worst shithole of a major american city

which major american city (you define "major") most closely resembles an ass-ugly, boring-as-fuck shithole?

now i haven't traveled all over this fine land but based on my limited experience i'm going to say indianapolis

new york

Stockton, CA is the biggest shithole of a city i've ever visited. it's bigger than Newark, NJ (which is also a shithole but at least it isn't boring) so if either qualifies as "major" then Stockton would get my vote.

by shithole i guess i'm thinking less urban decay/blight and more "christ is this place boring"

though for both at once you could do worse than toledo, ohio

Phoenix?

Didn't we do this? Hard to search on phone but I could swear....

This has to be Houston...

Jacksonville.

Yeah we totally did this within the last year. I think it was poll thread.

of the cities I've been to I have no idea how this CAN'T be Newark

Tallahassee itself wasn't that great but I had a lot of fun on the FAMU campus

if it was a major city, this would be Alexandria, LA no contest

ohhhh, tallahasee is not a major city

but it's a capital!

signed, someone who grew up outside of St. Paul

it's a college town that is also a capital for no reason

of the cities I've been to I have no idea how this CAN'T be Newark

the city that gave the world Redman, Corey Booker and Tony Soprano; whose nickname is "Brick City" and has a neighborhood called Ironbound with tons of yummy Latino & Portuguese eats (and whose old nickname is Down Neck); and isn't even the skankiest city in New Jersey (that honor belongs to either Camden or East Orange) is totally not the worst shithole of a major American city.

i strongly suspect Jacksonville would win this contest -- but i've never been there so i can't vote for it. i have been to Stockton, CA and that does get my vote.

somewhere in alabama ime

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/82/239891424_8e99979771.jpg

one reason why Newark doesn't win this contest ... yum

Albany

steve shasta otm

newark is not a major city, i mean whats a major city, whatever it is not newark

but yeah prob houston i support that

idk top 30 top 40 maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas

kinda want to argue DC here but i know its not really true

eh if you go by that then riverside/san berdoo is one of the top 15 cities in the country

never been to houston, so i have to say phoenix. every time i've been there i've hated the fuck out of it.

im just gonna lump then in w/l.a. nbd xp

from that wiki list

26 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL MSA

^^ding ding ding

Well Houston won at least one of the times this was done before.

of the 20 largest american cities, which is THE WORST?

Charlotte

This is the one I was thinking of that we did more recently:

What Is America’s Most Miserable City?

Orlando is really bad.

man these threads full of how bad we can hate on a place are such a drag

I know I ain't gotta read 'em but phooey on you hater ppl all these towns got something great about em

nuh uh *explodes orlando and every human within*

i know a lot of people that went to COLLEGE in ORLANDO

COLLEGE!!!

aero do you really believe there are simply no shitty parts of the country at all

orlando has disneyworld!! wtf!!

lol, you've really never been to orlando, have you

i've been to disneyworld. also dwight howard

Houston

aero do you really believe there are simply no shitty parts of the country at all

not just the country the world. like I goof on Germany but that's just because I had a shitty time there once that was like this month-long horror so traumatizing that I can't re-enter the country w/o reliving it, but when I'm not just doing "lol they shit on shelves" schtick I know better, all kinds of good things about Germany obv. (nb I still avoid the hell out of it don't get me wrong.) I just think everyplace in the fuckin world is nice there's good people & beautiful things everywhere & "what place sucks the most?" is just such a make-the-world-a-tiny-bit-worse look. and I think people who take a lot of pleasure in talking about how shitty this or that place is are without exception more unpleasant to hear & be around than the places they're running down.

Ilxville

Houston is a shithole and it smells bad

consists entirely of a highway

has sideways traffic lights

I'm with aero to an extent, but Houston sounds pretty bad.

jacksonville seconded

using amster's defn of shithole

In terms of visiting and hanging out for a couple of days every major or second-tier level city I've been to has had something worth checking out. If you like roaming around and people watching and eating and finding out what sort of defines a place it's always fun for a least a couple of days, even just to wonder why exactly half a million or so people all choose to live in a particular spot.

But I've never lived anywhere particularly huge or immediately mind-blowing so my perspective and willingness to look for the good in places and/or my tolerance for boring shit might be higher.

smh @ lack of philly

on the scale of well-known american cities (excising stockton orlando etc.) def a srs shithole

I like Philly.

i think so much of this correlates to being poor or wealthy in the city in question, no?

xp By which I mean I went there 3 times and everyone was always nice and the city seemed pretty enough and had about 300% better housing options than where I live/was living at the time.

i know a lot of people that went to COLLEGE in ORLANDO

i'm gonna guess university of central florida, which for some unknown crazy reason had the highest enrollment in the country. wiki says it's second now. had some friends and tennis team pals transfer there.

philly's great! definitely not a shithole

it kinda peeves me how often Houston is mentioned in this capacity. there's nothing bad about Houston that doesn't apply to a ton of other places. Maybe because it's the biggest city outside of LA and the major east coast cities.

i'm gonna guess university of central florida, which for some unknown crazy reason had the highest enrollment in the country. wiki says it's second now. had some friends and tennis team pals transfer there.

― andrew m., Wednesday, October 5, 2011 12:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah, UCF it is. there's prob a lot of factors as to why they have so many students... when i saw the campus in 06 it was like a community college hollowed out in the middle of a forest, but i've heard that it looks way better now

re: houston, it has all the terrible things about new orleans (weather, crime, lack of trees, giant roaches, etc) and none of the charm.

I've spent a lot of time in both Houston and Dallas and Dallas wins this thread easy. Houston's achille's heel is its hellacious traffic which does count for something... (ok and the humidity.) But there's more to be found under the surface in Houston whereas Dallas is basically just surface. Dallas is just this awkward failed amalgam of wannabe-la and wannabe-nyc that just feels like... Phoenix?

lots of philly love. maintain that compared to the rest of the marquee american cities -- LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC, Miami -- it is by far the biggest shithole. obvi if we're including 'major american city' to include fresno and detroit it's got competition but otherwise stand by my claim

inside and all around Rice University there are some beautiful trees!

actually prefer giant roaches who make their presence known to the little ones hiding in the walls.

As a resident of Houston for 22 years, it has all the issues of an suburban sprawl, but its culture is limited to them. The major social outlet for most residents appears to be megachurches, even the most walkable neighborhoods are pedestrian unfriendly, the nearest decent hiking trail or beach is 600 miles away.

the weather is totally unbearable though. growing up there, however, has made consistent temps below 50 just as unbearable for me :-/

I'll admit, though, I don't think Dallas (or Tulsa, or OK City etc.) have any edge on Houston (save weather). Houston's major calling card is probably the reasonably priced restaurant scene.

i think seattle, boston miami and dc are all shitholier than philly tho de gustibus etc

i'm always gonna be curious how Houston is doing, i think. i root for it.

oh i like seattle a lot, not that i could ever live there

I mean Charalambides will never release an album entitled Dallas

yeah plus Dallas will never produce weird Jandek album covers.

the only American city that I have a crush on is New Orleans; kinda don't see what the big deal is about any other American city. There's lots to love about the USA as a place of intense natural beauty, but not its cities. IMO etc

i am blind w/ love for nyc but most of the rest of the cities in this country i can take or leave. i hear nice things abt chicago.

cmon you do not see what makes NYC a fairly interesting and unique place in the world?

xp

For what its worth, Jacksonville has the worst walkscore of the top 50 cities. OTOH, its on a lake and 10 miles from the Atlantic.

being from Texas and have a certain experience of what cities are like here, i have to say i go pretty gaga over most the marquee cities and im pretty jealous of people who get to live in them (with at least a moderately healthy income).

10 miles from the Atlantic.

― der dukatenscheisser (Sanpaku), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:17 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i'm not sure if i can think of anything potentially more disgusting than a beach outside of jacksonville

NYC is kind of as much a monument as the grand canyon in some ways, imo.

New York is definitely interesting but I don't know that it's all that unique in the world. I can think of a couple cities that are comparable in terms of what they have to offer but a lot cleaner and less oppressively crowded than NY. Don't get me wrong, I love NYC. I always have and I always will but I would never want to live there again. It's just too much for me after a while.

no city has the same mix of density and diversity

I've spent very little time in NYC, just a couple of days in Manhattan at a conference about 15 years ago. It seemed like there was a lot of traffic. I wasn't sure what the monumental sights were: I guess the buildings are very big, but you can't really go into many of them because they're just businesses or residential. The parts along the water seemed shitty. Getting to/fro LaGuardia was ugly (in Queens? or is that Brooklyn?), just a bunch of ugly brick-ish buildings that looked the same, lots of gaudy billboards, typical American city stuff.

The cities I love are all in Europe or Asia, & what I love (as a visitor) is their monumentalness, their sense of history, that you can walk amongst. New Orleans's the only city in the USA that I've ever gotten that feeling, that there's something deeper there than just modern capitalism.

well, dude

i think what you're getting in the European cities is perhaps pre-modern feudalism then?

oh, whatever, im not going to try and sell people on new york, you either get it or you dont

There is a lot of traffic. He's right about that, at least.

There are ways to not get it, and then there are ways, though.

queens is hella ugly it is also super interesting and cool tho, like a bizarro America without white people. I wouldnt say you've seen ny tho.

xp

Sometimes I wish I hadn't grown up right outside NY so that I could get that first time visiting it feeling other people get to experience. One of my roommates in college was from some rural town in Nebraska and her first day in NYC was the first day of orientation. I can't even imagine how awesome and terrifying that must have been.

I think my honest answer to this question is Las Vegas.

I guess the buildings are very big, but you can't really go into many of them because they're just businesses or residential.

Do...you require to be able to go into buildings in order to justify their existence apart from whatever function they serve for people who live or work or do things in them? Do you require to be able to go into MONUMENTS for them to...er, count, or something?

There's lots to love about the USA as a place of intense natural beauty, but not its cities. IMO etc

― Euler, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:15 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

imo too

you can go inside a lot of the buildings in NYC, fwiw. euler youd probably like the met! and the morgan library! and the village, and bits of brooklyn. theres a ton of history in new york, it just doesnt go back much further than a few centuries. but anyway im not sure "history" is the reason to love new york city. i think "culture" is the reason.

