The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - your town

In My Humble Opinion
21

Great call on all of these, which I somehow missed in my own assessment. Can’t believe I forgot about the arb.

As for the students, your complaints ring true with me, but I’ve just always assumed students are like that at every university. You ever consider running for Michigan Student Assembly?

On second thought, maybe that’s not such a good idea. I shoulda put that in my ugly section. Annoying flyers, annoying chalked sidewalks, and about a 0.1% voter turnout consisting of the candidates and their immediate friends. Great system. :rolleyes:

22

Location: Hawaii

Good: Ethnic diversity; great for restaurants and cultural attractions. One of the most attractive settings in the nation, if not the world. I won’t gloat too much our climate.

Bad: Cost of living is extremely high, from gas to food to housing. Traffic is a bear. No Target.

Ugly: Not the year-round warm weather allows for plenty of scantily-clad local chicks. The beaches and malls make for excellent people-watching scenery.

Really ugly: Being married and trying to people-watch casually, but not too casually. Except her.

23

Boston, MA

The Good: The waterfront, the touristy areas (in summer), the fantastic restaurants, world-class symphony.

The Bad: The charming old ethnic neighborhoods that have lost all their charm. The high rents (comparable to HI, I understand!). The traffic – 200 year old cow paths do not make good roads for modern drivin.

The Ugly: My commute.

24

Boise, Idaho:

The good:
[ul]
[li]Clean, low pollution[sup]*[/sup][/li][li]Healthy economy[/li][li]Low crime rate[/li][li]Friendly people, as a friend who moved from Wichita can attest to as he has noticed there are fewer assholes living here.[/li][li]We have concerts, culture and other special events, more than we used to have, a plus to having a growing community.[/li][li]Close proximity to outdoor recreation, within an hour of snow skiing or snowmobiling, water skiing, hiking, fishing, etc)[/li][li]Plenty of trees (hence the name for Boise, derived from French) and urban landscaping.[/li][li]Four distinct seasons; winters aren’t overly harsh.[/li][/ul]

The bad:

[ul]
[li]Education- schools are underfunded and overcrowded, teachers are underpaid, buildings are old and in need of repair, bond elections are held frequently and even when they pass they don’t seem to help the problems.[/li][li]Traffic outpacing ability for street infrastructure to keep pace. A lot of the existing streets are bumpy and in need of repair.[/li][li]Sprawl- The city has grown significantly, doubling in population in the past two decades, bringing with it the usual problems with infrastructure not keeping pace, more traffic and overcrowded schools.[/li][li]Summer is too damn hot, not enough rain in the summer.[/li][li]Because Boise is situated in a valley it is prone to inversions in the winter, which means a bubble of air traps in pollutants and diverts storms away from the area, which would bring snow to the mountains and clear the dirty air.[/li][li]Too isolated, nearest urban centers of Salt Lake City or Portland or Seattle are each a day’s drive away.[/li][li]Plenty of jobs, but not enough high-paying jobs.[/li][li]Too much Mormon influence, making things too conservative.[/li][/ul]

The ugly:
[ul]
[li]The oft-mothballed and abandoned “Boise Tower” project has left a big gaping hole in the middle of downtown for the past six years or so. Every now and then a developer expresses interest in the property and unveils plans to build a new high rise, complete with shops, offices, restaurants and condos, but as always, the lack of funds and investors keeps these false hopes from getting anywhere.[/li][li]Not just Boise, but the whole state of Idaho has an undeserved reputation for being a haven for the KKK, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations and other hate groups.[/li][/ul]

[sup]*[/sup]Except when there are forest fires nearby, and in the winter when we have inversions.

25

Havre, MT (I might do Missoula later, I know it well enough):

The Good: Plenty of open spaces. A wide range of temperatures from summer to winter, and quite pleasant springs and autumns. Some of the best chicken and steaks at Uncle Joe’s restaurant. A lot of native wildlife and some not-so-native (our neighbors own peacocks and peahens, and we allow others to run their horses on our land). Some really exciting and beautiful storms blow through here, and you can see them coming for miles and miles away.

The Bad: We have next to nothing here. Very little arts or culture or cuisine. The college radio station is the most boring imaginable (most of the time it’s just a CD player on shuffle) and, usually, there is nothing going on. It’s an hour and a half to the next largest town (Great Falls) and even that is a wasteland. It’s five hours to the closest city worth being in (Missoula) and even that has its limitations. All those travel times assume good roads, especially to Missoula because you have to cross a pass to get there and passes get snowed in. A bad snow can easily add an hour to the trip to Missoula, and a really bad snow can prevent travel there altogether. Summers get really hot (triple-digits) and winters get really cold (-40s, substantially lower with windchill). Summer is the most boring season imaginable.

