Two Fridays ago I posed an open question about the best and worst places you have visited or in which you have lived. As I noted at the time I have little experience with international travel but I've travelled extensively in the United States, visiting 49 states (all but Alaska) and spending a decent amount of time driving around both the big cities and back roads of each. Here, then, are my conclusions about the worst towns/cities in the U.S. It's not impossible to live in these places and like them, I suppose, but it would require a ton of money, the optimism of a Mormon missionary, and a mastery of self-delusion. There are a lot of crapholes in this country and I could spend all day naming them. But these stand out, for reasons that you no doubt understand if you've visited.
5. Lubbock, Texas – Quite literally the Middle of Nowhere, Lubbock stands as an oasis of nothingness in an enormous sea of more nothingness. Bad places often advertise their proximity to decent places, i.e. "Scranton is only an hour from Philadelphia!" Lubbock's claim is "Only five and a half hours from Fort Worth!" Favorite pastimes among Lubbock residents include crapping out kids like Pez dispensers, bragging about how cheap their huge homes were (oblivious to the relationship between property values and desirability) and committing suicide. Being in Lubbock creates a sense of total isolation comparable to over-wintering in Antarctica or spacewalking outside the International Space Station. Hot, boring, and stuffed to the brim with prodigiously breeding Fundamentalist Texas stereotypes, Lubbock edges out El Paso and Huntsville for the right to represent the state. Trust me, Texas has a lot of candidates here.
4. Youngstown, Ohio – The poster child for post-industrial Midwestern urban decay. Gary, Flint, and Detroit get more press, but Youngstown is the perfect synthesis of blight, obscene pollution, a complete lack of anything to do (economically or for entertainment), and a crime rate that would make Johannesburg blush. Hopelessly corrupt Ohio politics govern this excuse for a city, not that there's anything a competent government could do. The attitude seems to be "Why fix it? Who gives a fuck?" which makes perfect sense in a city that hasn't seen a tree planted, a lick of new paint, or a pothole filled since the steel plants shuttered thirty years ago.
People in Youngstown have absolutely no reason to live and spend their days desperately plotting an escape to Dayton, Allentown, or the sweet release of death.
3. Reno, Nevada – Where hope goes to die. A fifth-rate, non-union Mexican equivalent of Vegas. Given that Vegas already kinda sucks, this is particularly damning. Don't go to the casinos hoping to live out a 1960s Rat Pack film. They're loaded to the gunwales with junkies, the homeless, people who soon will be homeless, and other assorted societal detritus. A sad black hole of broken dreams, alcoholism, and gambling addiction. If Vegas is a glamorous date with a supermodel, Reno is being fingered by your uncle.
If Vegas is champagne toasts with celebrities, Reno is beer-bonging Natty Ice behind a currency exchange. If Vegas is a majestic cruise ship, Reno is bobbing from Havana to Miami on a floating door. If Vegas is a $1000 meal with Thomas Keller, Reno is jamming a can of Cheese Whiz in your mouth and pressing hard. If not for its proximity to Lake Tahoe, Reno might rank even lower.
2a. Colorado Springs, Colorado – Unlike the others on this list, CS is relatively clean, has some wealth, and enjoys decent (if extreme) weather. It is also a megachurch and defense contractor infested cesspool which feels as artificial as Main Street, USA at Disneyworld. Celebration, Florida has more authentic character. Strip malls, megachurches, subdivisions, more strip malls, more megachurches, and more subdivisions, all populated with a mixture of humorless Dobson acolytes, buzz-cut Air Force personnel, and defense industry hangers-on.
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If Orange County and Southern California invented the awful, generic suburban strip mall landscape, CS took it to its logical extreme. Driving through this "city" is like watching one of those old, cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons where they re-used the same background over and over and over.
2b. Lexington, Nebraska – Oh, you want someplace "bad" in the more traditional sense? Lexington is a rank outpost dominated by incomprehensibly big meat processing facilities (Tyson, IBP) which bathe the town in a noxious, knee-buckling blanket of excrement, rendered animal matter, and chemical wastes. Classic meat processing town – illegal aliens (the meat industry are equal opportunity exploiters, sampling Mexico, north Africa, and Eastern Europe with equal aplomb) crammed 10 per apartment, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, obscene crime rates, and a closer resemblance to Calcutta than Cleveland. Lexington goes the extra mile, though, littered with abandoned and rusting cars, often simply left in the middle of the road, and completely overrun by packs of feral dogs. Seriously. A Mad Max backdrop of burned buildings, broken windows, rusted appliances dumped on lawns and sidewalks, abandoned vehicles, and garbage that no one, least of all the city, bothers to pick up. Now Tyson is importing illegals from the Sudan, giving the rural Nebraska town an exploding HIV-positive population it is ill-equipped to handle. Redefines "godforsaken."