I am def in the minority on this but cities in america rarely have the level of pop density I like to keep things interesting. but I may be the world's biggest people watcher, so

I'm pretty sure I hold that title.

you can enter a higher % buildings in manhattan than any other city in the country. because there is retail etc on the bottom floor . so that's a pretty bizarre critique. "why would I want to go to Dallas? it's mostly just single family houses and I can't even go into them..."

a recent visit to NYC proved that the city has a spirit impervious to the attacks of hipsters and investment bankers and trustafarians and duke grads

i think euler meant, like, old churches, and stuff? we dont really have a ton of those. there are a bunch of storefront churches but im not sure they have quite the architectural or artistic vibe that hes looking for

guys u can go into any building you want to #protip

#occupyanybuildingyouwantto

#justgoin

lol this thread will now go on forever because somebody said they didn't love ny

nb I have loved ny from the second I set foot in it in august of '94 but it is impossible for me to imagine any citizenry being more "what do you mean you don't love this?" about their town, it's like the Old Faithful of native pride

and it's multiplied by 5 when the person isn't actually from NY but lives there now

I don't actually love new york I just hate the rest of America more

yeah NY is actually kind of boring but it's less boring than a lot of other cities in america

oh please

I hate how NYers feel that being in NY gives them a 'license to be wacky' because 'hey it's new york'

what

you really shouldn't be allowed to play guitar naked with a cowboy hat even if you lived in looneyville

hes not actually naked

and it's multiplied by 5 when the person isn't actually from NY but lives there now

Well I didn't move here just because I didn't have anywhere else to go. It was actually a conscious choice, which I consciously considered, as opposed to staying in Evangelical Capital of Crazy Land.

he's not completely naked tho and that makes a big difference xp

the thing is I wanna give COME THE FUCK ON YOU KNOW NY IS THE BEST ppl shit because they're tiresome + often hate on places for stupid reasons but OTOH come the fuck on, anybody who doesn't love new york is fucking fronting imo

i am kind of shocked at the "new york is actually really boring" challopsery going on around here, dayo, i expected better of you

new york is really like not mellow if youre into mellowness

what is the mellowest city in the US

i found portland to be rather mellow on a recent trip

portland? lol xp

i would actually like to know this

NYC is just like a bunch of people living together, pretty boring imo

Portland is kinda fake mellow if you live there it can get pretty uptight

honolulu?

I'm more mellow than you, man

mellow places are like Sausalito, all them rich hippie towns are mad mellow

Portland is kinda fake mellow if you live there it can get pretty uptight

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:50 PM (1 second ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but all mellowness is like that to an extent

col springs or boulder

in terms of cities that i have been, i can say that nyc, boston, dc, la and san francisco are all not at all mellow

philly is sort of mellow

i guess honolulu is mellow but that feels like cheating

pdx is definitely mellow, on the other hand its more like "a big town" than a city

sausalito is mellow, marin in general, but its not really a city

boulder is a good answer

i thought CO springs was super conservative, seems like th opposite of mellow

most of sf is mellow but when it's not mellow it's really not mellow

omg boulder is so not mellow, that place is fd in the head

also not really a city

SF is that weird thing where everyone thinks theyre really mellow but theyre wayyyy not mellow

otm

yeah if a place is too mellow it's not really a city

i went to mission dolores park, seemed like a mellow scene, lots of weed, but on the other hand there was like 1m people there and someone was spinning dubstep on a big amplifier

california mellow

being a yuppie is stressful

boulder has medical marijuana now though, that gives them a mellow pass

well i mean boulder is just not big enough to be a city

its a college town m/l

SF is that weird thing where everyone thinks theyre really mellow but theyre wayyyy not mellow

this is otm & is one of the things that really sticks in native socal ppl's craws about nocal

san francisco is the boston of the west

is it possible for people to be mellow

prob not really

is it possible for cities developed by humanity to be mellow

boulder is not a city it's a rock

a big rock

midwestern cities all seem pretty mellow to me

boulder is not a city it's a rock

― （╯°□°）╯︵ mode squad） (dayo), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:56 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

I love these threads.

you know what, I probably find nyc a boring city because everything is really expensive so I never do anything exciting there

the most exciting thing to do in nyc is go to maoz and get free refills from the salad bar #protip

(courtesy of iatee)

pizza tipping bottle openers vampire weekend

yeah I haven't really been to NYC, it's true; I oughta book a trip there some time just to see the museums which I understand are great. & I think big buildings are kinda cool! but it's not really my architectural preference. & intense people-walking-really-fast-ness isn't my thing either, but I think that's a big part of what NYC lovers love.

not hating btw, just saying I don't really get the appeal; but I reckon others feel the same way about Paris & I couldn't explain to them what's so great b/c it's just a vibe to me.

just walking around ny gazing at things is p amazing and free

the met is free, amnh is free, central park is free, prospect park is free, amazing $10 meals all over the place

i have fun around NYC with like not much money at all

houston is a terribly assembled place with lots of dumb things happening but i can't front, culturally it's massively underrated. really cool shit happening under all that sprawl.

hah that's what I do whenever I'm in NYC! xp to icey

btw there are a TON of places in new york that arent people walking fast everywhere, in fact there are four entire boroughs of it, and also basically anywhere north of midtown in manhattan

x-post - Paris is GORGEOUS but is a place that I found pretty boring. I mean there is tons to see and that's great but it all seemed to sort of shut down at night. Then again, I'm fairly certain I just didn't know where the action was. The end result was that I was bored for a majority of the time I've been there and I've visited 3 times.

I've been to the met, been to central park, been to prospect park, been to moma, $10 is on the high end of what I'm willing to pay for a meal

I took the ferry to staten island and I thought that was pretty cool, staten island is so weird

new york has shit tons of variety is basically the thing that makes it so wonderful

$10 is on the high end of what I'm willing to pay for a meal

O_O

Right now I am in Baltimore, MD. I like it but the price of food is still rather shocking. Not like Texas.

When we arrived I thought it was the friendliest place ever. Even more friendly than Austin could ever be. The morning after we arrived, I took off walking down the street to the grocery store, chatting with everyone like it was Sesame Street and just had a really pleasant afternoon and felt so safe.

I guess I was pretty naive to go exploring on foot in a city I am not familiar with in a neighborhood I knew nothing about. Two days later, watching the news, I find out the area isn't cool. There were two shootings on the corner, during the day and a girl got run over crossing the street I crossed to get to the store.

Last night several police cars were parked outside the hotel parking lot and I heard a man say,"He ran that way", then a knock two doors down and, "Police". That was it. No one around here really knows what happened.

This morning we come to find out that this is not a good part of town and it is known for the car theft and stabbings and killings. After watching the local evening news in Baltimore for almost two weeks, reminds me of San Antonio, in that the city has nothing but bad parts?

When they start setting kitties on fire, I'd say the city has major issues. Still, everywhere I have been so far, everyone is so uber friendly.

I walked around brooklyn this one time and saw a bunch of tall guys with pants cuffed at their ankles and not wearing any socks despite wearing shoes, also their shirts had patterns and were in muted colors

Staten Island is so weird.

Fact.

if u say "ive been to the met" youre doing it wrong

for me it's bring one joint, one book and music and im good for hours wondering around.

I saw the best minds of my generation, in a drum circle at grand army plaza

People hate on Baltimore a lot. I've never been there but my ex lives there and LOVES it. It does have a reputation for being pretty rough though.

Euler aren't you a food dude? NY isn't Paris bakery-wise & a lot of aspects of "oh, we went to [x], it's really not the same" blah blah are just the worst but from an actual-food perspective that city is the bomb

I've been to the Met at least 20 times and I still feel like I haven't seen even a fraction of it except for the American Furniture part. I wind up lost in that wing every fucking time. SHAKER TABLES. I GET IT!

san francisco is the boston of the west
--ice cr?m

I only went to Boston for the first time recently and this was entirely my impression

what about new orleans

x-post - Explain yourself ice cr?m. What does that even mean?

new orleans is amazing

SF is that weird thing where everyone thinks theyre really mellow but theyre wayyyy not mellow

this is otm & is one of the things that really sticks in native socal ppl's craws about nocal

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, 5 October 2011 17:54 (6 minutes ago) Permalink

yep. also:

san francisco is the boston of the west

going back to visit NYC a few weeks ago my favorite thing is now Jackson Heights, what a great neighborhood

is new orleans better than new york though

After watching the local evening news in Baltimore for almost two weeks, reminds me of San Antonio

haha wait

it's harder to have a bad meal in Paris than NY...but they really don't give a shit about non-french food

$10 is on the high end of what I'm willing to pay for a meal

O_O

― Juggy Brottleteen (ENBB), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:05 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol maybe I believe in go hard or go home... if you're gonna eat out, eat out and save all your money for a $50 a course meal

x-post - Or vegetarians. I've never eaten more goat cheese in my life. Never wanted to see goat cheese ever again for a while thereafter and I really love goat cheese!

i think you just do cities wrong dan

have we done best city in the US for foods ?

why would we need to

otm

ENBB i had a pretty similar take on paris. also feel like i'd have liked the city a lot more if i were older/less concerned with having access to 'nightlife'

most of the time after I pay $10 for a meal I kind of feel that was so not worth $10

ya Paris nightlife is pretty crap

Interesting! I probably would have too. I didn't want to go like hard core clubbing or anything but it just seemed to empty out after dark and I was sort of like, "We're in Paris and it's 9 o'clock on a Friday night! We can't just go sit in the hotel room!" We ended up walking around a lot those nights which was great but it still seemed a little odd to me in that way.

boston and san francisco are two cities that consider themselves important world centers that are actually rather provincial, there are other similarities like size, density, lefty politics, proximity to a much larger city that they think they have a rivalry with, single world class industries (education and tech) - they both in their own ways epitomize the culture of their respective regions - and berkley and cambridge are the same places too - also they hate to be compared to each other which is p lol

im originally from the bay and grew up in boston so im more than anyone really in the world qualified to make this judgement

yeah aero I dig food & I oughta go to NYC for the food too. really I just need to book a vacation to NYC sometime soon; business just never finds me there whereas I end up in Europe all the time.

I don't care about night life at all---don't really go to bars---so while Paris is quiet after hours, the fact that American cities can be vibrant late isn't a selling-point to me.

why would we need to

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:13 PM

you think it's that clear cut ?

bay area has non-white people is the big difference, Boston just has djp

lol

thread is making me sad i don't live in new york. i was supposed to live in new york; i don't know what happened.

i did have a friend who took me to the kind of bars where only 50-something parisians hang out and play tarots and get tanked on pastis every night tho, that was cool

san francisco definitely felt 'provincial' when I visited

thread is also making me want to defend houston. i've never lived there or anything but it has a lot of cultural institutions iirc. one could do worse.

the fact that American cities can be vibrant late isn't a selling-point to me.

― Euler, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:17 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

walking through the village at 2am and the streets are just teaming, even if youre not into partying or w/e, is p amazing and unique

probably helps that it's only 7 miles by 7 miles and there are no skyscrapers

yeah aerosol

i mean im not down on SF or Chicago (or LA or las vegas) but, lets be real here, by almost any measure nyc is the best city in this country for food.

i did have a friend who took me to the kind of bars where only 50-something parisians hang out and play tarots and get tanked on pastis every night tho, that was cool

― queen latifah approximately (donna rouge), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

I would have loved that! We didn't even know where to find those.

walking through the village at 2am and the streets are just teaming, even if youre not into partying or w/e, is p amazing and unique

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

unfortunately every single last one of the people you are walking next to is horrible, but thats the price you pay

That's hardly the first time I've heard that opinion, ice cr?m. I really need to check out Boston some time.

walking through the village at 2am and the streets are just teaming, even if youre not into partying or w/e, is p amazing and unique

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

OTM. It's the greatest.

thread is making me sad i don't live in new york. i was supposed to live in new york; i don't know what happened.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

theres still time, i have a futon

skyscrapers have less to do w/ it than the streetscape.

walking through the village at 2am and the streets are just teaming, even if youre not into partying or w/e, is p amazing and unique

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

unfortunately every single last one of the people you are walking next to is horrible, but thats the price you pay

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:20 PM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

o come on max!

