worst shithole of a major american city

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

I like Philly.

i think so much of this correlates to being poor or wealthy in the city in question, no?

xp By which I mean I went there 3 times and everyone was always nice and the city seemed pretty enough and had about 300% better housing options than where I live/was living at the time.

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

i'm gonna guess university of central florida, which for some unknown crazy reason had the highest enrollment in the country. wiki says it's second now. had some friends and tennis team pals transfer there.

philly's great! definitely not a shithole

it kinda peeves me how often Houston is mentioned in this capacity. there's nothing bad about Houston that doesn't apply to a ton of other places. Maybe because it's the biggest city outside of LA and the major east coast cities.

i'm gonna guess university of central florida, which for some unknown crazy reason had the highest enrollment in the country. wiki says it's second now. had some friends and tennis team pals transfer there.

― andrew m., Wednesday, October 5, 2011 12:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah, UCF it is. there's prob a lot of factors as to why they have so many students... when i saw the campus in 06 it was like a community college hollowed out in the middle of a forest, but i've heard that it looks way better now

re: houston, it has all the terrible things about new orleans (weather, crime, lack of trees, giant roaches, etc) and none of the charm.

I've spent a lot of time in both Houston and Dallas and Dallas wins this thread easy. Houston's achille's heel is its hellacious traffic which does count for something... (ok and the humidity.) But there's more to be found under the surface in Houston whereas Dallas is basically just surface. Dallas is just this awkward failed amalgam of wannabe-la and wannabe-nyc that just feels like... Phoenix?

lots of philly love. maintain that compared to the rest of the marquee american cities -- LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC, Miami -- it is by far the biggest shithole. obvi if we're including 'major american city' to include fresno and detroit it's got competition but otherwise stand by my claim

inside and all around Rice University there are some beautiful trees!

actually prefer giant roaches who make their presence known to the little ones hiding in the walls.

As a resident of Houston for 22 years, it has all the issues of an suburban sprawl, but its culture is limited to them. The major social outlet for most residents appears to be megachurches, even the most walkable neighborhoods are pedestrian unfriendly, the nearest decent hiking trail or beach is 600 miles away.

the weather is totally unbearable though. growing up there, however, has made consistent temps below 50 just as unbearable for me :-/

I'll admit, though, I don't think Dallas (or Tulsa, or OK City etc.) have any edge on Houston (save weather). Houston's major calling card is probably the reasonably priced restaurant scene.

i think seattle, boston miami and dc are all shitholier than philly tho de gustibus etc

i'm always gonna be curious how Houston is doing, i think. i root for it.

oh i like seattle a lot, not that i could ever live there

I mean Charalambides will never release an album entitled Dallas

yeah plus Dallas will never produce weird Jandek album covers.

the only American city that I have a crush on is New Orleans; kinda don't see what the big deal is about any other American city. There's lots to love about the USA as a place of intense natural beauty, but not its cities. IMO etc

i am blind w/ love for nyc but most of the rest of the cities in this country i can take or leave. i hear nice things abt chicago.

cmon you do not see what makes NYC a fairly interesting and unique place in the world?

xp

For what its worth, Jacksonville has the worst walkscore of the top 50 cities. OTOH, its on a lake and 10 miles from the Atlantic.

being from Texas and have a certain experience of what cities are like here, i have to say i go pretty gaga over most the marquee cities and im pretty jealous of people who get to live in them (with at least a moderately healthy income).

10 miles from the Atlantic.

― der dukatenscheisser (Sanpaku), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:17 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i'm not sure if i can think of anything potentially more disgusting than a beach outside of jacksonville

NYC is kind of as much a monument as the grand canyon in some ways, imo.

New York is definitely interesting but I don't know that it's all that unique in the world. I can think of a couple cities that are comparable in terms of what they have to offer but a lot cleaner and less oppressively crowded than NY. Don't get me wrong, I love NYC. I always have and I always will but I would never want to live there again. It's just too much for me after a while.

no city has the same mix of density and diversity

I've spent very little time in NYC, just a couple of days in Manhattan at a conference about 15 years ago. It seemed like there was a lot of traffic. I wasn't sure what the monumental sights were: I guess the buildings are very big, but you can't really go into many of them because they're just businesses or residential. The parts along the water seemed shitty. Getting to/fro LaGuardia was ugly (in Queens? or is that Brooklyn?), just a bunch of ugly brick-ish buildings that looked the same, lots of gaudy billboards, typical American city stuff.

The cities I love are all in Europe or Asia, & what I love (as a visitor) is their monumentalness, their sense of history, that you can walk amongst. New Orleans's the only city in the USA that I've ever gotten that feeling, that there's something deeper there than just modern capitalism.

well, dude

i think what you're getting in the European cities is perhaps pre-modern feudalism then?

oh, whatever, im not going to try and sell people on new york, you either get it or you dont

There is a lot of traffic. He's right about that, at least.

There are ways to not get it, and then there are ways, though.

queens is hella ugly it is also super interesting and cool tho, like a bizarro America without white people. I wouldnt say you've seen ny tho.

xp

Sometimes I wish I hadn't grown up right outside NY so that I could get that first time visiting it feeling other people get to experience. One of my roommates in college was from some rural town in Nebraska and her first day in NYC was the first day of orientation. I can't even imagine how awesome and terrifying that must have been.

I think my honest answer to this question is Las Vegas.

I guess the buildings are very big, but you can't really go into many of them because they're just businesses or residential.

Do...you require to be able to go into buildings in order to justify their existence apart from whatever function they serve for people who live or work or do things in them? Do you require to be able to go into MONUMENTS for them to...er, count, or something?

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