Next to Houston, Texas, what is the worst city in the US?

[leftofthedial]

[Chan790]

1. Southington, CT

[jobycom]

2. All cities are beautiful in their own ways. They are all home to someone

and it just seems mean to me to insult people that way.

I'm overly sensitive, having grown up in Mississippi, and hearing the things people say about that! :)

[Chan790]

3. I only diss Southington because I work there

and it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's a funny-shaped strip-mall community littered with superfund sites (most of which belong to Pratt and Whitney who refuses to clean them up and is suing the town claiming they can't be forced to clean-up the toxic waste seeping into the water supply.), no lie.

As far as I can tell, people come there from other towns to shop and only claim to live there; there is no other way a town could claim a population of 61,000 without a single living-domicile in the entire town.

[leftofthedial]

4. Everything is beautiful

in its own way
Like a starry summer night
Or a snow-covered winter's day
And everybody's beautiful, in their own way
Under God's Heaven
The world's gonna find a way

Ya know, jobycom, even if I wasn't so mean, Houston would still suck.

Mississippi is a very interesting place though.

I walked from Natchez To Hushpukena
I built a fire by the side Of the road
I worked for nothin in a Belzoni saw mill.
I caught a Blind out on the B and O
Talullah's friendly Belzoni ain't so
A 44 will get you 99

[jobycom]

5. I like Houston.

I'd live there if I had to move from Austin. It's not tops on my list, but it's not far down, either.

[speedoo]

6. Omaha, Nebraska.

I went there for a job interview with the ex a long time ago. Before we were there 8 waking hours, she said she'd divorce me if I took the job.

It might be a great place for some (Warren Buffett calls it home, so it can't be all bad), but for us it was horrible.

[begin_within]

7. I spent 3 days there and I didn't find it all that unpleasant, frankly

It had a soft, comfortable feel to it, with lots of parks around it, and people living slow, lugubrious, somewhat bland, midwestern lives. Not a place for someone who likes big city action and excitement, but still, I can think of worse places - much worse, like Gila Bend, Arizona or Bombay Beach, California.

[Haole Girl]

14. I lived in Omaha, twice actually

My father was US Air Force...what can I say!
The people were very polite and well-mannered. They were also friendly and welcoming. The main reason I wouldn't want to live there is simply the harsh winter weather. I've lived in much worse places. I don't think you get a real feel for a place in just one day...but, of course, that's just IMHO.

[huskerlaw]

17. Ok, as a native Nebraskan...

I lived in Nebraska for the first 26 years of my life, the vast majority of it in a tiny little town between Lincoln and Omaha. I lived in Omaha for about 5 months, and Lincoln for 8 years.

You'll notice that I only lived in Omaha for 5 months. There are many reasons for that, but not the least of which is because Omaha is a pretty shitty place to live. Particularly when your other option is Lincoln. The thing is, Omaha has all of the big city problems without many of the perks. The crime rate is somewhat ridiculous for the midwest. It's dirty (generally, though it has some nice parts). The only part of town that would be decent to live in is full of McMansions (because the housing is so cheap there that nearly anyone can afford them). And most of the "entertainment" is movie theaters, chain restaurants, and shopping malls.

Now Lincoln, on the other hand, is fabulous. Only 45 minutes to the west and ooooh so much nicer to live in. Of course, much of that is due to it being the home of the main university. For its size and location, it has a lot of diversity and culture.

[MrCoffee]

8. Houston is a great city. You are insane. n/t

[leftofthedial]

12. yeah, it's great in that no zoning, unrestrained capitalism

metastisizing urban cancer, the-place-is-full-of-texans sort of way

one thing it has going for it is that you know what the smell is, unlike some eastern cities.

[StellaBlue]

26. I agree

I am from East Texas and I think Houston is a cess pool. In my experience, the only people who like Houston are fromHouston. And even then, only about 50% like it. The others escape. I am going to a BBQ with a former Houstonian here in Austin RIGHT NOW. He hates Houston.

[Reciprocity]

29. Deep East Texas here.

Try living in the navel of the bible belt and get back to me. Hey Angelina is a dry country. No booze. Just god fearing, gun totin', Repugs for miles and miles.

Now Houston is a great town with horrendous traffic. Lived there for eight years. Oh how could I forget the pollution. Must have been all those brain cells I wasted in my youth.

