Houston is the 4th largest city in the U.S. and it is “turn you into a puddle hot” but I still like it. I think New Orleans and Houston are tied for large U.S. cities with the highest heat discomfort factor in the U.S. but those cities aren’t very similar at all. I don’t want to insult the owners of this message board but I would much rather live in Houston than Chicago when it comes to weather. I prefer sweating and roasting over freezing to death any day.
Quoth Scotty Mo:
OK, I have to step in in defense of Johnstown, here, since that’s where my family’s from. Yes, it’s seen better times-- The city was badly hurt when the interstate highway system passed them by (one of only five cities in the country where that happened), and the steel mill closings have been hard on the town as well. But I personally have seen worse towns, even just in the US. Johnstown is still clean and dignified, the people are still friendly, and the scenery is still pretty.
I used to feel that way, too. Then my air conditioning went out in the aforementioned hell-hole called Columbia, SC. Too hot to sleep. To hot to sit on the couch. Too hot to stand up, sit down, or move. Just too damn hot. With cold, at least there are quilts and blankets and layers of clothing and such. The only thing is that nothing helps my fingers or toes in Minnessota-type winters. Gloves only seem to make it worse. But all in all, I can find more ways to adapt to cold without heat than to heat without air conditioning.
I don’t know from city, but the vilest town in the universe (I hope to Ghu that it never grows into a city!) is Sheerness-on-Sea, Kent, UK.
Remember The League of Gentlemen? Royston Vasey? In Sheerness thats a toned-down documentary.
Hobbies of the locals? Arson, racism (that’s anti-human racism), twocking and incest.
Motto? “Paddle faster, I can hear banjos”
A nuclear strike on the shitheap would count as civic improvement.
Lets see. Kabul? I never knew what death of hope meant until I visited there. In London they could simply get rid of the whole city except the City of London, Westminster, Kensignton and Chelsea and a bit of Islington and we would miss nothing. Most of the generic hellhole cities that people mention have something to offer, all Indian Cities I have visited have a lot to offer. But in the Kingdom, Riyadh is just depressing and religious fanatics control it. Peshawar which someone mentioned in the same vein has a thousand year of culture behind it.
Don’t be so quick to write off the entire Central Valley as “most loathsome.”
The I-80 corridor and US 50 corridor is just fine: Vacaville, Davis, Sacramento, Folsom, Roseville, Placerville, Auburn… etc.
Other places are also just fine: Chico, places on the Delta
Marysville and Stockton aren’t that great, but I doubt they qualify as “most loathsome in the universe.”
I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more wretched confluence of poverty, boredom, social backwardness, banality, ugliness, and … words like that … than the rural midwestern US. In particular, rural central/southern Illinois.
And for my money, all of that suckitude converges on Illiopolis, Illilnois. Imagine you’re about 15 miles west of the charming city of Decatur. You’re about 15 miles east of the charming city of Springfield. All around you, everywhere you look is this. And that charming view is interrupted by the ominpresence of this factory. Your neighbors got sick of it all and moved away, but since no one wants to live in Illiopolis their house never got sold, and now it looks like this.
And for fun, the only thing to do is to party at the one bar in Sangamon County with a 3:00 AM liquor license. But since the owners only play rap music, the bar tends to attract an “out of town” crowd (read: gangbangers and wannabes from Decatur and Springfield). Oh, and since it’s a 15-mile drive for the “out of towners” to get home, there are a lot of drunks trying to leave that parking lot after they’re done shooting at each other, sometimes leading to the death of a state trooper.
Charming place, Illiopolis.
I am surprised nobody yet mentions Fayetteville, NC. During my 2 holidays and numerous business trips in the US, this is easily the worst city I visited (it is a limited experience though). That it is awful is even mentioned in “Band of Brothers”(the book).
I"d take Barstow any day over Fayetteville.
In my own nation? Heerlen would be my favorite (or rather, least favorite). My mother lives there and the city itself is awful. Old mining city, but the mines are closed. No centre to speak of, many high rise buildings… It call itself park city… Oh, the irony. Countryside around it is pretty, I’ll grant you that. It just emphasizes what it would look like if the city vanished.
Albany, NY
Yeah, Brockton’s a bit schitzophrenic in that sense. You can cruise from one end of to the other and not quite believe it’s all the same city. In that sense it’s no different from any other old, tattered mill city.
It really need a revitalization like Lowell. I can’t see that happening right now, though.
First of all, I’ll heartily second the guy who nominated York, PA. It’s a shithole now, and if Harley-Davidson pulls out like they think they might, it’ll be a worse shithole because a lot of well-paying jobs will be gone.
I’ll see York and throw in Harrisburg City in for good measure. (I’m talking about the City of Harrisburg, not the surrounding townships that happen to have Harrisburg addresses.) Steve Reed, once Mayor for Life, lost in the primary. This is not a bad thing, because Harrisburg is chronically in debt over silly things like an incinerator it can’t get rid of and a Civil War museum in a place that isn’t really known for the Civil War. (The Confederate Army was en route to Camp Curtin, near what is now Harrisburg, but they were stopped at Camp Hill before they could cross the Susquehanna.) There have also been a lot of shootings this summer in the Allison Hill neighborhood. Just driving through Allison Hill is depressing because that neighborhood looks worse than Sarajevo at its worst.