Oh Max. They're not all awful - just most.

x-post - Same with me and SF. I haven't been since I went there with my parents when I was a kid.

walking through the village at 2am and the streets are just teaming, even if youre not into partying or w/e, is p amazing and unique

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

unfortunately every single last one of the people you are walking next to is horrible, but thats the price you pay

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 11:20 AM (15 seconds ago) Bookmark

lol was gonna say the same things about hollywood

thanks, max

kinda feel like this needs to be split into "best/worst cities to visit" and "best/worst cities to live in" because the perspectives of a city based on whether you're a tourist or a resident are so different and based on such wide-ranging criteria.

nah im just kidding about the people, manhattan is super fun

max otm the village late at night is one of my least favorite things in ny.

after living/working in brooklyn for ten years upon arriving in manhattan im still to this day kinda 'whoa this place is nuts'

haha the only time I stayed in NYC was in the Village; I don't really dig hanging out with affluent American youths but that was the scene.

the problem with NYC is you're going to find americans there

max otm the village late at night is one of my least favorite things in ny.

― iatee, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:22 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is genuinely sad

Also, there are places in Paris where you can go late at night if you want. They also have a nuit blanche (allnighter) tonight

lol this thread is getting me k psyched abt ny again, must resist

yeah aerosol

i mean im not down on SF or Chicago (or LA or las vegas) but, lets be real here, by almost any measure nyc is the best city in this country for food.

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

okay i guess the double obese guy would know best

i just feel like although there are more options in NY other cities have hit the high mark for me more often

Since The Village was the only place I've actually lived in NYC I think that's partly where I get the overwhelmed feeling. Oh, I guess I lived in mid-town for a while. When I was in Brooklyn last summer I sort of fell in love with it and was all, "Let's move here now!". I know very little about Brooklyn tbh.

it's like the worlds largest frat row or something. I'm sure it was cool when you could still get stabbed. xp

iatee went to stanford so his opinion of berkeley is irrelevant.

xxxp well you start the thread and well see if u and steve shasta can convince anyone

idk having attended nyu i can definitely understand what is exciting about the village late-night, now i go back and oh jesus macdougal street is a fucking nightmare, no i hate comedy, leave me alone

you could not pay me to enter a bar on macdougal street

maybe that little tiny one in a basement but that place is always playing shitty punk music real loud

x-post omg macdougal lol - I forgot you went there too.

if you like brooklyn you'll love philly

http://i.imgur.com/VqVwR.jpg

whoops

a. frat boys are people too
b. theres tons of cool people and things still in the village
c. getting stabbed sucks
d. youre not seeing the forrest for the trees
e. party

when I first visited brooklyn I was like "hey this pheels nice"

yeah philly is consistently one of the most underrated cities in the US, love that place, fantastic art museum too for a city its size

wait what I went to berkeley

I don't want anyone thinking I'm preppy scum when I'm hippie scum

houston has a lot of cultural institutions iirc. one could do worse.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 6:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm best cultural infrastructure in the south imo

dayo the problem is that there isnt a "manhattan" to phillys "brooklyn" and its manhattan that makes brooklyn "brooklyn"

one of my favorite people is from houston and i feel like i'm arguing by proxy for her itt

I don't want anyone thinking I'm preppy scum when I'm hippie scum

Oh I thought you got a JD at Stanford. Am I confusing you with someone else.

Philly is dope IMO

Elmo/Max You know that comedy place they should Louis C.K. going into in the beginning of Louis? That's down there somewhere, right? I know it's one of those ones around there but I can't remember where exactly and it's been bugging me.

I like Philly.

Hoosteen - we were talking about Houston the other afternoon irl, remember?

haha oh right

yeah philly is consistently one of the most underrated cities in the US, love that place, fantastic art museum too for a city its size

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:28 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the complaint re philly generally from the people who live there is: everyone is a horrible asshole

a. frat boys are people too
b. theres tons of cool people and things still in the village
c. getting stabbed sucks
d. youre not seeing the forrest for the trees
e. party

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 2:28 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

f. drink specials

max are you saying that manhattan is so shitty it lowers their expectation of brooklyn so that people go "hey this is sweet" when they finally go to brookly

comedy place they should Louis C.K.

show not should

ya, you can see him coming up out of the west 4th stop in the credits

Yeah, I just noticed which stop that was the other night.

as someone whose facebook feed is clogged by "PHILLY IS THE ONLY PLACE IN THE WORLD" people from high school, I concur that people who feel really strong about philly are assholes

nevertheless philly rules the world droolz

u know what i cant believe im still on this thread when the greatest city in the world awaits outside my door, on the morrow yall, i have some culture to soak up

has anyone been to that little island inbetween manhattan and new york I think a train stops there it looks so cute on the map I want to go

I want to say it's called stonecutters island but Ithink it's called roosevelt island and it maybe has a beach and is actually kind of large?

enbb, yeah, it's the comedy cellar. dave attell made fun of my hair once there.

roosevelt island, i been there a few times, you can even take the tram my god

IT HAS A GONDOLA

It's pretty boring though. Mainly residential.

its sort of a lil communist country in ny w/a ruined leper colony or something at the southern tip, its p neat, no beach tho

x-post - I think it's where I saw Dave Chapelle years and years ago. If it's the one I'm thinking of it's TINY. He was very very drunk/high and kept falling over. Was still amazing.

auxiliary islands of New York City

it's just boring apartments now boring luxury apartments. I heard lots of UN people live there.

never been to city island, sposed to be p sweet

Just had to google-maps MacDougal St and my feeling is, nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded. No, okay, kidding, but it does make me think that never in my time in NY have I had enough money flowing like a river into my hands that I would spend it in the stores on MacDougal St; also THAT'S where the other Artichoke Pizza is?

You can get good clams on City Island.

City Island was lols when I went there. Like four blocks wide with one street down the middle. Nice old brick houses with back yards where I was, and the seafood joint on the corner was the most Mafia place I have ever seen in this entire city plus living in Jersey City for 3 years, so that is a bit. But you can only get there by bus/car over one bridge, so basically no one would ever see me again.

philly is the best

why are we talking about nyc all the time on this thread btw

city island is a pain to get to but it's worth it on a nice day

artichoke pizza is the most overrated shit ever

can we just rename thread 'NYC is cool'

Roosevelt Isl: At one time you couldn't have DOGS on the island, as pets. Is that still true? It sounded crazy but hey.

the seafood joint on the corner was the most Mafia place I have ever seen in this entire city

YES!!!

My ex was from the Bronx so we'd drive there sometimes to get dinner. It's bizarre but sort of neat.

how on earth can philly even come up here?

I don't understand that either. They have mass transit and affordable housing and a nice city center iirc and you can get there on the train, all of which puts Philly firmly across the "protected from this poll" line.

otm

new york and san francisco have come up already, so why not philly

How many "major" american cities are there?

4-5

lol

so basically if it isn't NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston or Philly, gtfo?

ny dc chicago la sf

If we're talking top ten metro areas, Dallas is my least favorite. SF is not in the top 10 fwiw.

i can only assume that you cant decide between four and 5 because you arent sure if you should include staten island

xposts

it's not in the top 10 purely based on the population w/i the municipal boundaries but the greater bay area is

one of my favorite people is from houston and i feel like i'm arguing by proxy for her itt

― horseshoe, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 11:29 AM (50 minutes ago)

good place to be from iycmd

iatee -- no it isn't? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas

Or am I reading this wrong?

they don't count the south bay

Oh. It's only #6 with the south bay though.

I was more answering w/r/t 'which american cities are 'world cities''

Those metropolitan/megapolis boundaries can be so arbitrary. Fremont (1 hour away) is included with SF whereas Silicon Valley (30 mins away) is not. mmmkay.

new york

― yung huma (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 9:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I mean, Fremont is directly adjacent to San Jose, yet it is lumped in with SF which is several counties, bridges, area codes, etc. away.

ya it's arbitrary and stupid

tons of people commute south bay <-> sf

Fremont is closer to Oakland than Silicon Valley is to SF. But both Fremont and Silicon Valley are South Bay to me.

lol:

worst shithole of a major american city [Started by flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist) in October 2011, last updated 1 minute ago by polyphonic on I Love Everything]
Guess the City [Started by cherry blossom in October 2008, last updated 1 minute ago by Ismael Klata on I Love Everything]
Occupy Wall Street [Started by Milton Parker in October 2011, last updated 1 minute ago by iatee on I Love Everything]

I loved Philadelphia! I walked all over that city, met friendly people. It would get swarmed with people during rush hours but off time was off time. Lot's of record stores when I was there in 2002. Haven't been there since , but really loved the place!

I really dig Houston as well!

Having lived 20 years in Jacksonville -- JACKSONVILLE

I can't think of Jacksonville now without remembering the Achewood comic arc that took place there

Jacksonville, NC is worse.

i'm not sure if i can think of anything potentially more disgusting than a beach outside of jacksonville

Coney Island is not just potentially but actually more disgusting than Jax Beach.

Why are so few people mentioning Detroit in this thread?

pity

It no longer exists.

i voted detroit in the last one

Gotta give some other shithole city a chance to win, c'mon now.

I fuckin hate all of you people

how do you post in this thread so many time everyone it gets done like every week

eighth-ing or ninth-ing JAX. i mean i've been worse places but they weren't 'major' American cities.

that said, they did have some really nice city parks there, even in the not-so-nice areas

and yeah, Philly's awes

and yeah, Philly's awes

one of my favorite people is from houston and i feel like i'm arguing by proxy for her itt

― horseshoe, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 11:29 AM (50 minutes ago)

good place to be from iycmd

― citation needed (Steve Shasta), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 3:21 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

if you can m____ d______?

catch my drift

oh i see. yeah, she doesn't live there anymore.

If u catch my drift?

Dammit

New York City is a shit hole. Visited twice this year, two weeks total. Can't understand why people want to live like that. Not as shitty as Houston, but nobody every says Houston is a great city. Houston, Dallas and Atlanta are all ubershit but NYC would be my top choice for the worst. Partially due to the fact that NYC residents love to shout about how amazing it is but mostly because it's dirty, there are no good parks (other than Central Park), every street looks like the one you just passed and there are way too many people.

every street looks like the one you just passed and there are way too many people.

Uh?

You guys, Houston has a LOT of ethnic culture that you never hear about because it is, by its nature, very insular. That also means it's full of as many amazing restaurants as New York City, and I'm not even joking. You just have to know where they are. Invariably, they are in some sad-looking, otherwise abandoned strip mall.

I liked Philly a lot, and NYC too. Loved living in Baltimore, though it is totally neighborhood by neighborhood as far as safety & fun. Have disliked Boston ever since I was a child; it was the closest big city and I had family there, I've never liked visiting or even going there for shows. DC is the worst place I've lived as opposed to just visited. Just moved to Dallas a few weeks ago and so far it's not bad at all.