[Maine-ah]

9. FT. Lauderdale, FL

lived there for 2 years after graduating. What a hole. Too many people, too much violence, the bigotry amazed me. Maybe it was too much of a culture shock or something, but I'll never step foot in that place again.

[kwassa]

10. Lauderdale is full of transients, like much of Florida.

[leftofthedial]

13. the whole state of Florida

well . . . sucks.

[kwassa]

11. Camden, NJ, Newark , NJ, any rustbelt city in the US.

Parts of many major cities are horrible, and parts of the same cities are also beautiful.

[mark414]

15. Las Vegas - it revels in its suckiness

while all the other cities tend to have excuses

[begin_within]

16. Try these two:

Gila Bend, Arizona:



Bombay Beach, California (on the Salton Sea):



Both places extremely hot for half of the year, and both with absolutely nothing to do there, no reason to live there, that I can see.

[Arugula Latte]

18. I'm not a big fan of Los Angeles ...

However, not sure if I'd call it the "worst." It does have hills and ocean access, which are huge to me. I can't stand living in flat areas, for some reason.

The sprawl and brown air and freeways and 'tude would get to me, though.

[petronius]

19. I'm confused - none of those cities are next to Houston

Did you mean to list Beaumont, Galveston, and Port Arthur?

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

20. Spokane,

It is the bleakest place I have ever been in my life – a crappy old railroad town whos best years were fifty years ago where people talk about Expo 74 like it was yesterday.

Spokane’s claim to fame you ask? Nixon’s last presidential visit before resigning!

It also has so much meth that you would think you were an extra in a night of the living dead sequel

Not to mention the old Mayor Jim West was just like Foley, a Republican caught in a scandal over trying to fuck little boys he found on the Internet. I think he even tried to lure one with an offer of basketball equipment. He however didn’t resign, he was recalled and he eventually just died.

And just like Foley – everyone in politics knew what he was up to, including a democratic challenger who said nothing!

[jmowreader]

21. Top Eleven Reasons why Fayettenam is even worse than Houston

Reason 1: Somewhere around 40,000 cars running around this town with the same bumper sticker: Army Wife--Toughest Job In The Army. First, I didn't even know Army Wife WAS a job in the army, and second, I can think of a bunch of jobs that are a hell of a lot tougher than being an army wife...like being the poor bastard who has to knock on an army wife's door and tell her that her husband died to make George Bush richer.

Reason 2: Our latest plan for Drawing Tourists To Fayettenam involves building a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. that's at least ten feet taller than the statue of Saddam Hussein the US Army pulled down in 2003. Using tax dollars.

Reason 3: We've got this guy in Fayettenam named Moses Mathis. They call him the Bicycle Man. I really like him. Mr. Mathis is retired from one of the factories in town, and he spends his time collecting old bicycles no one wants, fixing them as good as new, and giving them to children at Christmas. This is no onesy-twosy operation; the last time I was at his shop he was sitting on around 400 bicycles, and all of them will go out the door two days before Christmas. (I built him a massive set of shelves to store computers on, and somehow he found out I can rebuild a bicycle wheel, so now I go up there a couple times a month and work on wheels for him.) Oh yeah: he does computers now too. He scrounged around 300 of those. Anyone want to guess where the Saddam-sized statue of MLK is gonna go? (Actually, it WAS going to go there, but they decided at the last minute to sell the land to a developer who is going to build a housing project...because there just aren't enough of them. It gets better: the MLK Park Committee, the director of which fucking hates Moses Mathis with a passion, didn't tell anyone she was going to sell his warehouse until after the closing.)

Reason 4: Our city's economic development plan is almost completely dependent on destination tourism. Since we decided to try to convince people to spend their entire vacations in Fayettenam, we lost the Monsanto plant, the Black and Decker plant, two other chemical companies, three textile operations, a company that made electric fans, and we're about to lose the Goodyear tire plant--which is the largest tire factory (as measured in the number of tires that come out of it, the amount of land it covers and the number of people it employs) in the entire world.

Reason 5: Once the destination tourists that we wrote off all our major industry to lure get to Fayettenam, there ain't a damn thing for them to do. Let's see...they can go to the mall, they can see mainstream movies, they can go to a couple of very small art galleries, they can see where famous historical buildings used to be before Sherman burned the town to the ground, and they can play golf at courses just like the ones they have at home. With all those things to do, not going to Fayettenam but saying you did is just as good as actually gassing up your car and driving here.

