worst shithole of a major american city

which major american city (you define "major") most closely resembles an ass-ugly, boring-as-fuck shithole?

now i haven't traveled all over this fine land but based on my limited experience i'm going to say indianapolis

new york

Stockton, CA is the biggest shithole of a city i've ever visited. it's bigger than Newark, NJ (which is also a shithole but at least it isn't boring) so if either qualifies as "major" then Stockton would get my vote.

by shithole i guess i'm thinking less urban decay/blight and more "christ is this place boring"

though for both at once you could do worse than toledo, ohio

Phoenix?

Didn't we do this? Hard to search on phone but I could swear....

This has to be Houston...

Jacksonville.

Yeah we totally did this within the last year. I think it was poll thread.

of the cities I've been to I have no idea how this CAN'T be Newark

Tallahassee itself wasn't that great but I had a lot of fun on the FAMU campus

if it was a major city, this would be Alexandria, LA no contest

ohhhh, tallahasee is not a major city

but it's a capital!

signed, someone who grew up outside of St. Paul

it's a college town that is also a capital for no reason

of the cities I've been to I have no idea how this CAN'T be Newark

the city that gave the world Redman, Corey Booker and Tony Soprano; whose nickname is "Brick City" and has a neighborhood called Ironbound with tons of yummy Latino & Portuguese eats (and whose old nickname is Down Neck); and isn't even the skankiest city in New Jersey (that honor belongs to either Camden or East Orange) is totally not the worst shithole of a major American city.

i strongly suspect Jacksonville would win this contest -- but i've never been there so i can't vote for it. i have been to Stockton, CA and that does get my vote.

somewhere in alabama ime

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/82/239891424_8e99979771.jpg

one reason why Newark doesn't win this contest ... yum

Albany

steve shasta otm

newark is not a major city, i mean whats a major city, whatever it is not newark

but yeah prob houston i support that

idk top 30 top 40 maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas

kinda want to argue DC here but i know its not really true

eh if you go by that then riverside/san berdoo is one of the top 15 cities in the country

never been to houston, so i have to say phoenix. every time i've been there i've hated the fuck out of it.

im just gonna lump then in w/l.a. nbd xp

from that wiki list

26 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL MSA

^^ding ding ding

Well Houston won at least one of the times this was done before.

of the 20 largest american cities, which is THE WORST?

Charlotte

This is the one I was thinking of that we did more recently:

What Is America’s Most Miserable City?

Orlando is really bad.

man these threads full of how bad we can hate on a place are such a drag

I know I ain't gotta read 'em but phooey on you hater ppl all these towns got something great about em

nuh uh *explodes orlando and every human within*

i know a lot of people that went to COLLEGE in ORLANDO

COLLEGE!!!

aero do you really believe there are simply no shitty parts of the country at all

orlando has disneyworld!! wtf!!

lol, you've really never been to orlando, have you

i've been to disneyworld. also dwight howard

Houston

aero do you really believe there are simply no shitty parts of the country at all

not just the country the world. like I goof on Germany but that's just because I had a shitty time there once that was like this month-long horror so traumatizing that I can't re-enter the country w/o reliving it, but when I'm not just doing "lol they shit on shelves" schtick I know better, all kinds of good things about Germany obv. (nb I still avoid the hell out of it don't get me wrong.) I just think everyplace in the fuckin world is nice there's good people & beautiful things everywhere & "what place sucks the most?" is just such a make-the-world-a-tiny-bit-worse look. and I think people who take a lot of pleasure in talking about how shitty this or that place is are without exception more unpleasant to hear & be around than the places they're running down.

Ilxville

Houston is a shithole and it smells bad

consists entirely of a highway

has sideways traffic lights

I'm with aero to an extent, but Houston sounds pretty bad.

jacksonville seconded

using amster's defn of shithole

In terms of visiting and hanging out for a couple of days every major or second-tier level city I've been to has had something worth checking out. If you like roaming around and people watching and eating and finding out what sort of defines a place it's always fun for a least a couple of days, even just to wonder why exactly half a million or so people all choose to live in a particular spot.