The Ugly: The town is slowly dying. It is slipping to just under 10,000 people and there’s no signs of a boom any time soon. The two major employers are the hospital and the railroad, and the hospital is run by absolute morons (Hey idiots: You can’t have a hospital without surgery, and you can’t have surgery if you persist in abusing the anesthesia staff!) and the railroad isn’t a growth industry anymore. The public library last got a cash influx in the early 1980s it seems, and no other public institution is doing much better. Beautiful historic buildings aren’t maintained properly. Drug use and suicide are both well above national norms for all the reasons listed above. There is some really ugly racism throughout the state between whites and indians.

26

Here in Trondheim, the navelfluff of the world, we have

good: microbrewery and coffeebars, also urbanised wildlife and 5 min access to non-urbanised wilderness

bad: the bus-system is completely useless, can’t get you where you need to go, therefore everyone drives to work

ugly: the city is next to a fjord, but the waterfront is inaccessible because of the railway, completely shutting the city off.

27

Bremerton, WA

The Good - forward thinking Mayor, and downtown redevelopment. Gateway to the Olympic Peninsula. Only 15 miles from Seattle.

The Bad - Those 15 miles are by FERRY, so it takes an hour to get there. There have been attempts to put in high speed ferries, but they tend to be put down by the rich property owners who are more concerned about their beach rights than they are about building the community (And who have much faster ferry commutes, d/t THEIR terminal being on an island that is that much closer to Seattle.) So-so schools. Too MANY school systems - our county has an almost 1:1 ratio of high schools to school districts. Consolidation is BADLY needed, if only from a money-saving point of view.

The Ugly - What’s that woprd that is so rarely used in this thread? Oh yeah - sprawl. Not as bad as some places, but still a problem. An economy that is too dependent on the military.

28

The Good hmm… where to start?
Nature: it’s gorgeous here. Ocean to the west, bay to the east. Mountains, redwood forests, rolling green hills north & south. It’s one of the few cities in the county where you can reach nature without endless sprawl between.
Politics: if you’re a liberal, you’re in good company. When i moved here in 2000, the question wasn’t Gore or Bush; it was Gore or Nader.
Transportation: everything you need is within walking or biking distance.
Food: there’s everything here, and it’s all good.
Culture: arguably the best symphony in the world, good museums, vibrant Asian and Latino communities.
Weather: some people hate it; i love it. (Almost) never too hot or too cold or too rainy or too sunny.

The Bad
Horrid roads: I’ve been sent to the hospital after hitting a pothole.
Astronomical rent: $1200 for a 400sqft unit is the norm. I couldn’t live here if it wasn’t for rent control.
Garbage: i’m not sure if it’s the wind or if people are just jerks, but it’s everywhere.

The Ugly:
Homeless addicts: there are about as many explanations as there are people, and there are tons. Getting woken up by some cracked-out junkie screaming outside the window of your $900/month room is oh so pleasant!
Pretension: the city is teeming with cooler-than-thou urban hipsters. It’s enough to make a man wanna stay at home to drink!
Overzealous protestors (see Pretention, above): something like 80% of the city is anti-war, and has been since before it began. We don’t need you marching down the street with your megaphones screaming “STOP THE WAR!” every other week. Tell us something we don’t already know.

29

Missoula, MT (I’ve never lived here, but I’ve visited frequently ever since I was an infant)

The Good: It’s a cultural center for the whole state, possibly a good part of the surrounding states as well. There’s always a concert or a play or some good indie films showing at the Wilma. You can get good sushi and coffee and ingredients just by walking around downtown, especially along Higgins. There is a university with a world-class journalism school, which means good college radio and a good free weekly alternative newspaper. There are indie bookstores with a selection and helpful staff, including a used book store that’s neither dying nor full of absolute dross. Music shopping is wonderful and the local music scene is vibrant. The climate is very mild and rainy (Montana’s Banana Belt) and the mountains are always visible. There are plenty of tree-lined residential boulevards and the town is generally pedestrian-friendly. It’s close to Polson and Flathead Lake, but the entire Bitterroot Valley is wonderfully beautiful.

The Bad: It’s still pretty far from anywhere else, and getting anywhere else involves betting the passes or the planes won’t be snowed out or iced over or both. There are some fairly touristy aspects to the city (no, really, huckleberries are good but huckleberry soap is stupid) and if I never see that ugly “Made In Montana” sticker again I’ll die a happy man. Inversion layers aren’t especially fun.

