I suspect answer for you is that you would feel unsafe in most of northern Berkshire county. Note that you would not be actually be unsafe. But even in the nicer towns and best neighborhoods, you'd need to go into Pittsfield or North Adams to get groceries and stuff. You would see people panhandling, maybe a run down building. You'd know that there are homeless encampments out there, somewhere, too close for comfort. If you think there are problems on the Cape or in Portland, you certainly aren't going to like driving down Tyler St.

Now if you go to south county, you will likely feel very safe. Everything is quaint and idyllic looking. All the bad stuff will (allegedly) be up north, far away. You can even cultivate a hyper-local disdain for the less-than inhabitants of Lee and Housatonic.

Note that you will not actually be any safer in south county. You might even be less safe. People seem to get run over in Great Barrington pretty frequently. You're much further away from the region's only real hospital if you have a medical emergency. I can assure you there is plenty of opiate addiction there too, just like everywhere else. But you will feel safe.

Yeah, all the parks in the Berkshires are chock full of junkies haphazardly tossing needles all over the place. That's totally a real thing you should be very worried about. People don't rake leaves this time of year, they rake needles.

And don't even get me started on the dangers of fentanyl. I heard about this one guy who became an addict just by being in the same building as fentanyl. It's that bad. Fentanyl can kill a grizzly bear at 100 paces. Fentanyl slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. All those youtube videos and facebook posts are completely true and you should spend your entire life utterly terrified of absolutely everything.

It is absolutely subjective. The number of innocent victims of violent crime by strangers is vanishingly small damn near everywhere. What people usually mean by "safe" is "do my neighbors look scary", and what they really mean is "are they poor or brown skinned".

Seconding what the above poster said. A good tiler will find plenty of work anywhere in the state. And while some may travel to other parts of New England like another poster suggested, it almost certainly won't be necessary to stay busy.

If you want (slightly) more affordable areas than greater Boston, the 5 colleges region around Amherst/North Hampton and southern Berkshire County both have plenty of upper income residents who will pay well for quality work.

There are some weird assumptions here, the first being that gentrification is a desirable thing. The process involves driving out all the lower income and working class residents so a bunch of bougey pricks can get a latte without the risk of encountering poor people. Where are all the current residents supposed to go when the already unaffordable housing becomes literally impossible for them to pay for?

Second, Springfield and all the rest of the deindustrialized mill towns in western Mass are basically fine. Things looked (often literally) pretty grim in the last few decades of the 20th century when population numbers plummeted, but they have stabilized quite a bit since then. Most of the blight has been cleared. There are ongoing renovation and community development projects through the gateway cities program and other efforts. While controversial, the MGM alone made a pretty big change to the downtown streetscape. Sorry if downtown still isn't twee and sterile enough to be indistinguishable from a mall food court.

Third, Springfield does not need to exist as a satellite of Boston. It never has. Its insurance industry is more closely tied to Hartford. It functions as an important regional transport hub. Baystate Health provides advanced medical care for all of western Mass. It doesn't need to be closer to any airports. BDL is right down the road. Boston is only the center of the universe for people who live inside the 495.