I was exaggerating for effect. But Buffalo still gets a heck of a lot of snow on a regular basis, especially when compared with other places. As this link demonstrates, the city is second on the list of cities over 100,000 that receive the most snow per year.
http://www.buffalonian.com/history/articles/1951-now/2001snowstorm/SnowfallinMajorusCities.html
The only good thing about the snow is that it helps to cover a truly ugly city like Buffalo in something pretty.
Another vote for Gary, Indiana…makes Calcutta look nice.
But to the poster who said Los Angeles…my first reaction was NO WAY…but you know what…we lived there for 12 years and loved it, but then we moved, and our friends started moving and my lover and I just realized last weekend that almost all of our close friends have left LA in the last two years. We are talking about a lot of people! (35 off the top of our heads.) Maybe there is something going on. Add to that the fact that a large percentage of the people moving here to Las Vegas are people from Los Angeles and, well, maybe LA is losing some of it’s luster. Too bad…despite its flaws, I always thought LA got an unfair bad rap. Maybe things are getting worse.
But you only have to drive through Gary, Indiana once and I think this game is over.
For what it’s worth, I worked in Newark, NJ for several years and I don’t think it’s all that bad.
For one thing, the city is no longer abandoned - a lot of law and accounting firms have moved back, new office buildings are going up, etc. This process has accelerated since 9/11.
The Ironbound section continues to be vibrant and bustling, with plenty of successful shops and restaurants. I’ve spent many a fun Friday night in Newark.
Other commercial areas of Newark are pretty busy too - for example Market Street & Broad Street. 5th avenue it ain’t, but the stores aren’t boarded up either.
Truth be told, I feel more safe and comfortable in Newark than in New York.
Yeah, but you have to listen to people end each sentence with “eh”. And pronounce things like “organization” and “about” very strangely. 
ccwaterback,
I think I get your drift. This whole thread is a “US” city thing which is why I held off, on the grounds that I would be completely off topic. It would seem a breach of protocol, as it were.
From my perspective, Lithgow, NSW, is the absolute pits.
It’s a down at heel, former mining town (still is in a very minor way), and the museum, which covers the glory days of 1840-90 is moderately interesting, but breathtakingly boring.
There is absolutely nothing to do there.
I have ambled through the shopping centre and I can assure you that everyone there has a bored look in their eye.
The vehicles going through the main concourse all look bored. So do the drivers.
The police officers loafing around chewing on their unhealthy snacks in the shoping centre look bored.
I tell you, Lithgow is the absolute pits.
Even at 11.00 pm walking past the “wildest” Lithgow taverns or clubs on a Friday or Saturday night, you’re not likely to meet with anything more exciting than a falling down drunk departing from some pub or other, without even a helping hand by the hired help.
ccwaterback
Oops. My apologies. I just realised I should have addressed my last response to Bryan Ekers
AlanOB it must’ve been really boring. The effects haven’t worn off yet. Snap out of it man…pay attention…you’re home now and everything is gonna be allright. 
I’m thinkin about visiting Australia next year. I’ll be sure to skip Lithgow.
For true suckage on a monumental scale it’s hard to beat Odessa, Texas.
A victim of the boom/bust cycle of the oil industry, Odessa has languished in “bust” mode since the mid 80s. An undiversified economy plus the migrant nature of oilfield work has left the city with a population largely made up of unemployed alcohol-soaked felons who while away the hours in some of the area’s much heralded (and dangerous) titty bars. Indeed, a drive down one of Odessa’s main avenues reveals that said titty bars, along with pawn shops and liquor stores (always a bad sign) pretty much fuel the local economy. Add to that a landscape second only to Pluto in terms of desolation, a pervasive chemical stench from the refineries, long, sticky, hot summers punctuated by violent storms and tornadoes and a complete absence of trees makes Odessa rather undesirable.
But they have that high school football team, Odessa Permian.
I’ve driven through Gary, Ind. and I have to say that it was pretty bad. Buffalo isn’t THAT bad, other than cold, miserable winters and a shrinking population.
What is the worst city in Canada? Of the cities that I have been to, I’d say St. Catherines, Ont. Of course I hear/read lots of bad
things about Winnipeg. I even spent a winter in Sudbury that was cold and snow bound, but the spring there was beautiful.
I’m going to vote for Pottsville, PA.
It is a horrible, horrible, horrible place.
If you want to discuss Canada, then perhaps a new thread is in order, but my vote will go for Fort McMurray, Alberta. I lived there for 4 months one winter, and it was the most depressing place on Earth.
It was built up around the oil sands and gas mines (or something like that) and has the feel more of an outpost than a city. It’s so far north it’s above the permafrost line, so the ground is always frozen about 6 inches below the surface, so nothing grows there that has roots longer than six inches - no trees, not even a bush. The winters are unbelievably cold (it was so cold we only went to school maybe every second day because the buses would start half the time - no joke). It was a miserable, desolate, depressing place.
Winnipeg is pretty ugly too, but the mayor has some interesting ideas for urban renewal so that may change in time.
How aboutthis town
Would you really want to live there? 
Look, L.A. is far from Utopia but it is also far from the worst city either.
