Certainly worse than Cranston, which is the city on the list, but yes, worse than Providence. Woonsocket has all the bad stuff and none of the good stuff of Providence.
Actually, don’t be dissin’ Providence! It’s up and coming economically and culturally and, from where I’m sitting (literally) quite charming.
Can we take Las Vegas off the New Mexico list? Sure, it has a skeevy side but it also has beautiful mountain scenery and magpies. I’d nominate instead Yeso, New Mexico, a town so bad that no one lives there. Or maybe Artesia, NM, which reeks of natural gas. Or Tucumcari; a guy I know got trapped there for 5 days during a blizzard and he said it was Hell and the only thing to do there was shop at the K Mart over and over again.
As for California, having actually been to Compton (most people’s knowledge of it comes from movies and rap music, who among you can say you’ve actually been there and not just driven through), I’d have to agree with it as a nomination and actually a strong contender.
Yes, there are quite a few shitholes in CA (hey, it’s a big state). Oildate/Bakersfield and Palmdate/Lancaster/Miscellaneous Inland Empire are certainly strong choices. They have they’re share of problems and personally I wouldn’t want to live there, but I don’t think it really compares to Compton or other South Central Los Angeles (recently renamed to “South Los Angeles”, btw) in terms of sheer avoidability. There are a lot of places you really don’t want to live, but there are only a few where you really don’t even want to be.
As for the whole nation, I don’t think little podunk towns in the middle of nowhere are really all that undesirable. Yes, there may be nothing to do, and the people hicks, but I think it’ll have a hard time beating out of the really undesirable metropolitan areas.
I was in Rock Springs long enough to deal with a surly motel clerk who curtly told me they had no rooms available. We stayed in nearby Green River instead.
Nampa isn’t all that bad. Sure, it’s notorious for the stench caused by the sugar beet processing plant, but as a community it’s a decent place. Personally, I’d nominate Garden City, which is more or less one giant trailer park full of white trash folks, plus it has one of the Boise area’s few adult bookstores, plenty of seedy bars (dives), second-rate motels and tattoo parlors. Garden City also has a higher concentration of registered sex offenders living there than in other parts of the Boise area.
Who made this entry? Portland is a very nice little city, with excellent restaurants, and very little crime. If you want lousy places in Maine, look at Bangor, or Millinocket-or LUBEC (easternmost USA city). Lubec is mostly boarded-up canneries and empty houses-nobody seems to want to stay there!
I think its from a book I saw at a sales rack at Borders. America’s Worst Cities, and has one per state. For Nebraska, it lists Lincoln, which is ridiculous. Not that I’m so much a Nebraska homer, but Lincoln is a very livable city with the capital and state university. There ain’t much to do, but that’s common for a city of 200,000 in a farm state. The gist of the article was that Lincoln is 98% white, therefore it’s bad.
I still stand by my Final Four (three)
And the Cinderella (after reading the posts)
4. Flint, Michigan
But watch out for Butte, Montana to play spoiler, despite not being part of the East-Coast media bias. And Youngstown, Ohio has been playing with a chip on its shoulder… never count out a city from Ohio.
Waianae, Hawaii is going out in the first round. Anywhere from Hawaii is going to get that dreaded #16 seed.
Just speaking from my personal experience, here, and I could be totally off base, but Cranston, RI seemed very nice compared to Central Falls, RI. In Cranston I felt safe comparatively. There were, I think, three drive-bys in the little place in the 4 hours I was there, and there was shattered glass everywhere. Oh, and a friend of mine got felt up by a complete stranger.
Man, I really should pay more attention to the list. Anyway, RI isn’t my neck of the woods anymore, so whatever. 
~Tasha
To be honest, I don’t know if this is going to work. There are too many opinions (and not everyone is being listened to) and the only way for this to work is if we have all been to every place that has been mentioned, and actually have a personal experience with all of the said cities and towns. None of us can say that. The alternative would be for the participants to do research on these cities and towns that start making it into the top 25. That probably won’t happen either.
Eh, its going to be really hard to get more than 3 people to agree on one place, especially if its somewhere the bulk of us haven’t been, or possibly never even heard of.