Reason 6: Only in Fayettenam would a paper run by freepers, that fills its editorial page with the worst kind of freeper bullshit (they like to run slightly-left-of-center editorial cartoons in a size you can cover with your hand, and Glenn McCoy's slightly-left-of-Mussolini editorial cartoons about twelve inches wide) and that dedicates at least three issues a week to Jesus news, receive letters from its readers calling them too liberal.

Reason 7: The underground newspaper in this town is even farther to the right than the mainstream one.

Reason 8: The primary way to get into Fayettenam is to exit I-95. We have spent about fifteen brazillion dollars cleaning up Hay Street to make it this big tourist showcase. To get to Hay Street, you've got to go down US 301, where there are exactly two attractive buildings: the Caterpillar dealer and a Grainger industrial supply store. Everything else looks...let's just call it "kinda rough." For instance, the 301 Motor Lodge, which was hot shit when the 301 was the main way to get up and down the Eastern Seaboard, has a collection of fiberglass animals from the 1950s. That's fantastically nostalgic...until you realize they haven't been painted since the 1950s. IOW, you gotta get past all this trash on the 301, then up an equally-shitty-looking Person Street, to get to the showplace Hay Street. Most people turn the fuck around and leave.

Reason 9: Someone fucked up when they decided to turn Hay Street into a showplace. The theory was, if we dress up the street and turn it into all these little curio and art stores, tourists will just rush to Fayettenam to shop in all these charming little stores. And then the fuckers decided to up the Downtown Privilege Tax to the point that none of the curio and art stores can afford to operate on Hay Street. Half the buildings on Hay are boarded up. Half of the surviving businesses are sitting at the top of the hill looking down on Hay, the others are either within a mile of the mall or on Ramsey Street near Methodist College.

Reason 10: Museums. Museums are great. Museums are wonderful. After the city figured out no one is going to spend their entire vacation shopping along a four-block stretch of this shithole, we went apeshit with building museums. We've got this park that has the names of every Cumberland County resident who got killed in a war engraved on a granite obelisk. We've got a museum dedicated to paratroopers. And for the piece de resistance: one of this town's worst problems is rail traffic at street level downtown. Basically, they built downtown in the middle of a switching yard. Trains are switched at all hours of day and night, which really congests traffic. Our solution? Build a Railroad Museum! Who the fuck is going to spend their entire vacation running to this particular wide spot in the road just so they can go to a Railroad Museum? Especially since they got the Cross Creek Scale Railroaders to build the fucking thing--the CCSR operated from an abandoned rail depot; the city convinced the CCSR that turning the rest of the depot into a museum would be a good service project for them--then evicted the massive N-scale train layout the scale railroaders had spent about fifteen years working on from the premises. Fortunately for the scale railroaders, the active Amtrak depot had enough room to hold the layout, so it's there now.

Reason 11: The most famous thing in Fayettenam--we were renowned throughout the world for this--was Rick's Lounge. The most notorious titty bar in the entire state of North Carolina. Rick's had two minor problems: the fundies hated it because too many soldiers were spending money they SHOULD have been tithing at this establishment, and it was on the best place to build the new police station in the entire city. The city used eminent domain to take the land, paid Joey Monsour a few million dollars (which he used to build an all-NEW titty bar in a different part of town!) and tore Rick's down. Then they put up a huge cyclone fence around the land and let it sit fallow for three years. The only reason they built the police station was that Joey Monsour sued for the return of his land, as the agreement he signed said they were going to build a police station there and they had not for several years, so he was gonna put Rick's back up.

Trust me on this: anyone who thinks their hometown sucks should move to Fayettenam for a few years. You'll think your hellhole is fuckin' paradise, you really will.

[leftofthedial]

22. well, at least living there gives you plenty of time to think

about how much you hate living there and why.

I spent a year in Fayetteville one weekend.

[jmowreader]

23. Reason Number Three gets even better

Mr. Mathis' workshop sits on a piece of land that contains two buildings: the former Cumberland County Sheltered Workshop facility that now hosts Mr. Mathis' shop; and one I better explain.