1. Holbrook, Arizona/Pine Ridge, South Dakota – Indian reservations, especially those not proximate enough to populated areas to throw up casinos, are horrendously depressing places. So take your pick. These two, representing the Navajo and Sioux nations, respectively, are just brutal. Like abandoned trailer parks after an F5 tornado. If you want to see people living in the borders of the United States without electricity, indoor plumbing, or any source of income, here's your chance. Grinding poverty, a complete absence of hope for improvement, cultural disenfranchisement, and magnified doses of every social problem in the country – teen pregnancy, meth, suicide, homicide, illiteracy, gangs – define reservation towns. Holbrook looks like a beat-up carnival ride, the kind you see in parking lots of county fairs, and ensures that anyone foolish enough to visit (Petrified Forest National Park is nearby) will have their car broken into as a reward. Shameful. Embarrassing. Pitiful. Guaranteed to make you feel better about your town.
I defy you to dispute any of these, although I'm confident that there are a lot of close honorable mentions one could argue for inclusion.
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Ike says:
You ougtta make a Google Earth thingy for these.
FMguru says:
I can't believe not a single place in Florida made your list. I assume Houston was just bubbling under the top 5.
Sophia says:
My grandmother lives in the Lake Tahoe area, and I'll put in a vote for Carson City as worse than Reno. Same sad-ass casinos except sadder-assed.
daphne says:
Everett, Washington: armpit of Seattle. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Identical row houses. As for Colorado Springs, if I remember correctly, it had a pretty-enough town square, Debbie Fields Cookies (or am I dating myself), and – whatever this indicates – numerous thrift stores.
Mark says:
I used to be stationed at Fort Carson…. It's only an hour from Denver!
comrade x says:
Richmond, Kentucky. The hill people live in trailers strewn through the Appalachians. You can tell if a trailer is inhabited if their is a fresh ring of garbage bags around it. No shit, it looks like the locals just step out on their front stoop, wind up, and throw the trash bag somwhere out in their yard.
In the pleasantly surprised category, I thought Mobile, Alabama was one of the prettiest cities I ever saw. People seemed friendly, too, even to a Yank like me.
SamInMpls says:
As a child, I lived for a short time in Plainview Texas which is advertised as only 46 miles North of Lubbock AND 75 miles South of Amarillo! One thing to add about Lubbock: Prior to May 9, 2009, you couldn't buy a six pack or a bottle of wine. No packaged alcohol of any kind could be sold.
There is one nice thing I can say about my time there: My 1st grade class was bilingual and the teacher always went through everything with the entire class in English and Spanish. My guess is that this was not an approach that was dictated to her or otherwise implemented district-wide but it also didn't appear to ruffle any feathers. I didn't retain much Spanish (moved to MN) but had enough at one time to be introduced to Voltron, Defensores del Universio!
SarahMC says:
I guess I'm pleased Scranton only got a passing mention rather than its own number. Phew. Lay off Scranton, though! I grew up there and I love it there. Most people who diss it have only "driven through there" on 81 or something. It's really quite beautiful if you venture away from the highway.
Tosh says:
Holy shit.
In that post I see the elements of a nascent Frommer's USA 2009 except, you know, places to avoid?
poor Trope says:
I'm throwing troy and Schenectady new york in the mix. Places that have trappings of former wealth, like old brownstones turned crack dens. Only one out of three stores on main street is open, I mean a boarded up main street! Places that could be nice again but years of de-industrialization and state neglect leave only glimpses of what it used to look like. They are the hot cheerleader in high school who got knocked up and hooked on meth, which is to say the former beauty and promise makes it all the more depressing.
Evan Sultanik says:
Camden, NJ. Its only saving grace is that it is on the other side of the river from Philadelphia.
44% of the residents live in poverty, the highest rate in the nation (2006 Census).
There is one aggravated assault reported for every five residents (2007 data).
Consistently ranked America's most dangerous city by the NY Times.
Due to a history of corruption (viz. payoffs from the mob and drug dealers), the state of NJ basically revoked Camden's right to be self-governing (the mayor now has no real power).
