Worcester has a lot of restaurants, especially along Shrewsbury street, downtown, and in the canal district around Kelly Square and the streets north of it (and a bit south too).

We have a few areas that are lower income, some higher, like any city, but it's pretty intermixed and spotted across a bunch of areas in the city. Best bet is unfortunately to look at crime data on sites like Zillow, and consider that most of the heavier density of issues while they tend to have more crime that does not mean they're nessicarily unsafe, we've had a lot of catalitic converter thefts that are skewing the map a bit.

The bus system is free through this year iirc, but we're fighting to keep it beyond that. The WRTA is a hot-mess right now, they're blaming it on drivers taking too much FMLA but they should at this point have been able to correct for it. They've cut routes on Fridays affecting 1000's of riders due to the supposed shortage. On top of that, they run pretty infrequently anyway, and it can take an hour or more to get really anywhere in the city if you have to transfer at the hub. I like to call it a hub and spoke model, without the wheel, because other than the umass university hospital stops, most of the routes do not loop back to re-combine in areas apart from the hub downtown.

The commuter rail from Union Station is going under an upgrade to add a second platform, this hopefully also is a prelude to the continuation of the line towards Springfield. There's supposedly wifi on the trains, but that's generally a lie. They run at decent times, which will probably improve when the 2nd platform opens.

As for where folks hang out, it depends on what you like to do, wrestling and comedy are popular things, so are some bars, do you have any particular preferred methods of hanging out and meeting folks where you currently live?