After World War II ended, Fayetteville like all other communities in this land of ours had a major building boom. Six high schools were built simultaneously. This was the time of segregation, so five "white" schools and one "black" school, larger than all the rest, were constructed. During the period of segregation, this one school, which was named E.E. Smith after a famous black educator who lived here, was a hotbed of Civil Rights activities. Times change, people move around and this school found itself in the wrong place, so a new, integrated E.E. Smith was built and the Walker-Spivey School was moved into this building. Walker-Spivey was a trade school for "mental defectives"--the term they actually used. If your child was believed to be mentally handicapped or otherwise not suited for book learning, they sent him here and taught him a trade like carpentry, mechanics, masonry or roofing. There are still a lot of Walker-Spivey alumni working in Fayetteville; the school did its job well because many of them own their own companies.

Walker-Spivey was converted to the "alternate" school where all the expelled kids from the rest of the district attend and moved to smaller quarters, and this building was closed. There is no fence around it, none at all, but thanks to the deep respect people have for this building (and the fact that no one can find the damn thing), the building has been deserted for at least fifteen years and there's not one broken window in it.

Both of these buildings are set to be razed to build a blight.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

24. FayetteNam (Fayetteville, NC) is a worthy pick. I visited a few times when

one of my best friends was stationed there.

Strip malls, strip bars, auto repair shops, tattoo parlors, pancake houses, catering to the American serviceman.

[jmowreader]

27. Fayetteville is so bad even people who've never been think it sucks

Our city leaders go to conferences and viciously defend the town when someone calls it Fayettenam.

A few years ago, they had this big "City Motto" contest. You were supposed to think of something nice to say about this town and the City Council picked one. Some numbnuts came up with "FayetteNow"--which was supposed to be their rebuttal to someone calling this shithole Fayettenam. It made it to the final ballot before someone realized that it was fucking stupid. (The winner: "History, Heroes and a Hometown Feeling," which is worse.)

We did the All-America City thing too. The city coughed up fifty thousand tax dollars to compete for this, and won because, in part, we played up the ethnic diversity of the town. (Name the ethnicity and we have it.) We then marketed this grand award by putting the All America City logo on the city's letterhead and calling that good.

[Coventina]

25. Wow! And I thought I hated living in Phoenix!!

I bow to your superior bile.

You certainly do paint a vulgar picture. I've never been to Fayetteville and I hate it already!

[smitty]

30. Waaaah! If you hate Fayetteville so much, move.

[Taverner]

28. Dude! Where's Bakersfield, CA???

Home of the 'Free' Republic

[leftofthedial]

31. Buck Owens singlehandedly redeemed Bakersfield

[LeftyMom]

33. No, RimJob's in Fresno.

Another fine canidate city.

[jmowreader]

35. The Frei Republik comes from Fresno.

[Xipe Totec]

32. Pasadena, Tx

literally next to Houston

[Taverner]

34. Isn't that called "Stinkadena" at times?

All the chemical plants, refineries....etc

Kind of like Benecia here in the (Cali) Bay Area

[Xipe Totec]

37. You got that right!

Stinkadena it is.

[ElboRuum]

36. New Castle, Delaware...

I... I... can't describe it...

For some reason, every time I've ever found cause to go there, kicking and screaming, down the DuPont Parkway, it is always drab overcast.

I don't believe the sun ever shines there, as if the very giver of life on this planet can't spare a few beams of photons for something so... so...

I don't know, you just have to see it.

[hippywife]

38. Any city in Oklahoma.

The Dems here are really Republicans.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

39. Dallas, TX

I'm sorry Dallas residents. The place is a hell-hole due to its astronomical rates of crime. The complex is nice and it has an independent cinema, but the main downtown areas are pretty dead - full of banks and big oil offices.

The arts and museums are great, but not enough to tip the balance.

[Lethe]

40. everytime a worst city thread comes up, i always give the same answer:

COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS

A liberal's worst nightmare....

Even with a major university there, it manages to be a RW dreamland with a 99% redneck population complete with a George Bush Library and matching street (intersecting street is Coke St. btw). Everyone drives a massive truck there with W stickers all over it, which they don't even need cause they are only driving to school and then work at Bubbas BBQ. They also have their own little psycho nazi-esque paramilitary cult to encourage uniformity among the population. (talking about the corps) There ain't shit to do there, except maybe get drunk and talk about football and ag classes.

[SeattleGirl]

41. Ft. Worth, TX

AKA, Cowtown, USA. Y'all can have it.

[Broken_Hero]

42. just about any city in Oklahoma.....nt

[Sonora Nora]

43. love houston!

but Corpus Christi is the worst city in the country!