I work in Camden. The first time I drove in to my job a cop pulled me over. Officer to me: "You shouldn't be here. I'll escort you back over the bridge."
Will says:
Reno isn't notable in Nevada for its squalor – a hundred miles in any direction gets you fantastic levels of squalor. Reno is notable for the size and consistency of its squalor. It's like one of the dwindling gold rush towns that metastasized and somehow kept growing.
About 10 years ago a sinkhole opened up about five miles west of downtown Reno, taking out part of I-80 and filling with water. The natural solution: WATERSIDE RESORT. A team of Navy divers training there caught somthing virulent from the water.
It's a special, special place.
Michael says:
My partner grew up on a cotton plantation in the middle of the Mississippi delta. To go visit his grandmother we drive through progressively smaller shitholes like Cruger, MS. Every time we go, I'm just amazed.
The Truth says:
You dare us to defy these? Your defying a lot of other lists that have placed Reno in the top five for cities to live. Have you ever been to Reno lately — or are your recollections of Reno based on some ancient memory, or perhaps its based on an absurd depiction of Reno from the show Reno 911, which is shot in California BTW? I have been fortunate enough to live in numerous places. Reno happens to be one of my favorite towns based on my love for the outdoors and Reno's proximity to Lake Tahoe. Also, Reno is a great place to go mountain biking, tubing on the Truckee River, or kayaking — certainly these are recreational activities that most individuals enjoy, and can be done in a beautiful and NATURAL setting.
Additionally, Reno has always been a diverse town with a diverse economy. Unlike Vegas, Reno has not or will never base its economy on gambling — which is why I feel your comment regarding lost dreams and your description of hobos running rampant is not only incredibly exaggerated, but completely unfounded — especially considering the impoverished state of a lot of rural cities across the nation whose level of poverty are actually worth noting. Also, based on the increasing local university population, the town has transformed into a cultural and artistic gem.
I can easily think of 10 towns i have been to that are far worst than Reno. And my judgment is based on my substantial experience within these cities — not an understanding of Reno that is devoid of any true or realistic description of what the city actually is. This is actually reflective in the fact that half your description consists of analogies to a city that shares its state borders with Reno but no more.
Will says:
Did I neglect to mention that the Reno-Sinkhole-Turned-Marina was an EPA Superfund site before it got flooded out? A place that was at one point a toxic stew of chemicals is now a Fun Family Water Experience for Northern Nevadans.
Special, special place. And people.
Ed says:
Well let's thank the Mayor of Reno for stopping by.
If your analysis of Reno is as good as your spelling and grammar, then perhaps I am wrong. For future reference, saying "I can think of at least 10 worst places (sic)" is not a ringing endorsement.
Robert says:
I'm reminded of HL Mencken's essay on the American 'libido for the ugly'. It's worth re-reading, especially in light of the ongoing coarsening of the national dialogue.
I live in Oakland CA, which combines areas of remarkable beauty and grace with other areas of terrifying squalor and crime. It's peculiar.
Paul says:
I can't really comment on the particular choices here; they all seem awful enough in their own ways. But I do see a real bias at work. Like the law which the Supreme Court overturned in the Ricci decision, the reality of the bias is so obvious as to invalidate the results. You've been to every State in the Union but Alaska, and only one city west of the Mississippi makes it onto your list? Lucky for you, Ricci was overturned by the totally non-activist conservatives on the Court, so you can claim an honest test.
You don't like wide open spaces. That's fine. But it shouldn't be one of the major reason for placing a city on your list, which it seems to be.
There's not an Appalachian town out there where the fighting cocks are only marginally more inbred than the crackers who own them that doesn't rate worse than Lubbock? Please. Or no crime riddled tenement filled hellhole on the east coast that's worse than Reno? Richmond KY and Camden NJ, both mentioned above, would seem to qualify.
I'll give you Colorado Springs, though. It's only an hour away from Denver(!), where I live, and Dobson and his ilk are the taint of and on the otherwise pretty decent State of Colorado.
Dr. Derty says:
Love the Hanna-Barbara simile. Hilarious. Very original. I actually go to Co-Springs occasionally as we have offices there (I work for a defense contractor). Everything you say is true. The roads there are crazy too. I could not stay in one lane for more than two intersections without it merging into another lane or becoming a right-turn only lane, which can be annoying when the avg. speed limit is 50 to 60 MPH.
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