Houston has great food that is for sure!

Okay...Dallas???????

I don't care about night life at all---don't really go to bars---so while Paris is quiet after hours, the fact that American cities can be vibrant late isn't a selling-point to me.

sometimes I wonder if we're related by blood or something

walking through the vibrant streets late at night with lots of ppl in em is exactly what I don't want, if I stay up til 2 it's so I can enjoy the quiet of the streets outside - this was actually a great thing abt youth culture in Portland when I lived there at 18/19: you could dance in the most insanely lit-up crowded constant-action dance club til 2 & then your walk home would be like...empty streets, fog, ghosts. ex-Rajneesh guys asking for change.

there are no good parks (other than Central Park)

there are lots of good parks; central park is a great park; central park is probably easy & reasonably quick to get to, compared to how far away the good park is from you at any one time in another city. lots of good parks though.

yeah, that's mental! prospect park, bryant park, all the new waterfront parks, greenwood cemetery even...there are things you can fault NYC for but it doesn't lack for great parks.

what are we talking about when we say that paris doesnt have much of a nightlife

Bryant park is shit. It's not even a park. It's mostly pavement/concrete. If you count Bryant Park as a real park, you have completely different standards. You can get a nice panini and latte at Bryant park, maybe even ice skate, but otherwise it's a tiny square filled with people having a lunch break and pigeons. Prospect Park is in Brooklyn. I suppose I was equating NYC to Manhattan, which I know is wrong, but...

i see on google maps that there's a patch of grass there in teh summer but it's still a ridiculously small bit of grass to warrant calling a park.

look at this list of largest urban parks in the world - 15 of them are in new york city http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_park#Urban_parks_by_size

if you can ice skate at a park and yet you don't rank that park as awesome then I have beef with you

otm

brotherlovesdub, more like brotherisdumb

I suppose I was equating NYC to Manhattan

lol wth

in mn you can ice skate in pretty much every park with standing water for like 6 months a year so i need something more aero

nyc has like 20 great parks. how much time did you spend outside of manhattan, brotherlovesdub?

by 'great' I mean 'this would be the best park in almost any american city'

you need to get out more

I've only been to NYC a few times, and it was for business each time, so I never left Manhattan, except for the brief time I spent in Brooklyn when I race across the bridge. Would like to see more.

what are we talking about when we say that paris doesnt have much of a nightlife

really only maybe a half dozen night-lifey parts of the city, not a lot of late night food

but you can drunkenly ride a bikeshare bike around empty parisian streets at 3 am on your way home, which makes up for some stuff

i also love these threads, and can't really think of an american city i find more boring and shitty than Cleveland, but it isn't a major american city. if we're talking the major cities? Houston. hands-down. DC second in terms of shitholiness.

also, very much agreed about the Bay Area being non-mellow while pretending to be mellow.... but to call SF the Boston of the west really really really pisses me off for some reason, mostly because Boston is such a massive stain.

(sorry, please don't sb me, bostoners).

why is it a massive stain? other than the people

the red sox

but to call SF the Boston of the west really really really pisses me off for some reason, mostly because Boston is such a massive stain.

― Sophomore subs are the new Smith lesbians. (the table is the table), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 8:52 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol and you know who hates to be compared to san franciscans... BOSTONIANS

they should take it as a compliment

by 'great' I mean 'this would be the best park in almost any american city'

in fairness though if you were in a great park in rochester you'd be kinda "I guess this park would be ok if it were in NY"

I fuckin hate all of you people

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 10:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how do you post in this thread so many time everyone it gets done like every week

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 10:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my big reaction to SF on my last visit was "wau this is like Boston only legit"

Lots of gays too.

why is it a massive stain? other than the people

this made me lol hard

Re: Jax. Technically, it's not 10 miles from the beach, it borders the beach community. If you live nearer to UNF/JTB, the beach is surprisingly close. The boardwalk in Jax Beach during most of my years there looked like Coney Island Jr., with rotting ferris wheels and crusty skee-ball garages. All that is gone, now.

I'm lost about the lake in question. The Camp Blanding lake, way the fuck out in the woods of the west-westside? I spent too much time at that redneck infested place when I was about 15. Ugh. Horrible.

Jax not only doesn't have sidewalks, it doesn't even have curbs, in most neighborhoods. Grass just borders the street.

Riverside was the only neighborhood I would live in during my 20s, and I vaguely miss San Marco, and the booji beaches between Jax and St. Augustine, but there is NOTHING else there but rednecks.

Detroit, however, I can never say a bad thing about. Too much sepia-toned childhood memories of Michigan.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Diseased-Streets-472430013.html

An NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals a dangerous concoction of drug needles, garbage, and feces lining the streets of downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed more than 150 blocks, including some of the city’s top tourist destinations, and discovered conditions that are now being compared to some of the worst slums in the world.

Ppl need to relax abt discarded needles

they used to be more spread out, now they are more concentrated.

from that wiki list

26 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL MSA

^^ding ding ding

― yung huma (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 10:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man anybody who answers this has never been to fuckin' Waldo, FL.

I totaled my car in Waldo and the nearest hotel was 12 miles away, loads of nothingness for miles. everybody asking me "how the hell did you wind up out here". simple - I drove into another vehicle while en route to some place almost as boring (Jacksonville). Nobody goes TO Waldo.

NBC Bay Area otm it’s fucking depressing

just wondering what % of slumminess that is if you consider the entire city. Like, it's a pretty small %, compared to other cities that have much more poverty

relax about needles, chill about poop, settle down about garbage, take it easy about pee

It's also kinda funny in the context of "we're going to investigate the 150 city blocks nearest our offices!"

http://abc7news.com/news/data-shows-sf-has-2nd-highest-homeless-population-in-us/1407123/

SF’s downtown human feces situation is the best illustration of our national wealth distribution crisis that I’ve encountered, fwiw

If you're trying to get one of us to ask "Where's Waldo?", keep tryin'.

xp

new york

― yung huma (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 9:07 PM

Somebody's gonna get a stern talking-to.

Dr Morbius...otm

Nyc probably up there

But what happened to SF? It used to be so nice 10+ years ago

Used to go often and every time it got worse and worse

If You're Going To San Francisco, Be Ready To Wash Feces From Your Hair

i did not need a full-on news investigation to tell me that downtown sf is a horrible place

worth getting a little feces in your hair to get a Mission burrito

A little feces in yr mission burrito

worth getting a little feces in your hair to get a Mission burrito

― Josefa, Monday, February 19, 2018 10:58 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

such a good Minutemen song

Regarding first post of this thread, Indianapolis has an ace Kurt Vonnegut museum

at this point i'm sure indianapolis is better than SF or most of NYC

Indy is very affordable and there is more tech business there than you would think. Louisville is similar but perhaps a bit more fun. Cleveland has all sorts of stuff going on.

The places that are really boring and scary are some of the rust belt smaller cities where much the industry is gone and what's left is a land of the junkie dead with just a hospital or college propping up things. The only way up is getting the heck out of town.

Little Rock gets my vote. visited once during a tour and the place was like stepping into the Twilight Zone. driving around downtown on a Saturday night and nobody was in the streets, it looked like everything was closed, like a weird ghost town. we pull up the bus and get out to ask for directions from a lone redneck just standing outside of a closed shop. it felt like we had ended up in Troll 2.

xpost Seriously. I was born and spent a number of formative years in a town about an hour from Indianapolis which is basically unrecognizable today. It's just kinda imploded. Literally in many senses (you can easily get into the double digits, counting the number of collapsed roofs on houses as you drive through town).

I heard Chicago described recently as 35% San Francisco and 65% Detroit. That said, we're going to be out in San Fran this summer, so solicited recommendations, and one response that came back was, and this s a quote, "After Chicago, SF feels like a dump and like someone forgot to clean up."

i lived in indy for a decade (moved last year) and i wouldn't say it's a "shithole". its reputation for being boring, while perhaps a bit overblown, is the most you can say for it. the architecture there is shit. some good museums, though unfortunately the art museum had to start charging admission. art-wise the big car collective are doing some good stuff.

issues with indy? well, the entire american midwest is dying. they invested heavily in industrialism, folks there aren't very educated. worse, once i (finally) got my degree, i moved out because they don't really have the jobs for people with degrees. the whole town, during the time i lived there, was run by lilly, in sort of the same sense that beaverton, where i live now, is run by nike. problem is that lilly adopted the "big score" business model so common in capitalism now, which did great for them in the '90s but the patents on all their cash cow drugs ran out, and they don't have any new ones. so they're dying. they are getting rid of all their employees with decent benefits and replaced them with contractors (i didn't have decent healthcare until i moved out of indianapolis). a "big score" could come for them at any time, of course, but i'm not laying odds on it.

tech is growing out there - not fast enough to compensate for everything else - but there are potential issues here. any tech in indiana is going to have to be very okay with republicans. indiana tries very hard to have their "business-friendly" republicans running the show, the sort of people tech folks (not bros, indy doesn't really have "tech bros" per se) like to make a big show of "bipartisanship" with, but they do tend to fuck up and wind up with racist assholes like pence (you've heard the story about the time pence flat out refused to pardon a black guy who was wrongly convicted the entire time he was governor, right?), who _will_ drive out tech money. as for the democrats, the state party is a thoroughly dysfunctional and milquetoast org and there's not really any hope for them.

the other thing about the midwestern cities is low population density. this is one of the most important determinants of a city and people don't even think about it most of the time. the only two really high pop density cities in america are sf and nyc, though eventually i can see the entire west coast going that way. economic disparity is much more pronounced out here than it is in the midwest, but mostly that's a factor, i think, of there being less and less money to go around there. worst case scenario in the west coast is sf. worst case scenario in the midwest is detroit, which is great if you like techno but problematic in most other respects.

I like Chicago.

I want to go to Detroit, I have this gut feeling that it's gonna be a lot cooler than people say.

I ended up going to NYC one more time after this thread, staying in Koreatown, went to the Met & Moma & other tourist shit, had a swell time. would not call it a shithole compared to yeah Houston or Dallas for instance.

I have reoccurring nightmares of being stuck on hotel buses between O'Hare and like Arlington Heights.

My favourite cities in USA are Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia

My least favourite cities in USA are Phoenix (why is it there and why is there nothing to do), Houston (ugly but good food), Dallas (bad but the surrounding cities are nice) and San Francisco (cold, expensive, and you have to wait 45 minutes to eat anything)

None of them are as bad as Calgary tho, that's the worst place

I love unassuming do-good cities like Charleston, Lawrence KS, Savannah, Oklahoma City, Missoula

I don't adore Portland, New York, New Orleans or Chicago-- they feel like cities on autopilot

gonna go with indianapolis, there are some cool people there, but the city proper..... woof

No list is a perfect measure, but I prefer the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_areas_of_the_United_States ranking to the metropolitan one, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas to that relying upon city limits proper. One could probably construct better measures than either of these, and I imagine people have, but using the PSA list for now, I'd deem the top five or ten 13-18 or so the only "major" cities, followed by about 19-24 I'd deem "mid-major," and about 25 40 or so minor ones thereafter, the rest being towns of unusual size.

