I was speaking specifically of the La Carpiodistrict, which few tourists ever see. It is one of the worst slums in any developed nation:
I have worked in La Carpio twice. Words cannot describe the poverty. It’s not the Costa Rican’s “fault”, as over a hundred thousand Nicaraguan war refugees flooded the country and vastly overwhelmed the resources, both government and natural. It would be like the US suddenly absorbing about 7 million refugees and sticking 1/3 of them in Dallas, Texas or LA, California.
IMHO, however, any city where some 20-25% of the residents live in poverty and 12-15% live in one slum know for the poorest of the poor shoots right up the list of worst cities.
First US city to come to mind. Back in the 1990s I read DC’s The Question and it was revealed the crime-ridden, corruption-prone Hub City was based on East St. Louis with some news articles cited - it sounded horrible.
Fair enough but I don’t think focusing on marginalized refugees in a largely hidden section of the city puts San Jose, Costa Rica even near the top. I am sure it is terrible but hidden to even most residents and there are much worse slums in the world.
For example, Dharavi is a slum section of Mumbai, India that is one of the truly worst in the world. It only consists of less than 550 acres and has somewhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 people living in squalor in that small area. The poverty is so extreme that epidemics break out, people poop wherever they can because most don’t have any sort of plumbing and they do whatever they have to in order to get by. There are also slum tours offered to Westerners to see what true poverty looks like.
If you like walking across mounds of decomposing trash, human feces and dead animals, that is the show for you. Ta Da! I have seen documentaries on it and nothing in the Western hemisphere begins to compare. The only ones that come close are in Brazil and the U.S. border areas of Mexico.
:eek: Naples is my number one favourite place in the whole entire world. I’d go there today if could. More pizza for me, I guess.
In Italy I reserve my hatred for Brescia and especialy Forlì (provincial tedium), Bari (all the drawbacks of Naples without the charm), and most of the inland parts of Sicily give me the creeps too.
Believe it or not there is waiting lists to get a spot in a slum like that. Any shelter is better than none and in Mumbai the parks have 24 hour security to stop homeless people sleeping in them. The thing is those slums have thousands of small businesses inside them, and someone working and living in one of these slums in Mumbai can still make more money than they can back in their home village being an agricultural laborer.
Read Shantaram, it’s an excellent account of an Australian prisoner who escapes and goes on the run and ends up living in a slum in Mumbai. Mostly a true story although some of it is exaggerated.
I know the logical answer is in a war-torn desert somewhere, but my first-impulse-reaction was that I’ve been to the Dallas area three times now for various reasons, and while the city itself is kind of fine, the various suburbs are existentially soul-sucking.
D’oh! :smack: Thank you for bringing this up, because I did not mean Plano. I meant Plains. Plains, Texas. All the way on the other side of the state in West Texas.
I think you mean cite and there is a very good reason for that. Innsmouth Massachusetts is a fictional town invented by H. P. Lovecraft. It is supposed to be a dystonian version of Newburyport, MA which makes absolutely no sense because it is an extremely thriving and exclusive area today.
The same goes with Plano, TX. My parents live in the general area and I have never seen an area so quickly built up. Toyota USA just moved their headquarters from California to Plano and the economic impact is no less than when Henry Ford first decided to build cars in Michigan over 100 years ago. They can’t build elementary schools fast enough and I have walked for hours among attractive new subdivisions that are probably occupied now but they just sprang up out of nothing in the general Dallas area.
I know people love to hate Texas but they are truly in an economic boom with a fairly inexpensive cost of living and all of the high paying jobs you could want. I would take one myself and be much better off but I can’t because of my kids. Still, it would beat the shit out the Boston area overall for personal finances if I could do it.
Plano is a stupid and ridiculous answer to this question. It is a quickly growing city in its own right. I have my own problems with the Dallas/Fort Worth/Garland/Arlington/Irving/Plano area because it is so incredibly huge but it isn’t a shithole in the least. Its major problem is that is over 70 miles from one side to the other but it is thriving and affordable.
If you think otherwise, I can try to get you a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Jakarta or any of the long list of cities that have real problems and aren’t a stupid answer to this question.
Trois-Rivieres, Canada. The only thing that keeps you from smelling that paper smell everyone keeps mentioning is the relentless, mind-numbing cold. The town that makes children BEG to be sent to bed without their supper. A place where pizza must be drained…
I have not been to Bukavu, and my visit to Goma was in 2005. It was friendly enough, but the volcano pretty much destroyed any real infrastructure they may have had. People were living in extreme make-shift conditions and there was little government control. The difference compared to Rwanda (just 2km away) was staggering.
There’s a lot of wells pumping just outside town, maybe one of them hit H2S or something the day you were there. Oil wells can have a pretty pervasive smell.