Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-16083651-20140722215813/@comment-19765459-20140723170156

LadyX wrote:

Is it really that overly developed? From what we've seen it jives pretty well with what I've seen of South Bend, my county capital. Of course, it's an actual city with it's own police force, not just relying on county brownies...

The wooded areas may feel more natural to the werewolves, but I've definitely been thinking it's not the most logical place to reside for the very reason you've stated. But yea, I could easily see two or three packs sharing a city like San Fran, LA, Chicago, or NYC. Not including their corresponding counties.

I've just been looking at the county being a Hale territory, and the fact that they've never introduced any other werewolf residents subtly confirmed that. It seems sudden that were are learning about other established packs in the county. Why were they not involved in any of the previous messes? Why did they never. Approach Derek? Hell, why wouldn't they have handled the Peter situation before Laura? It was basically unclaimed territory for six years, but would draw Hunters putting themselves at risk if they didn't do anything. Oh hell yeah it's over-developed! How many HUGE abandoned, industrial buildings have we seen? Derek lives in a tall, seemingly abandoned high-rise industrial space. There was also the abandoned shopping mall where they fought the Alpha Pack. Plus there are places outside of the town proper (like the distillery). Yet it is small enough that it is apparently unincorporated and policed by the county sheriff. It may be that it once had a much larger population when industry was more vigorous and the town has seen major population decline, which would explain all the vacant real estate.

A real big city could, based on what we've seen, support multiple werewolf packs easily. They are still people, and if they want to go out to the woods they could always just drive like any normal Californian.

I'm assuming that Beacon Hills was vacant territory because of the high levels of Hunter activity. Word of what happened to Deucalion's pack had to have gotten around after the slaughter at the distillery. Thus we've seen that significant Hunter involvement in the area goes all the way back to when the Hale's were still the local pack. One stray Omega wandered into town in S2 and was quickly killed by Gerard & Co. It is probably not a coincidence that other werewolves are only showing up in numbers now that Chris has pulled the Hunters out of town. In S3b it was clear that he'd dismissed all of his minions, since he, Allison and Isaac constituted the entire "Hunter" presence in town. Whereas in the past there were apparently enough of them that they had Hunters monitoring local CCTV and eavesdropping on cellular activity.

The sense may have been that the Hunters never really vacated the town until just recently. And since the sheriff's department was not well-staffed enough to notice all the illegal hunting, with illegal weapons, going on in the Preserve, the town probably never seemed safe. Otherwise the surviving Hale Alpha (Laura) would have been expected to live there, which she didn't.