Though and perhaps because I haven't been to all of them, I wouldn't call any of the majors a "shithole." If forced to pick one, my biases would point towards Dallas, but I'm not sure they'd be correct. Of the mid-majors, what I've heard suggests that Orlando is a pretty good answer.

I want to go to Detroit, I have this gut feeling that it's gonna be a lot cooler than people say.

Probably, but that's because they hit rock bottom a while ago and essentially formally downsized.

I've been trying to think of some good shitholes, but can't credibly post any. Houston would seem the leader - the climate of New Orleans without the culture. A city built upon no zoning, handshake deals and segregation that has damaged both the city's social fabrics and the physical environment. It's the 4th-largest city in the U.S., but no one ever mentions it. It's the largest city in Texas, but Dallas and even San Antonio get more press. What that place is going to be like in 20 more years, I don't want to imagine.

But, um, I've never actually been to Houston. YMMV.

Houston and Indianapolis are the two largest cities that are closest to where I live that I've never been to. Can't speak for the city, but I am on record for speaking in very general terms that Indiana may be the stupidest goddam place on Earth. Those people make Oklahomans look smart, which is something, I tell you.

Actually, culturally Houston is surprisingly diverse (which is one reason why the food is good). But the city is otherwise like a giant strip mall.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT FOOD.

*Unless I'm in New Orleans.

Waldo FL sucks. Worst fuckin' speed trap.

Orlando I hear is terrible

And I've been to Indianapolis and it's flat and sprawling but I don't remember it being terrifically awful

I really can't understate how terrible Calgary is. It's Houston except cold and without the good food. Food there is expensive and goddamn terrible. Houston seems lovely in comparison

Indianapolis is just tremendously boring imo. Feels like a really big small town.

Waldo FL sucks. Worst fuckin' speed trap.

― Lockhorn. Lockhorn breed-uh (Jon not Jon), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:10 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

EVERYBODY SAYS THIS. it's insane that this is all they're known for lol

that and the flea market

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDzhEcfRORk

Moo Vaughn is otm about having to include the urban statistical areas. The people who complain the most about inner-city crime tend to be those who live in a large urban area, and they don't get that their economic and cultural stakes are tied to the city as much as the suburban sprawl.

A coworker was putting St Louis proper down, and I'm like... St. Louis is really a core surrounded by about three tiers of suburbs now. You can't paint a picture of the city without including the mcmansion crap on the outer ring as part of it, and then it starts to become clear why things are how they are

Orlando I hear is terrible

I've lived in or outside Orlando for almost my entire life. I don't love it, and for many years hated it but I couldn't see it being put on this list, at least not alongside some of the descriptions I've seen above. There is a ton to do here. I also warmed a little to the city when we got an MLS team and started revitalizing the Church St area which had been dormant and dull for a while.

The main issue here is shortage of affordable rental properties and crime - we've showed up in the top ten in the crime risk index in previous years. statistically it's mostly larceny type crimes rather than violent crimes, but I definitely don't live in a good area (ie we just got an email from our Apt Complex that multiple vehicle break-ins have happened in recent weeks).

houston is a wanna-be los angeles but less cool

indianapolis is weird and boring

not in a big/major city, but a brown buddy was chilling at a university party around lafayette i believe and lots of white dudes were giving him dirty looks and he felt really unwelcomed

chi town is fun, i would't live there though

st louis is boring

milkwaukee feels devoid of all culture and looks like a dying city

i don't know, lots of competition for worst major city i guess

You can't paint a picture of the city without including the mcmansion crap on the outer ring as part of it, and then it starts to become clear why things are how they are

I mean, are we talking cities or metros? St. Louis or St. Louis County?

I love St. Louis (the city). You can keep the fried German food though.

or the Provel pizza

Chicago is my favorite city. the museums, the food, even the suburbs. plus it's reasonably affordable, it's obviously a place that has everything you can find in NYC or the Bay Area (except amazing bridges) but you can actually buy something there or rent and not die of not being able to buy food because now you're broke.

I really like Los Angeles but I won't be able to afford to live here at some point. I mean, when it comes time to buy. We know people who are so into the idea of L.A. that they're willing to buy a fixer-upper in some smog-filled corner of the Inland Empire and...no.

as much as I like it there, SF has major problems. Tech industry, homelessness, sinking condo skyscrapers, etc. We have friends who lived up there near Berkeley pretty recently and rented their house out down here, and then returned back after a couple years bc they were miserable. And the traffic feels much worse in SF to me, even though the stats indicate L.A. doesn't have much competition in the worst traffic stakes.

i loved NYC when i lived there, it changed my life, but living there again feels wrong.

Yes, Houston, which at least since Katrina is home to more New Orleanians than any other major city, is by some measures the most diverse city in America. It's substantially larger in day and nighttime population than Dallas, and denser and more populous in its truly urban interior, with a larger residential population in its downtown core, though the latter two may be marginal differences, and Dallas evidently has a superior transit system and perhaps more coherent neighborhoods. In addition to having a superior food scene, I'd judge from afar that Houston tops Dallas in the arts, though that's probably debatable.

xxp

los angeles is the most overhyped turd

if there were less traffic, less people, less hollywood types, and less expensive it would be way better

i mean $2k to live in a 1br downtown was a real shocker tbh, a city center that was barely functioning just a few years ago

xxp I think of it in terms of the previously mentioned link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_areas_of_the_United_States

So you end up with the city, the area containing the majority of people that commute within that area, and it covers all the economic/social codependencies.

It's not what you're going to ever think of in terms of "I visited X city and it sucked" because no tourist or visitor for work is going to be hanging out in some outer ring suburb, so maybe it's not what this thread really is for. Or maybe it is, because the explanation of why a city core sucks is usually a function of whether people actually use the city or cloister themselves in the suburbs.

i love l.a. these days. such a better vibe than sf. had to move from sf for school after living there 25 years. it really is a shithole and nyc is pristine by comparison from what i've seen. even in swanky parts of sf there is often a sewer smell. and a buddy of mine in the mission woke up to a turd at his front door the other day.

did they ever resolve the problem of neighboring states literally giving people exiting mental health facilities/incarceration bus tickets to SF? that was an actual thing

https://thinkprogress.org/nevada-gets-sued-for-dumping-homeless-patients-with-mental-illnesses-onto-buses-271e5c518016/

xxp

this is true

i'm pretty jealous of the people i know around L.A. who bought houses in the Los Feliz and Silver Lake hills for 300k around the year 2000. those all go for over a million now.

a Redfin real estate search for under 800k within a five mile radius leads to tears.

xxp

weird how even in canada the cities to the east of vancouver do this and ship them all to vancouver

I haven't spent a tonne of time in Milwaukee but it's the only city I've seen on any of the Great Lakes that did the waterfront properly

Having lived in both Houston and Austin, I can say that Houston is definitely a more interesting and diverse place--artistically, ethnically, food-wise, etc. As mentioned above, the true "urban interior" of Houston (think the inner loop, Montrose in particular) is actually pretty great--expensive but nothing like Austin, which is now pretty bland and overrun with techbros tbh. Perhaps visitors usually aren't impressed because you have to have a pretty deep knowledge of it to know what's worthwhile and what to avoid--and that hour long drive from the airport to downtown is depressing as fuck. And the proper downtown is boring office buildings, which gives a false impression of where the action is.

Milwaukee, like Pittsburgh, has come a long way!

For me the rotten part of my Houston experiences has been the air quality. I'd drive in from the east on I-10 on my way to SA and at some point the air would turn brown then black-ish, like I was driving into an eclipse. I've been in LA in similar circumstances but when it was the result of wildfires north of the city, whereas in Houston this seemed to be normal.

xxxp

And then Vancouver ships them back

article?

And the proper downtown is boring office buildings, which gives a false impression of where the action is.

― ryan, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 5:55 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the question that most interests me about Houston - where is the center of the action? Montrose feels pretty sleepy to me.

I haven't spent a tonne of time in Milwaukee but it's the only city I've seen on any of the Great Lakes that did the waterfront properly

― flamboyant goon tie included, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:50 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was only there for a day and didn't make it out to the waterfront but i'm glad to hear it b/c what i saw of downtown totally sucked. putting a massive highway interchange right in the middle of the city was not a great idea.

There are a lot of incredibly clean, pleasant smelling parts of San Francisco! ... Like most of it, at this point -- just not the parts where people who visit tend to go. This thread is so weird in terms of how people are judging cities, apart from say, Orlando.

I spent five days in L.A. a couple years back and spent time in Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz -- those parts were cool, but definitely not representative of the city as a whole.

putting a massive highway interchange right in the middle of the city was not a great idea.

yea so many cities are fucked bc of shit like this

how so?

definitely not representative of the city as a whole

in a city as big and diverse as LA you could say the same about any neighborhood

absolutely! many major cities are also big and diverse, and people itt are saying, "i went there a few times, spent time in a few areas, and man, the whole city is a shithole or conversely, this whole city is great.

yes, you're right, it's weird

Every city is good probably. Though I will never return to Houston.

it's an odd feeling when someone's going on about some city being horrible and then it turns out they inexplicably were in the most boring part for work and didn't make it any further than a block from their business meeting

yeah obviously the "quality" of a city has as much to do w/ your values and how you spend your time as it does the city itself

philadelphia

Every city is good probably.

cities are inherently interesting

The only real shitholes are the places you'd expect, imo, like Youngstown and Gary. Big cities are all degrees of fine/good.

still trying to sort out my feelings on albuquerque

Probably the root cause of any shitholeishness in any American city is racism

that's why i picked philly

OTOH it seems a little ridiculous to demand or expect that someone spend a lot of time outside of downtown or whatever before they can be allowed to venture an opinion on a city or "primary statistical area" - a city is not a movie or an album, it's expensive and time consuming to try and take in the whole built environment and cultural scene.

So having spent a lot of my leisure time in my youth and been on many work trips in my middle age to the primary statistical area that includes San Francisco, I feel confident in saying that downtown is a real shithole, and that a city as rich as SF, in a state that boasts an economy bigger than continents, should clean up its fucking poop and needles and give its people some affordable places to fucking live. It's disgusting.

yea so many cities are fucked bc of shit like this

― marcos, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:04 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how so?

― sarahell, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:06 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

poorly placed highways & interchanges disrupt the flow between neighborhoods, cities get chopped up & segregated, you lose access to things like lakefronts and riverfronts. in cleveland for example we have two large highways merge just east of downtown blocking miles of beautiful lakefront, the lake is not accessible to people who live right next to it. the highways here are made for all the people who commute into the city from the suburbs and everyone in the city got fucked over

xp yeah, it's more "worst shithole I've visited" or "worst shithole in which to live"
we've got room here for everything

mpls got pretty fucked by I-94

still trying to sort out my feelings on albuquerque

― gbx, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:40 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tell me more! what's it like?

my uncle settled there for 30 years and really loved it, i have this very romantic view of it in my head bc of him and we talk about moving out there someday because it seems like an interesting and affordable place w/ good culture and weather. i have friends in colorado though who tell me it is a meth-ridden shithole and tell us we should move to santa fe instead

i have love for the shithole cities of america. i spent a lot of time in a small city that's usually regarded as a shithole and i mean i thought it was fine. fine enough that a lot of people i know who moved away moved back by choice.