Maybe a top 10 and go from there. The arguments are whether X is worse than Y in places like Rhode Island. While no disrespect toward RI (or would be it “respect”), those areas will not “beat” Gary or East St Louis.
Top 9
Gary, IN
E St Louis, IL
Camden, NJ
Youngstown, OH
Bridgeport, CT
Butte, MT
Compton, CA
Flint, MI
Chester, PA
Maybe make it 15 to give it more variety, so it doesn’t look like a rust-belt bashing thread. 
ANYTHING in that area would be only marginally safer than Bagdad… :eek:
I agree. I’d like to add in Quartzite, AZ. Nothing but ‘mobile home’ parks (dumpy ones, at that) in the middle of dusty hell, along with a few fast food places - not particularly good ones - for people off the interstate who HAVE to use the restroom - or worse, for people off the interstate who don’t mind stopping in such places. Abandon all hope, ye who run low on gas there.
My hometown is a special little part of hell south of Chicago.
Harvey, Illinois, where the police scoop up the bodies out of the alleya and don’t even question the neighbors. Where the police also, no doubt, robbed my dad’s corpse after he died in his house. Harvey police have even been known to get in street brawls with other police departmemts.
Oh yeah, unemployemt runs 20-30%, and on a per capita basis it’s usually among the top producers of murder and auto theft.
I’ll cast my votes based on HubZilla’s final four:
I’ve never been to Camden, NJ, so I can’t really speak about it.
I’ve driven through Gary, IN hundreds of times, and it’s pretty dirty and depressing. Plus it smells bad. But other than driving through it, and hearing/reading things, I don’t have that much experience with Gary.
Now for the two I’ve come to know personally:
I’m a union organizer and I’ve actually worked in both East St. Louis, IL and Flint, MI pretty extensively. I’ve house visited workers in the absolute worst neighborhoods in both Flint and E. St. Louis. Flint is hands-down the worst city in Michigan (beats Detroit handily). I’ve never seen so many abandoned houses in my life.
But E. St. Louis is the only place where I’ve actually feared for my life (and I’ve spent time in Chicago’s housing projects, as well as walking through some rough parts of east-side Detroit).
Many streets in E. St. Louis don’t have signs, so it’s hard to even know where you’re at when you’re driving around the neighborhoods. The locals I encountered there not only didn’t like having me cruise through their neighborhood, they actually threatened me with violence if I didn’t leave, even after trying to explain why I was there.
There is economic depression in E. St. Louis which is unrivaled anywhere I’ve ever been. I’ve seen horribly depressed urban areas as wells as dirt-poor rural areas. But the people I encountered that I was organizing in E. St. Louis were probably the poorest I’ve ever come across, and most of them had basically zero chance of ever climbing out of their poverty.
I vote East St. Louis.
Pshaw! Palmdale, Lancaster, and Fontana are garden spots compared to El Centro.
Suggestion: set up an actual, 1-on-1 tournament. It would have the advantage of actually giving distinct choices. Anything else really won’t be coherent.
No way there’s any part of this state worse than Fife. :eek:
Much like American Idol, a winner starts to emerge. I nominated Yulee, FL, despite having no real experience with it, but a call to my sister last night pretty much confirmed it. Excellent schools, devastating poverty. And pretty much the home of the Cletus family from the Simpsons.
But far better than ESL, Gary, and Flint. Those have to be the top three.
Here to nominate Weirton WV…much worse than Charleston…
Mount Vernon, NY, showing that being part of one of the richest counties in the country (Westchester) and next to the richest city in the country doesn’t help when your tax base is light industry along the Bronx River that is centered around junked cars and Section 8 vouchers for most of your residents and your city administration is out to prove that black good ol’ boys can be just as inept as the original recipe ones.
However, it’s not ESL; there’s a working and lower middle class in those factories, working like hell to move out of there to Tuckahoe or to the much nicer Bronx on the border. How many times do you think I get to say that?
If we want to do a special category of towns that time passed by and became shitholes, I nominate Desert Center California. nothing but dead palm trees, and burned out buildings. All in clear view of I 10 between fuckall and nowhere.
Somebody had some great plans that fizzled out.