Suburb Of America's Most Dangerous City Wants To Change Its Mailing Address

Reuters/Rebecca CookThe words "No Trespassing" are seen on the front of an abandoned house in a former thriving working-class neighborhood near downtown Flint, Mich. July 8, 2009.

A relatively well-to-do township in Michigan that shares a zip code with crime-ridden Flint doesn't want that city's name as its mailing address anymore, The Flint Journal reports.

Grand Blanc Township officials are fighting the U.S. Postal Service's decision not to allow parts of the 48507 zip code to be "Grand Blanc" instead of Flint, according to the Journal.

The township's supervisor told the Flint Journal that having Flint as its mailing address forces businesses in the town to pay higher insurance rates. Presumably, those higher insurance rates are related to Flint's notoriously high rate of violent crime.

Flint has America's highest murder rate - 62 per 100,000 people compared to 3.8 per 100,000 for New York City - and its population has been shrinking since the dramatic decline of the auto industry there.

Flint is also really poor. More than 38% of its residents live below the poverty level, and its median household income was less than $28,000 as of 2009, according to city-data.com.

Grand Blanc Township, on the other hand, is doing a little better. Its median household income was $59,000 in 2009 compared to $45,000 for the whole state in 2009.

Rob O'Lynnger, who owns Maplebrook Village Apartments in Grand Blanc, told the Journal that Grand Blanc was an attractive place to live.

"We have a lot of families here and when people are deciding where they want to live, school district is important to them," O'Lynnger told the Journal. "We're proud to be part of Grand Blanc and we want residents to know we are a part of it."