Buffalo is really a small Cleveland or flat Pittsburgh, only it has a higher percentage of middle and upper income residents in the city limits than its Ohio cousin. (Buffalo’s suburbs are, however, not as well off as Cleveland’s assortment of bucolic-sounding and/or Heights-suffixed 'burbs.)
Buffalo has seen much better days, but there are far worse places. Even then, it never fell as far as places like Detroit, Youngstown, Allentown, Scranton, or Newark.
El Paso probably is tops for sheer ugliness; it’s not really a blighted city, but there is plenty of manmade ugliness; the concentration of billboards and high-rise signs is unmatched, even by other Texas uglies like San Antonio and Houston. Believe it or not, the comprehensive plan of nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico essentially states “don’t even think about growing southward, towards El Paso; avoid it at all costs.”
Gary does have some stable, middle and upper middle class enighborhoods in the city limits, such as Miller along Lake Michigan. Gary even has beaches. The mills and the 70% of the city that is blighted pull it down, but at least the place has some redeeming value.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned East Cleveland, Ohio, but again it’s a mostly blighted city that has one nice, well-off neighborhood.
Winter Garden, Florida is pretty awful. Its a suburb of Orlando that is essentially an ethnic enclave of lower income Confederate-oriented whites (my polite substitute for the “r word”), with most businesses based on the sales and repair of motor vehicles. Like El Paso, it’s also damn ugly.
East St. Louis, on the other hand … nearly the entire city is blighted, the palce is packed with abandoned factories and rail yards, it’s the center of the sex industry in the St. Louis area,
East St. Louis, and there are few blocks that aren’t filled with vacant lots or collapsed houses. Believe it or not, East St. Louis has a miniscule middle class population; a narrow enclave east of the bluffs that follow the Mississippi River. This is also where the 2% white population of the city lives.
Mayor Martin O’Malley Announces Baltimore Achieves Sharpest
Reduction in Violent Crime, 1999 - 2003
Mayor Martin O’Malley today announced Baltimore has achieved the sharpest reduction in violent crime since 1999, falling more than 11 percentage points. According to the FBI’s preliminary uniform crime reports, Baltimore has achieved a near 26% drop in violent crime since 1999.
“These figures clearly indicate Baltimore is moving in the right direction,” said Mayor O’Malley. “While there is still work to be done, our efforts to provide safer neighborhoods for our children and improve the quality of life for our citizens continue to pay off. The reduction in violent crime is due in large part to the hard work of our dedicated police officers, committed residents and community partners. I appreciate the hard work being done by everyone in every corner of the City, and these numbers are just another incentive to keep forging ahead.”
Since 1999, violent crime in Baltimore has dropped 25.98%, leading the nation among the top 25 US cities and neighboring cities - Washington D.C. saw an increase of 12.8%, Richmond an increase of 16.13%. Philadelphia also achieved a reduction of 12.91% and Pittsburgh realized a increase of 24.56%.
http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/news/press/030617.html
YAY! I knew we’d get at least one vote! Actually Memphis does have its bad parts, but their mixed in with some average areas (so it’s not just one big area of ghetto), and in my opinion the good parts balance out the bad, and bring us right back up to ‘below average’.
Absolutely right. Buffalo ALSO has a lot of house fires. “House burns down in Tonawanda! Film at 11!”
Between the fires, snow, Bills and Sabres… well, that’s about it.
However, my vote is for Scranton.
For Canada, I’m going to limit my choices to actual cities, above 100,000 people, and pick Winnipeg. My God, what a horrible, ugly city. A walk through Winnipeg is like seeing what the Gaza Strip must look like during ceasefires - half the local shops are in the plywood business, if you catch my drift. Homeless drunks passed out all over the place, half the businesses boarded up, and outside the very core of the downtown there has been absolutely no attention paid to beautification. It’s a phenomenally ugly, dirty city by Canadian standards, has a high crime rate (again, by Canadian standards) and is home to the biggest population of homeless, hopeless alcoholics on the continent. Just awful.
Question: Are East St. Louis and East Cleveland considered to be cities in their own right, or are they mainly just suburbs of St. Louis and Cleveland, respectively? Are they populated enough to be cities unto themselves?
You must be from Toronto, right?
I think I posted the following in response to a GQ a long time ago, posted by another Torontonian, wondering why Buffalo has so many house fires.
The Straight Dope:
If there are no full-blown house fires in Buffalo that day, television news departments will try to find a local kitchen fire, or a blaze in the Southern Tier or Northwest Pennsylvania. Fires always lead the news in Buffalo because that’s what the viewers, a large portion being fire geeks and VFD members, want.
Toronto didn’t have the abundant inexpensive lumber of Buffalo, nor the German immigrant carpenters. That, and closer ties to a UK architectural heritage, resulted in a vintage housing stock that’s mostly brick.
Re: “House burns down in Tonawanda”… It’s so much a cliche in Buffalo that, when The Goo Goo Dolls released their first hit album (they’d released a few before that never got beyond Western New York), the radio commercial for it started off with “Fire in Cheektowaga…fire in Tonawanda…oh wait, we’ve got a breaking story…”
Anyway, as I said above, Buffalo is nowhere near as bad as Niagara Falls. I’ve driven through the worst parts of Buffalo at night, and I was less scared than when I drove through the worst parts of Niagara Falls during the day.