Finally, I’d like to add Abilene, Texas to the list. It’s a smallish city in the middle of nowhere that has some culture, but little else. It also has three Christian but no public universities. If you want to go anywhere, it’s at least an hour’s drive through some of the most boring scenery anywhere in America, and I’ve been through southern Arizona. The overall churchiness of the town gives most of the people a creepy Stepford vibe; they seem a little too friendly, but you’re really not sure why or how. The best I can say about Abilene is that the NPR affiliate doesn’t play Christian music.
Well, I am right now in Beijing, where I am staying for a couple of weeks. Lots of interesting stuff, and humongous heaps of culture. Also, the people appear to be nice… However…
The pollution… OH GOD, THE POLLUTION!!! My eyes are read and teary, the air smells of ozone, and there is a permanent brownish all-pervading haze.
That completely ruins the city, in my opinion. Which is a pity. But it ruins it.
Especially since the Olympics, in my experience Beijing’s pollution is nothing compared to other Chinese cities.
Try Benxi, nestled between the mountains of Liaoning province in probably exactly the wrong place to build a steel mill. Best time to go is in the winter when the steel mill is in full production (where the environmental controls may or may not be working), everyone’s burning coal for heat, and the mountains won’t let any of the pollution escape. You can see the particulate matter floating in the air and sticking to your skin and clothes.
Chinese steel towns are not happy places.
I’m not terribly well traveled in the terrible city department so I did some online fact finding for various lists similar to this one The World's 10 Worst Cities | Popular Science.
The cities that come up the most frequently seem to be Cherynobl (mostly abandoned), Norilsk, Beirut, and Abidjan, though its likely nobody really ever goes to these places willingly. If you wanted to list some places where a few of us might end up the current winner and temporary bad city is probably Baghdad, though you might want to avoid Mexico City if given the opportunity.
I personally lived in Milan, which is pretty crappy and horribly polluted, but once a year it floods with thousands of female models so it balances out 
Fernley, NV
Detroit:
Even the dead are leaving Detroit
Anyone ever try to live and work in Istanbul?
60 minutes for 10 km ALWAYS.
Noise, pollution.
Culture does not a nice place make.
RUNNERS UP:
Beijing, China- Polluted to the point where most denizens have a slight cough, and there are no birds. Think of a polluted, crowded, New York City except with very little nightlife and a repressive government.
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico- Haven’t been there in 30 years, but with 1000+ murders a year, how can it NOT be loathsome?
Camden, NJ- Without question, the biggest shithole in America.
And the winner IS:
“The City of” Dunn, North Carolina.
Almost 10 years ago, I picked my poor old recently widowed mother up in Florida to drive her in her Lincoln Town Car back home. While in South Carolina, something went horribly wrong with the car, and we lost our air conditioning in 105 degree weather. By the time we got to Dunn, the car got broken down, and we had it towed to local Ford dealer, who promised up is would be fixed the next day. We checked in at a local Super 8 and hoped for the best.
In the meantime, we ate at a local diner, where the waitresses were nasty to us because I guess they detected “Yankee” accents. Threre were all types of ne’er do-wells situated in the neghborhood we wandered in as well. All my efforts to get a rental car to take back home were thwartded by lack of availability. And the dealer kept jerking us around.
And, being Dunn, North Carolina, of course there was nothing to really nothing to do but sit and wait. They had their Yankees trapped in a modern day Andersonville. About the only saving grace of this dump was the shithole hotel had a semi-chlorinated swimming pool.
My mom was stuck in this shothole, trying to recover from my fathers passing, and I was burning up vacation days, with customers starting to call me cellphone asking where I disappeared to.
Finally, we had enough, and went to the ripoff dealership, and my mother bought a new car for $13,000 just to get the hell out of there.
We went into Dunn with a shit car, got treated like shit, and got ripped off while being treated like dumb Yankees. Fair punishment for a good son grieving his fathers death trying to simply drive his widowed mother back home, right?
If aliens ever invade this planet, and capture me first, the first thing I will tell the little green bastards is to nuke Dunn, North Carolina: The Most Loathsome City in the Universe.
Has Hull, England, been mentioned yet?
Has anyone ever been there?
I have a friend who swears it really is the
worst.
place.
ever.
The running joke there is that it should be spelled with an e.
Fulton, NY is a pretty sad place and should get honorable mention. It’s near Lake Ontario, but not ON Lake Ontario, which might save it during their month of summer. Otherwise, it’s like Barrow, Alaska, but without Barrow’s jobs, social scene, or nightlife. Since the Golden Corral went out of business, I swear the church food pantry is the best bet when you want to dine out.