But I've never lived anywhere particularly huge or immediately mind-blowing so my perspective and willingness to look for the good in places and/or my tolerance for boring shit might be higher.

smh @ lack of philly

on the scale of well-known american cities (excising stockton orlando etc.) def a srs shithole

But Detroit is further east than all of Alabama, and Alabama is in the SEC, so....

frightened to imagine what moov's posts look like before they're "edited down'

timecube.txt, basically

https://i.imgur.com/noQitra.gif

Minneapolis is growing not shrinking

http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-is-experiencing-a-population-boom-like-the-roaring-twenties/422600314/

(it's down from it's peak but the population is rising now, and I think will eventually get back to 500k if the current condo/apartment boom continued unabated)

for work we had a client involved in downtown minneapolis commerce and they said that downtown has added 10K population in the last decade

i'd be curious how accurate that list is...because they are comparing 2010 census to mid-century peaks, which most if not all of that loss was probably starting in the late 60s through the 80s and not (necessarily) indicative of what's going on now (though in some cases they could still be shrinking obv)

Residents continue to pour into Minneapolis, which is seeing its biggest decade for growth since the 1920s.

Latest estimates from the Metropolitan Council show the city has grown by about 10 percent since just 2010, adding about 37,374 residents. That puts the city's population, now about 419,000, on pace to reach nearly 450,000 by the end of the decade.

there's a lot of goofy stuff on this the more you look at it.
like Newark's "decline" is from a peak in 1930, it's actually stable and up slightly since 1990

same with New Haven (same since 1990), Washington DC (up over 100,000 people since 1997)

Boston is up 100,000 people since 1990 as well

Cities have gravity.

thinking about starting to pronounce shithole with a soft th. if anyone else wants to get on board i would appreciate the support.

hard h shithole is a shibboleth

I knew something was off with the poor KC showing, and I was right - I had not adjusted the density calculation for its historical footprint as I had done with Louisville, e.g. Reworking the figures places KC just behind STL in the overall ranking (roughly 20th place), and ahead of it, just behind Detroit (and Silicon Valley), in the age-agnostic one. That is, it's firmly in place with the traditional cities that still rank ahead of the bigger Atlantas, Dallas/Houstons, and Phoenixes.

The only large core cities that are still losing people are almost entirely contained within the rust belt.

I left Minneapolis in 1995. Figured I had accidentally started a trend.

Plugging in the Canadian cities, not entirely apples to apples but I think close enough, I rank Toronto and Montreal just behind Philly and ahead of LA. On an age-agnostic ranking, LA beats MTL, but TO pulls ahead of both Philly and LA, while still trailing Boston/DC/SF etc. Vancouver ranks right behind the Twin Cities, just ahead of Seattle, but age-agnostic it pulls ahead of both, right behind Miami.

If we just give you this thread, would you concentrate the entirety of your ILX posting energies on further elaborations of your urban demographic model?

according to my own matrix - i won't bore you with the details of how this is worked out - vancouver, bc ranks slightly ahead of scranton pa, but somewhat behind vancouver wa and perpendicular to boise id. toronto and montreal are tied with sequim wa but slightly ahead of sioux city ia

well, that's not so surprising, vancouver is in the northeast while sioux city, being high on the windy steppe, has long attracted new residents from mongolia as well as the argentinian reaches of the altiplano.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiplano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Assessments
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage

basic stuff can't believe i'm having to explain all this

making amendments to the matrix

I moved to Minneapolis in 1994, btw.

its not a major american city but i was watching the first episode of Flint Town on Netfix, their sad documentary series on Flint, Michigan and i flashed back to years ago when maria and i drove across the country and we were on the highway going by/passing Flint and i got an overwhelming feeling of danger/dread that i had never experienced before. i remember thinking in my head: oh jeez please don't break down please don't break down. like i really really wanted to get past the city exits as quickly as possible. i was afraid that if we broke down nobody would ever find us. or wolves would eat us? it was weird. i've driven through a lot of bad shit in eastern cities, nyc, philly, camden friggin' nj. never felt like that before or since.

just thought i'd share that here.

Flint - the R'lyeh of the USA.

Flint is among the two dozen or so that have declined under the 100K mark, along with other frequently-dismissed cities like Camden, Gary, Scranton, Trenton, and Youngstown, but I still rank it just ahead of Ann Arbor for urbanity

wow, that's crazy that trenton has less than 100k people. i always think of it as more populated. even my ailing neighbor springfield, ma has more people than that. they might not all be happy about it, but they are there.

worcester has an even bigger population than springfield. almost 200 thousand. little-known fact.

The Trenton metro area, which is coterminous with Mercer County, is much larger, 370K, but Trenton proper has been under 100K for the past four decades or so.

Worcester is a fascinating city. All of the advantages of the first half of the twentieth century, and all the disadvantages from the second half.

