closely by metros with "Heights" or "Park" in the name.

Neighborhoods with "Square" went the complete opposite way, landing 112% above that same average.

Therea rea few famous spots dagging the whole group up. For example, Times Square sees 1,123% more property crime than the NYC average, with Union Square and Hudson Square right behind it.

So, the name that sounds central and walkable and nice ends up being the one that tracks with way more theft.

Ever picked a place partly because of how the name sounded?

We analyzed FBI overnight burglary data from 100 of the biggest US cities, and it turns out that where you live matters a lot more than you'd think.

Seattle topped the list of cities with the most overnight break-ins with 234.6 residential break-ins per 100,000 people between 10pm and 6am. Cleveland and Spokane follow close behind.

The city with th eleast overnight break-ins was Frisco, Texas at 5.9 per 100,000. Irvine and Gilbert are right next to it. That gap is quite huge: Seattle experiences nearly 40 times the overnight burglary rate of Frisco.

We also looked at how people secure their homes at night, and this is the part that surprised me the most, 93% of people lock the front door before bed, but only 46% lock their windows, and just 20% actually arm a security system at night.

That means a lot of us just lock the front door and forget the other spots a burglar can use to get in.

Do you feel safe in your home at night? And if so, what do you do to make it feel safe?

When you picture a break-in, most of us imagine a smashed window or someone forcing the front door. But a lot of break-ins don't happen there at all: They happen through overlooked places like garages and basements.

Garage doors can be easy to get through without much noise. In most homes the garage door leading to the house is often left unlocked, so once someone's in the garage they're basically inside.

Then there are basement and side doors that you can't see from the street. Since they are often out of sight, homeowners might not even thing about them... which is exactly why they get used.

We dug into a few more security myths in a recent survey if you want to see what else people get wrong.

What's that one home security assumption you used to have that turned out to be totally wrong?