I concur, Milwaukee lakefront is very pleasant.

I'd live in Vancouver (non-US!) if I could get a job.

before they can be allowed to venture an opinion on a city

opinions are like assholes, etc

sorry for a moment i forgot this is the message board where people have opinions on how to hold a slice of pizza

poorly placed highways & interchanges disrupt the flow between neighborhoods, cities get chopped up & segregated, you lose access to things like lakefronts and riverfronts.

oh, I thought you were going to say "smog" and environmental issues that cause asthma in people that live by the highways, and yeah, that is bad. This other stuff, though, is just change, and there are often also positive things about that change.

so, I moved here because I have a large community of friends up in santa fe, which I adore (both the friends and the town), but the job was down in abq

it definitely has great weather, interesting culture (though, to me, that's a state-wide thing and not at all localized to abq), and it's very affordable. coming from mpls, though, there's a whole lot less going on for "cultural activities" (arts, not many national-but-small touring acts, etc) despite being of a similar size. there's a sense with some folks i know in Santa that it's poised for its portland/denver moment, but i'm not convinced yet myself

some folks i work with here (medical pros) have concerns about raising kids here because the schools aren't great (supposedly) and there is a lot of poverty/property crime, and consequently choose to live in fairly segregated (economically) communities that are pretty bland.

the surrounding area, particularly up north, is gorgeous and another huge reason I'm here. i'm very seriously weighing up a move to santa fe this fall, but it is substantially more expensive (tightest rental market in america, supposedly!) and i would have to commute ~2h/day

i'm still pretty ignorant of a lot of different corners of ABQ, and i gather that there are some pretty cute lil neighborhoods that would be pretty nice

isn't ABQ where the poster that got banned recently lived?

beats me

as a guy who's knocking on 40yo in a few years, and who has close friends nearby, and is more interested in hikes in the desert than staying out late, it's totally my speed for now --- it might not be as nice a place for a Younger Cooler Person

My take is that NY, LA, and Chicago are the only true urban Metropoli in America, LA of a different character than the others, though slightly smaller and more traditional urban centers growth-bounded by geography and/or regulation like SF, DC, Philadelphia, and Boston are close runners-up, at least the first of which may deserve to join the top three when consolidated with the more transit-accessible portion of the Bay Area. The other big cities/metropolitan areas are all either sprawling population centers too suburban in character (Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix), traditional cities of insufficient size (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis), or hybrids that don't quite satisfy either measure (Miami, San Diego, Seattle, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Orange County, the Twin Cities, Atlanta) to qualify, though a combination of growth and densification may be pushing some of these towards major metro status.

And the proper downtown is boring office buildings, which gives a false impression of where the action is.

― ryan, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 5:55 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the question that most interests me about Houston - where is the center of the action? Montrose feels pretty sleepy to me.

― Moo Vaughn, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:34 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's kind of the neat thing about Houston RN, is that there isn't really a center of action per se, just a # of different scenes. Montrose, The Heights, Midtown. Downtown is actually really humming now w/good bars & restaurants (Full Disclosure: One of my gigs is helping put on events there). East Downtown is blowing up too, but it's about to get fucked majorly by TxDot and the impending I-45/US 59 expansion, which will probably claim right of way on a whole bunch of bars, clubs, and restaurants.

xp - I have a friend that moved to Albuquerque a few years ago -- arty dude, in his 40s, has a kid -- I think his biggest issue with the place is relatively conservative politics, but otherwise he seems to like it.

Honestly, I find it impressive in a "wow, there sure is a broad spectrum of human taste and behavior" way, that so many people would choose to live in Chicago, considering how awful the weather is.

i need a big research university for work and university of new mexico seems like a neat place. i have no interest (i.e. financial ability lol) to live in expensive cities even if they are cooler. really id just want a nice house in an interesting neighborhood from where i can bike to work. in addition the weather, nature, and affordability, ABQ has the food, i could eat that new mexican cuisine all the time

xp yea i grew up in a shitty midwestern climate so there is a lot of it i take for granted and don't think about too much - "i guess half the year has to suck" - but i am realizing it doesn't have to be that way

i miss the winter weather, it never bothered me. it's the summers in the midwest that were tough.

Bad weather keeps the rent down here.

and I'm sure reduces the homeless population significantly!

ah man i love summer here, everybody comes alive

far less likely to shit on the sidewalk when it's 20 degrees out

nice house where you can bike to a research univ pretty much covers abq, though stay off the main arteries -- i might be biased by seeing patients in the neuro icu but ppl drive like maniacs here. i felt much safer as a bike messenger doing stupid stuff in chicago than i do now pootling to the grocery store (granted, i'm ten years older)

w/r/t conservative politics: i only run into that directly when i'm working at the VA and talking to old timers who are afraid i'm gonna take their guns away

def not as progressive as most equivalently sized cities but new mexico is such a diverse state that most ppl are pretty tolerant. as an n=1, one of the patients in my trans clinic said that they felt more comfortable after moving to abq from california so idk

this is my first winter in a non-midwester, non-new england climate and while i do occasionally miss the real serious fight-for-your-life winter, i'm pretty cool with, like, a dusting of snow and 40F being the extent of it. i can always go up into the mountains if i want the real shit

marcos you're in Cleveland, right? i think Cleveland summers are probably less humid and terrible than Chicago!

i don't hate summer there though, it was more like at its worst it would be difficult to deal with. but i grew up without central air so...

he moved from the SF Bay Area and is pretty much a socialist so ...

yea im in cle! humidity can get bad sometimes but summers are nice here, the lake keeps things cool & comfortable usually

he moved from the SF Bay Area and is pretty much a socialist so ...

― sarahell, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:44 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fair enough

worst part of midwestern winters is the gray. the permacloud.

310+ days of sunshine a year baby

i feel like i would be a different person

yeah the dreariness of regular overcastness was worse than the temps/snow of a Chicago winter. You spend 7 months looking forward to warmth and sun returning, and after a few nice weeks it's uncomfortably warm and muggy.

Whenever I go back to IL in winter, you can sense the grumpiness of 10 million people with cabin fever.

this time of year every year i'm like why the fuck do i live in minnesota? february is tuff

still trying to sort out my feelings on albuquerque

― gbx, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:40 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I was thinking the same. If it was in the Midwest, it'd definitely fare worse in my book. But obviously it's not, so I don't know what I'm trying to say.

A buddy and I were coming back from Vegas in 1996, and out of pure exhaustion, decided Albuquerque was the place to say for the night. We didn't have much money, so we were driving through these sketchy commercial zones off the interstate. Each time I'd go into a hotel, the TV in the lobby would be on with the news, showing a bunch of sirens and cops. I was running in and out of these places, and by the fourth time I jumped back in the car, I was thinking, "Damn, ABQ's got some crime."

Wasn't until we finally got a room and turned on the TV that I realized everyone was watching bulletins from the Atlanta Olympics where a bomb had just exploded.

at least santa fe is less than 90 miles away

you're only 200 miles from the dells, tho

310+ days of sunshine a year baby

― gbx, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:54 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like i would be a different person

― marcos, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:56 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this reminds me of talking to someone about how a year after moving to LA, he realized that having to grab his sunglasses on the way out of the house had started to be an annoying chore. dude was from Alaska.

I guess I'm glad to have moved so much that I know there isn't really an ideal climate for me. Summer in Georgia was terrible, winter in Chicago and Montreal sucks, but is in some ways less depressing than in Oregon and England. And then all of those places have times of the year that are totally worth looking forward to (England ofc can be less reliable).

tbf, albuquerque DOES have some crime, as well as a famously murderous police force

but yeah, sf is a pretty quick jaunt up the road

310+ days of sunshine a year baby

― gbx

everybody complains about the constant rain in portland but speaking as someone with seasonal affective disorder i don't have a problem with it. it's not just about "sunshine" vs. "gray/rain".

Whatever makes a town a shithole, I think it can’t be the weather. It rains on the countryside too.

hmmmmm

silby's point almost shouldn't have to be made explicit, but it's ILX. Shithole cities happen because of people, not climate.

Shithole cities happen because of both. Houston being a malarial swamp doesn't help it in any way.

I love some of the residential architecture in Houston though ... and the thick trees ... the barbecue...the museums... the music... Chicano culture... fried catfish at the Breakfast Klub... the tattooed hottie who (I deluded myself into thinking) was flirting with me ... What the hell is wrong with you people?

http://littlehouseinbaltimore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/10679725_10204930183913070_2425434780800058041_o.jpg

xp - None of those things are unique to Houston even in Texas, what is unique about Houston is that it's a malarial swamp that's endangered regularly by hurricanes and has worse air than Austin or San Antonio (DFW is equally bad).

well, I guess that particular tattooed hottie might have been unique to Houston

Malarial swamps have their charms

I went to Baltimore plenty as a kid, since I lived in the Philly area and had tons of family in DC, and it was always ... eh. But I was there last spring for the first time in a long time, and it really seemed to have turned around.

New Mexico is more blue than purple, isn't it?

Serious major shitholes: Phoenix, Fresno, Reno, Jacksonville.

(xp) Baltimore turns its shit into cotton candy, that’s the thing

we went to DC and Baltimore for vacation and I loved Baltimore

I’ve always loved it as well.

I've been to both Dallas and Houston and I find Houston to be much much better than Dallas.

Best thing about Dallas is that it’s next to Fort Worth, where Ornette Coleman grew up.

Malarial swamps have their charms

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby)

If you're a mosquito.

(xp) Baltimore turns its shit into cotton candy, that’s the thing

― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 11:02 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so otm!!!!!

as far as urban convenience & cultural diversity & affordability & space & pace & attitude of its citizens Baltimore is WITHOUT PEER on the east coast. the whole thing about riding right below the mason-dixon is great people are really nice but no one has time for any bullshit. there are major problems that make the survival of the city's spirit even more beautiful

Dallas and Houston are largely indistinguishable to me aside from the weather.

Here is how I break it down to an extent

Cities live and die by the ability and willingness of their citizens to use them for their purpose.

A city generates wealth through population density and population growth. A thousand people on a city block have more economic activity than the same thousand people spread over a square mile or an entire subdivision.

Wealth has to go somewhere. By default, wealth starts flowing to property owners, whose holdings appreciate due to speculation and whose rents increase due to demand.

The job of the city is to capture and redistribute wealth to buttress the continued health of the city by keeping everyone in the city. Subsidizing housing is probably the most important way of doing this, but mass transit and human services also help keep people in the city. Because as economic and population growth proceed at crazy rates, a correction to postwar white flight and an impact of deindustrialization and automation (cf Seattle and San Francisco this past decade, Pittsburgh and many others this next decade), marginalized people are at risk for displacement to the suburbs or homelessness.

If cities don’t capture enough the wealth they generate, don’t grow enough networks of interdependence, they are more vulnerable to the whims of large employers or the broader economy.