This fella would like a word with you about saying Ohio is the Northeast.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYYCl24X4AIiCP-.jpg

Yeah but Butler Co. is SW.

Layers upon layers, like cheese on chocolate on spaghetti.

Mmm chili mac

It's 100 miles from Columbus. That'd still be the same metro area in Texas.

Please to read again: "Northeast" was shorthand for "Northeast quadrant of the country" (for which I assume no visual aid is necessary). While I'm not sure the Western Reserve shouldn't be incorporated into a "Northeast" that the Feds officially extend to the Western NY/PA borders (and I'd tend to extend it below the Mason-Dixon to include DC), I wouldn't regard anything west of the Appalachians in those states as the Northeast.

tbf you also have previously located arkansas within the appalachians so i'm rolling with the assumption that all of this geography is loosely or indeed randomly assigned

And no one else has ever used "Northeast" as shorthand for "Northeast quadrant".

Please to read again: I wrote a post that referred to the "Northeast quadrant of the country" then subsequently used "Northeast" as a shorthand reference to same. I then edited the post without noticing that I had excised the former description. Thank you for your concern.

I grew up in Zone 17 but when my parents divorced my mom moved us into the Moot Realm. Still have family there.

salt lake city is a waking nightmare for the most part. it's a place that gaslights you for wanting to partake of things like "clean air" and "genuine culture"

streets are too wide for the chariots

Please to read again: I wrote a post that referred to the "Northeast quadrant of the country" then subsequently used "Northeast" as a shorthand reference to same. I then edited the post without noticing that I had excised the former description. Thank you for your concern.

― Moo Vaughn, Thursday, March 15, 2018 10:47 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i too would like to thank ez snappin for his concern in a very sincere manner. (also dude that earthless record is ill)

The top 75 US/CDN cities on my age-half-inclusive measure (of traditional urbanity?)...
NYC
Chicago
Boston
San Francisco
Washington, D.C.
Philadelphia
Toronto
Montreal
(Newark)
Los Angeles
Baltimore
(East Bay)
Minneapolis-St. Paul
Vancouver
Seattle
Orange County
Providence
Miami
Long Island
(Camden)
Detroit
New Haven
St. Louis
Kansas City
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Denver
Milwaukee
Dallas
Portland
San Diego
Atlanta
Houston
(Wilmington)
San Jose-Silicon Valley
New Orleans
Buffalo
Hartford
Bridgeport-Stamford
Rochester
Sacramento
Cincinnati
Fort Lauderdale
Worcester
Columbus
Riverside-San Bernardino
Hampton Roads
Tampa Bay
Lehigh Valley
Louisville
Ventura County
Fort Worth
(Tacoma)
Honolulu
San Antonio
Grand Rapids
Phoenix
Las Vegas
Albany
(Reading)
Syracuse
Richmond
Austin
(Trenton)
Stockton
Charlotte
Omaha
Fresno
Springfield MA
Indianapolis
Salt Lake City
(Akron)
Orlando
Raleigh
Toledo
(Scranton)
Memphis
Albuquerque
Dayton
(Santa Rosa/Sonoma County)
El Paso

The top 50 on my age-agnostic measure (of big-city-ness less concerned with traditional urban form?)...
NYC
Chicago
Boston/Washington, D.C./San Francisco
Toronto
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Montreal
Miami
Vancouver
Seattle
Baltimore
Twin Cities
Detroit
Kansas City
St. Louis
Pittsburgh/Dallas
San Diego
Sacramento
Houston/Portland
Denver
Cleveland
Milwaukee/Atlanta
Hartford
Tampa Bay
Las Vegas
Phoenix/Buffalo
Rochester
New Orleans
Hampton Roads
Honolulu
Cincinnati
Columbus
San Antonio
Louisville
Grand Rapids
Fresno
Austin
Charlotte
Albany
Orlando
Richmond
Syracuse
Raleigh
Salt Lake City
Springfield, MA
Albuquerque
Indianapolis

yes but which are shitholes

That is not my preferred nomenclature, dude.

sad that we'll never know

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/21/781703956/utah-woman-charged-with-lewdness-after-being-topless-in-her-own-home

“worst state” to be fair. it’s fuckin weird out here folks. west valley city is a gritty burb directly adjacent to salt lake city and is far from the worst shithole city here though. that would be somewhere completely cursed like vernal or nephi.

or price. carbon county has something like 44 opiate scrips per capita