The Ugly: Being the region’s equivalent of San Francisco means you get the region’s homeless and vagrant population. There are tribal problems, which boil down to the kinds of petty venality all governments are heir to exacerbated by the fact tribes are sovereign except when they’re not. Missoula has the exact same big box stores every other sizable city does once you leave the downtown.

30

zyzzyva: $1200 for a 400sqft would be wonderful… In Dubai I pay $1650 for 200 sq ft. :frowning:

31

Greater Lafayette area, Indiana (Lafayette & West Lafayette)

The Good

  • Purdue University makes the whole place much more cosmopolitan than could otherwise be expected of a small midwestern city. The large number of international students and assorted clever people bring with them a demand for restaurants, coffee shops, ethnic groceries, and music and comedy clubs. The sheer size of the university brings in several pretty good shows a year. Bob Dylan played here a few years ago. Major musicals come in. Opera and ballet companies come in. Celebrities (authors mostly) come to give lectures, all open to the public.
  • In spite of the university, it is still a small midwestern city, with all the assorted advantages of that. Rents are extremely affordable, with one-bedroom apartments near campus at less than $500 and houses for rent in Lafayette as low as the $600s. Traffic is also extremely sane.
  • We are nestled right between Indianapolis and Chicago. The former is about a one-hour drive, the latter a two-hour drive or a train ride. Yes, we have a train station, and trains actually come to it on a daily basis.
  • There has been a lot of nice commercial development in the last decade. We’ve acquired Starbucks on every corner, lots of jazzy new shopping venues, big bookstores, the big discount stores (including a Super Target), and “signs of life” like Panera. The old Tippecanoe Mall has Macy’s, Sears, J.C.Penney.
  • There is also a nice park on the river between the two cities, with an ice skating in the winter, a pedestrian bridge, the historic train station, and Lafayette’s Historic Downtown which holds several street fairs every year as well as a Farmer’s Market.

The Bad

  • The city is not very beautiful and the roads are not very well planned. Even we get gridlock during rush hour. And some idiot thinks it’s a good idea to turn all the roads in boulevards, which it isn’t, especially since no one bothers to plant anything in the median.
  • The shopping is only mediocre. The department stores exist, but are not big enough to have, for example, furniture departments. There are no high-end stores like Williams-Sonoma or Banana Republic.
  • The arts, outside of what Purdue ships in, are appropriate for the size of the town. There is a questionable symphony, and no pretention towards having a ballet, theatre, or opera. There is not a central art museum, and local galleries carry only things by local artists (sigh).
  • The weather is standard for Indiana, only noticeably windier. It gets damned hot in the summer, and gloomy and miserable in the winter.

The Ugly

  • As I suppose all major universities do, Purdue has an extensive Student Ghetto, which subsumes most of the area within walking distance to campus. Lots of petty vandalism and noisy parties.
  • Bad city planning bites again: one of the nicest parks (Happy Hollow) has an exposed sewer pipe running through it, and yes, it smells.
  • Very hard to meet people outside of the university functions, which come in two types: the type attended exclusively by students and by retired and couples, and the type attended by the campus “characters.” I had my fun running with the “characters” for a couple of years, and now I wish I could just make some nice friends.
32

Chicago, IL - north side

The Good: The food - more ethnic restaurants than you can shake a sombrero at. The Thai food alone is worth the rent. Museums, theaters, galleries, festivals - all those cultural events.

The Bad: Housing costs. The weather (is is August or Winter?) The traffic congestion. The neverending construction seasons (Is it Winter or Construction?). Parking. Gangs and drugs - not something I’ve been personally affected by, but my son is about to enter high school, and now it’s suddenly relevant. Ouch. The schools in general - the local high school has a 46% dropout rate. (Obviously, we’re looking into other options.)

The Ugly: Homelessness, feigned homelessness (nothing like seeing a “shift change” after giving a sad looking “veteran” a few bucks - watching his partner drive up in a BMW, get out in rags, take his pitiful looking sign, and take his place while the guy you gave money to drives off in the BMW), light, sound and air pollution.

33

Bristol, UK

Good: The Clifton area is beautiful, with yellowstone buildings and various parks and gardens. Thanks to the gorge, the west side of the city ends abruptly and turns into countryside. Great nightlife, especially for drum & bass fans.

Bad: Town centre was bombed in World War II, so they decided to cover up the river and build a load of concrete monstrosities. The character Vicky Pollard from Little Britain was inspired by the sort of person you find in the town cetnre. Cost of living is high in relation to income. You can never find anywhere to park.

Ugly: Bristol was the centre of the UK slave trade, and the legacy remains. Large poor neighborhoods with rampant drug addiction and crime (see: The Stapleton Road). Car and bike crime is a huge problem throughout the city.