So for a city to be a shithole, it must be a place where its residents do not give a shit about each other. If single-family homeowners don’t give a shit about techie newcomers who rent, if techie newcomers don’t give a shit about baristas, if baristas don’t give a shit about people experiencing homelessness, the political will to get the city to work for everyone in the city will be absent. And when the city suffers a shock, citizens will turn inward; as services dwindle, the wealthy will emigrate and those who remain will suffer from the cuts.

A resilient city’s economy depends on the city’s own gravity. A Boeing bust shrank Seattle for years. Everyone knows about Detroit. How do you make sure your city has the gravity to survive? How do you keep money moving through the city, instead of letting it be captured by speculators and publicly traded? How do you prepare for bad times? How do you build solidarity? How do you engineer a city, which in the end consists of autonomous agents?

What is a shithole but a place where nobody really wants to live?

Great post

Thanks I’m pretty sure that’s just me guessing what Jane Jacobs probably said decades ago but yknow I think about cities a lot

“Gravity” is a great way to think about it!

I would add that in many cases, it’s the neighborhood that provides much of the pull, rather than the city writ large. The political levers and large-scale investment and zoning choices may be made through City Hall, but neighborhoods provide the actual habitat, and unique blends of cohesion and complexity that make a city lovable - or not.

So for a city to be a shithole, it must be a place where its residents do not give a shit about each other. If single-family homeowners don’t give a shit about techie newcomers who rent, if techie newcomers don’t give a shit about baristas, if baristas don’t give a shit about people experiencing homelessness, the political will to get the city to work for everyone in the city will be absent. And when the city suffers a shock, citizens will turn inward; as services dwindle, the wealthy will emigrate and those who remain will suffer from the cuts.

Painfully OTM.

I could picture the current president calling a city like New Orleans a shithole. It does have high crime, poor infrastructure, its fair share of malarial swamps and rotting flesh. But holy hell, it certainly is not a shithole, for reasons silby lays out here.

increasingly so much of what makes a city is that One Company. a couple years back beaverton tried to be less of a suburb and more of a city, so they tried to annex surrounding unincorporated areas. this was all well and good until they got to the land nike was on. nike felt very strongly that they did not want to pay city taxes to beaverton, and used their power to lobby the state government to forbid beaverton from annexing them. well there you go. there was a power struggle, and city hall lost, and beaverton is always going to be a suburb.

there's the paradox of smaller cities right there. if you want to do all those things silby talks about, you need to collect resources, not just from people but from the companies because it's the larger organizations that really have the resources. but the companies have all the power in this situation, and everybody knows it. most cities can have all the plans and goals they want, but in terms of ability to accomplish those goals they're begging for table scraps. this is why all these cities are abasing themselves for the ability to be a second amazon hub.

re: highways run through urban areas: imho "things change" is a little bit blase/convenient when we're talking about something that was done and planned deliberately to benefit some people at the expense of others. the history of downtown highway construction in the us is overwhelmingly the history of white power elites demolishing swaths of nonwhite and/or poor neighborhoods and turning them into trenches or walls that cut off what was left of those neighborhoods. even when we're talking about something alongside a lake or harbor there is probably some version of this story playing out on the landward side. they didn't have to do it that way, but they did. more broadly the suburbanization that led to the desire for in-town highways to get business types back into downtown was massively subsidized, incentivized, and made exclusive at several levels of policy. "things change" isn't really doing that history justice. but if i'm misreading your post, sorry, just been thinking abt this this week cause we taught our sophomores about it yesterday.

I think that's where it helps to have fabulous location, in terms of weather and mountains/sea. Those things prevent a city from being interchangeable : no matter how many tax offerings an Indianapolis gives an Amazon, people who have the choice are going to choose to live in fab locations. (obv a big problem right now is how few people have the choice, and how little affordable housing there is in those good places)

xp

Our downtown is cut in two by the the Arkansas River. We live on one side, go to work on the other. There are so many days when, dammit, I wish there was maybe a fourth route I could take instead of one of these three bridges.

But then I spent one afternoon in the suburb below, while my daughter was at a birthday party. It took me 30 minutes to work out how to get from the north side to the south side of the interstate. I know this is common architecture all over the U.S., but how do engineers not see a wider road becoming more of an obstacle to travel?

https://i.imgur.com/63z0b8d.jpg

completely ridiculous

I'm sure there are some places in my area where that's more of an issue, but I live just north of a freeway that goes through the middle of the city, and there's a way to go over or under it about every ten blocks, and a lot more often downtown. Taking a half hour to make it around is crazy!

the Internet sports in this thread seems fun and all until you stay in a small area like a motel or your uncle’s farm and you watch tv and see a fucking trumpy bear commercial.

once you see a trumpy bear commercial, you become immediately homesick for your shithole or non-shithole major city.

i should probably reread "on wings of song"

Wow. Look at this photo: State Route 40 in Baltimore. Locals call it the "road to nowhere."

A middle-class black neighborhood was destroyed for its construction, with the full backing of the federal government. #blackhistorymonth Via @guardiancities https://t.co/ktwB4Rw27D pic.twitter.com/W6NC7rneDQ

— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) February 21, 2018

Without responding to silby's post in its entirety, I'll link this list of spending per capita among the 100 largest cities (with state spending as a not-irrelevant referent). Colorado Springs is last on the list, but Milwaukee (followed closely by Indianapolis) and Atlanta are the worst among the more 'major' categories I defined for myself above. The top 5 cities, in order, are DC, SF, NYC, Seattle, and Long Beach.

Link - https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America%27s_largest_cities

at least we know which ones are the dirtiest now

https://www.bbcleaningservice.com/images/dirtiest-cities-united-states.jpg

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Dirtiest-City-United-States-America-Study-Trash-474670993.html

yes the top 3 largest us cities are in the top 5 but mid-size cities seem to manage their garbage better

we're talking about something that was done and planned deliberately to benefit some people at the expense of others.

it gets complicated when this construction is done to encourage or retain jobs in the city, where these things can both benefit and disadvantage the same group of people. The finances of city governments in the US are complicated, and often business tax income and sales tax income (from the city workers buying things where they work) are what funds programs for the disadvantaged. A city like San Francisco is a great example, where they have a lot of money coming in from these things, and city services for the poor/marginalized far outweigh those of other California cities ... as an Oaklander, I look at SF money and am envious, but it is getting to be ridiculous that fewer and fewer poor and marginalized people can afford to live there so that they can take advantage of these services.

the history of downtown highway construction in the us is overwhelmingly the history of white power elites demolishing swaths of nonwhite and/or poor neighborhoods and turning them into trenches or walls that cut off what was left of those neighborhoods.

but it gets complicated when the neighborhoods are historically transitional, and when the poor/nonwhites don't want to live there! Like, you don't have to be white to want a house in the suburbs.

When the interstates were first built, nonwhites weren't allowed to live in the suburbs.

My understanding is that the Interstate system was sold to and approved by Congress based on the idea that a nationwide high speed road network was necessary for moving large armies swiftly and efficiently to whichever part of the nation required defending from (presumably communist) invasion. It was touted as a Cold War military project. I'm pretty sure the planners understood it differently, but those were the politics of it.

I would hope we all would know these facts about the history of the Interstate highway system! Not all highways are part of that system. A lot of highways that have these effects on cities have been built since the interstate system was designed. Previous highways have been redesigned and routes have changed!

If silby is otm (and they are) then NYC is the worst shithole in USA and that’s unfortunate given the intrinsic link between “not giving a shit” and the heart and soul of America

the history of downtown highway construction in the us is overwhelmingly the history of white power elites demolishing swaths of nonwhite and/or poor neighborhoods and turning them into trenches or walls that cut off what was left of those neighborhoods.

but it gets complicated when the neighborhoods are historically transitional, and when the poor/nonwhites don't want to live there! Like, you don't have to be white to want a house in the suburbs.

― sarahell, Thursday, February 22, 2018 5:38 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the suburbs are at their core about race and always have been

wow, it's really that simple?! geez louise!

and here I was thinking that it had to do with an intersection of economics, technological change, and race, but it's apparently just race! Good to know!

"at their core"

levittown was created to exclude non-whites.

so yes things are complicated but that doesn't change the fact that, like a lot of things in american history, suburbs are at their core about race

even today, i see it in my metro area, once a certain ratio of non-whites-to-whites is hit, suburbs that were "suburbs" in my youth are now "ghetto"

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/

all i'm saying, is that what once was a black & white issue (that also involved economics -- some categories of people in terms of income and types of labor could feasibly live in suburbs -- or certain suburbs, while others couldn't -- just logistically), is now a lot less about that. many of the suburbs in California that are fairly affluent and have high performing public schools are areas where whites are in the minority. There are also plenty of affluent suburbs that are mostly white -- that hasn't changed. cities are getting whiter, and the rich/poor divide in cities is getting larger.

Also, the desire to practice the ways that affluent whites have used to accrue and pass down wealth to future generations are at play (e.g. education, home ownership).

And it isn't like real estate development has stopped and all the suburbs that exist (or will exist) were built before the 1960s. In the fulfillment center dominated future, there will undoubtedly be more and more of these suburban developments, and will race play the same role in their development as it did a century ago ... idk, it could be exactly as you said!

And the racist housing policy article that omar posted, it actually comes into play in current development planning and arguments in cities esp. re affordable housing. Like, some people will argue that any affordable housing is good housing. Others will say, if you build large tracts of affordable housing in historically redlined neighborhoods, you are perpetuating that redlining and racism ... meanwhile, the affordable housing doesn't get built.

and the highway built that cut through a historically black neighborhood to provide easier access to the city center from the at-the-time white flight suburbs that have grown way less white in the past 10-20 years, provides about 10 blocks of "no man's land" that now houses a huge homeless tent city.

If silby is otm (and they are) then NYC is the worst shithole in USA and that’s unfortunate given the intrinsic link between “not giving a shit” and the heart and soul of America

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, February 23, 2018 9:12 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

To the extent one regards NYC as not satisfying the criteria silby describes, something I'd leave up to silby themselves, and therefore a failure as city, the obvious success of NYC, which has been the largest city in America for more than 225 years (as well as perhaps the largest city in the world and still #2) and to which no other American city comes even close in population, illustrates quite starkly the degree to which one would be incorrect. Whether the figures I presented indicating that NYC also spends more per capita than all but two other American cities, one of them a unique federal district without state funding, are consistent with silby's criteria I would also leave up to him or her.

I've always felt Troy, New York was rather awful despite a few nice spots

sad.

the obvious success of NYC, which has been the largest city in America for more than 225 years (as well as perhaps the largest city in the world and still #2)

sorry if i'm misreading this but in terms of urban area, NYC is 28th in the world and in terms of metro area it's 11th.

looking at a list of the largest cities in the world is really mind-boggling, the largest in the world by metropolitan area population is Guangzhou, with 44,259,000.

sorry if i'm misreading this but in terms of urban area, NYC is 28th in the world and in terms of metro area it's 11th.

― omar little, Friday, February 23, 2018 5:28 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You appear to be relying upon the wikipedia page that ranks cities based upon non-uniform and often unofficial population estimates (and omitting NYC's 6th-place urbanized area ranking per same).

My "perhaps" was intended to reflect the absence of any truly reliable uniform measure of population across countries with urban-definition and census-taking practices that vary both by nation and over time, and to cover not just New York's potential historic status as world's largest city during the period from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s, but also its potential present status as second-place metro area as reflected in this uniform measure - http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-population-125.html. I acknowledge that New York is sometimes or more often ranked lower than 2nd, as in this list - http://www.newgeography.com/content/005219-largest-cities-world-2016 - in which ranks it 9th, consistent with the 2020 "urban" population estimate (down from 4th in 2006) found in the first ranking I listed - but a top 10 world city is a success not a failure, and if the largest in our country is a failure then so is every other one.

so close to being on to something here

And actually, looking closer, the urbanized area ranking cited on that wiki page is uniform and the same demographia ranking I cite 2nd above, except the page gets NYC's 9th-place ranking wrong. The full study also identifies NYC as the world's largest urban area in land area rather than population.

a top 10 world city is a success not a failure, and if the largest in our country is a failure then so is every other one.

This kind of leaps past the discussion of what constitutes success and equates it entirely with size. If one accepts your premise then the conclusion is foregone, but you aren't supporting your premise.

Size speaks for itself. I'm not suggesting an absence of constraints upon "choice" of individuals' location, but agreeing with the poster whose post framed the discussion that cities' success (or in his terms' resilience) varies in substantial part with their population retention and that their wealth is a function in substantial part of their growth.

A city generates wealth through population density and population growth.

well, some populations generate more wealth than others, so your argument about "keeping everyone in the city" is more of an ethical argument, than one that supports your point. And going back to the discussion of racism and suburbs, some populations reduce the potential for wealth generation (e.g. white people with money did not want to go to downtown Oakland at night because of the "criminal element").

Before this thread got into theoretical arguments, there were countless posts complaining about the dirty streets of San Francisco, and how that makes it a shithole of a city. Wouldn't SF generate more wealth if it did not keep the homeless in the city? If it exported the poor and indigent elsewhere? ... or at least moved them to less visible parts of the City?

If single-family homeowners don’t give a shit about techie newcomers who rent, if techie newcomers don’t give a shit about baristas, if baristas don’t give a shit about people experiencing homelessness, the political will to get the city to work for everyone in the city will be absent. And when the city suffers a shock, citizens will turn inward; as services dwindle, the wealthy will emigrate and those who remain will suffer from the cuts.

This doesn't really follow. I mean, it's a nice feel-good argument, but ... The trick is to prevent or minimize the potential shocks -- from diversifying revenue streams to maintaining and repairing infrastructure in case of natural disasters. Cities that have attractive geography, potential for people to make shit-tons of money, and nice weather -- no one really has to give a fuck about people who aren't in their interest group for the city to be financially healthy and functional.

To the extent I was making an argument, it was a political one. (I would hesitate to say it's an "ethical" one.)

Basically pplains otm about New Orleans, gets it.

idk politics change when there's money/no money. Also, I know that the density = money stays local argument is conventional wisdom, but, I feel like this may be changing. Between Amazon, Uber, and AirBnB, it seems like the money people who live in dense urban areas are spending is not staying in the city. In how many cities is AirBnB charged hotel taxes which often go to pay for services for residents? What % of uber drivers live in the cities they serve vs. the potential loss of sales tax revenue from car sales in the city?

the chinese have been excellent baby producers

new orleans has Problems(tm) but it is so amazing and magical and full of good people

^otm for baltimore as well

Yeah my bottom line about “a place where nobody wants to live” doesn’t mean the same thing as “a place where nobody lives”. Certainly it’s possible that New York could be full of people who mostly wish they could leave, or people who are indifferent or neglectful citizens, allowing it to qualify to fgti as a potential shithole as they mentioned upthread.

The only possible answer to this is Houston. 4th largest city, in a former swamp, with unbearable heat + humidity half the year, terrible state politics, marginalized culture/history, and no interesting places to for multi-day hikes in 700 + miles. I lived there for 30 years, and don't regret leaving.

Ie, as someone struggling to find a career in New Orleans, fuck Houston.

Yeah my bottom line about “a place where nobody wants to live” doesn’t mean the same thing as “a place where nobody lives”. Certainly it’s possible that New York could be full of people who mostly wish they could leave, or people who are indifferent or neglectful citizens, allowing it to qualify to fgti as a potential shithole as they mentioned upthread.

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby), Saturday, February 24, 2018 5:33 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, do you believe that New York is full of people who mostly wish they could leave, and if so do you have some means of quantifying or otherwise supporting the assertion or applying the same criterion to other cities? Same question regarding the proffered proposition that it is full of people who are indifferent or neglectful citizens. Do you have, for example, a way of squaring that proposition with New York's spending more per capita than 97% of the 100 largest cities? Including New Orleans, which spends less than 1/6th the same amount?

I probably do not believe that, no.

I don't give a fuck about statistics re: population and economics in my shithole discourse

What is it about NYC that bothers me? The fact that it's America-but-pretending-to-be-Bohemia? I can't really describe it. I'm glad most of my friends have left

The fact that because it is so dense with media and business and people with money tuned in to the former two that it thinks the world revolves around it?

Most places I've been to have been full of nice people. The shitholes are the places I don't want to go back to despite that.

Every major city has shithole facets.

Some cities are more likely than others to foreground those to the average inhabitant (and visitor).

In a few special cases, some cities, by virtue of various elusive qualities, are able to alchemically integrate and transform some of their shithole-ness into something that becomes part of the city’s charisma. This is a difficult trick to pull off, and often requires cultural producers who consciously make this alchemy part of their work (e.g., John Waters re Baltimore).

Every major city has shithole facets.

Some cities are more likely than others to foreground those to the average inhabitant (and visitor).

yep!!!

All cities, like any form of social organization, are imperfect, but most or all of have redeeming elements to the extent that the city is inherently an admirable form of social organization. I believe it is, and therefore I would prefer not to deem any place that expresses it a "shithole." The "shitholes" are instead the rural or exurban "communities" that lack or reject urban organization and culture.

To the extent one wishes to extend the "shithole" designation to places that do qualify as cities, I therefore think it should be extended only or first to those cities that are least expressive of urban character. To judge which cities those are, one needs first to define such character by reference to certain measurable characteristics, and second to compare cities' relative measurements in a way that says something about their relative urbanity.

The primary measurable characteristics of urbanity, I'd venture, are Population Size, Density, and Age. Density is generally understood to be the primary factor distinguishing urban from sub-urban character, both reflecting and promoting socialization and a continuous civic sphere; the denser a city, the more urban it is. Density alone, however, does not a city make; size also distinguishes a "big city" from a "small town," reflecting degree of success in civic society formation. Age is a measurement of a temporal degree of success, reflecting the degree of development, continuity, and preservation of civic infrastructure and social culture. Age also functions as something of a heuristic for traditional urban form and character to the extent that the more recent development of the automobile has contributed to the rise of cities relatively lacking in same.

How to measure these characteristics, and across what cohort of municipalities? To answer the second question first, I have as said above no objective answer to what distinguishes a "major" from a non-major city, and may have a higher bar than most. Therefore, I looked at more minor ones too, examining virtually all cities with populations in excess of 100,000* (including out of curiosity those that have crossed the barrier only recently, though of course no such newly urban place will qualify for the final analysis as major), a somewhat arbitrary but (wiki-inspired and) at least roundly uniform and I think decently substantive measure of sufficiently-"urban" size to uniformly measure cities and not towns.

I also looked at cities that have met the 100K bar for a reasonable amount of time, but subsequently dropped below it. While one could make a good argument that such places are no longer cities, but in fact failures of urbanity that might well be the best answer to the question posed were they remotely in the neighborhood of "major" status, I nevertheless have treated them as extant cities (to the extent that they have not been absorbed for federal statistical purposes into adjacent ones) on the basis that their previously-urban status allowed the development of suitably-urban infrastructure capable of use by a population that theoretically can rebound to urban size, as some are in the course of doing. The same goes for larger and potentially "major" cities that have declined in population (as many if not most have), like St. Louis, which edges Detroit for percentage decline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shrinking_cities_in_the_United_States) among cities that retain deeemed-urban size but not necessarily deemed-urban density (a separate question I won't examine here). Most of these places are victims of changes in taste for urbanity, national population distribution, and economic trends, one or more of which could change sufficiently in the future to lead to their revival.

Above the 100K floor, however, city population is an insufficiently-uniform measure of size given the not-infrequent mismatch between the de jure political and de facto social limits of a city - some cities are really conurbations of multiple municipalities, while others are urban subsets of a single municipality that extends sometimes well into areas of sub-urban character. To measure size, therefore, I decided to use federally-defined metropolitan area populations, which while also varying somewhat in definition, are more uniform in character. To adjust for varying metropolitan definitions, I decided to rank cities according to an average of their Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), slightly-different-year Primary Statistical Area (MSA substituting, where relevant Combined Statistical Area(CSA)), and my own what I'll deem Secondary Statistical Area (MSA substituting, where relevant, CSA Metropolitan Division) population rankings. This may not be better and may in fact be worse than use of an Urbanized Area ranking, but it's the approach I took.

To measure density, I did rely upon city-limit density rankings as they are controlled to some degree by the area factor, and because city limits are a better measure of core density than sometimes vastly-extensive metropolitan areas. However, for certain cities that extend across multiple municipalities, I roughly averaged (population-weighted) densities across a subset of same.

To measure age, I used old census figures to roughly estimate the order in which core cities (which I sometimes consolidated or deconsolidated in anticipation of later-enacted such moves) crossed the 100,000 resident threshold.

What to do with all these figures? One could take various approaches. Mine was simply to average the three rankings. However, because age is more of an historically-based heuristic than a presently-measurable characteristic, I gave it shorter shrift by coming up with an age-agnostic measurement of size and density alone and then averaging the aged and no-age measures for a final rank that gives size and density primary but not exclusive status.

So what did I learn? If there is a least urban city (and therefore "biggest shithole") among the roughly 15 or so I deemed "major" above, it is Phoenix, though if Fort Worth is disaggregated from the Dallas metroplex, it ranks lower on an age-agnostic measure. Houston is runner-up, but just ahead of Atlanta, which tops it on an age-agnostic measure. All of these, however, rank as substantially more urban than a good many smaller cities that others including the original poster might deem 'major'.

The two least urban cities that I think safely qualify as such are also the two cities that most egregiously extend their borders far out into suburban territory - Oklahoma City (which ranks just below the biggest percentage-decliner among sub-100K cities, Youngstown, OH) and runner-up Jacksonville. The original poster's venture of Indianapolis is another egregiously-extended city, but nevertheless ranks as more urban than a number of others that might be deemed major, including Greensboro, Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis, Kansas City, and Orlando, while growing Salt Lake City is only a hair behind and may soon surpass it as Charlotte and Fresno have already).

That most of those sub-urban cities are Deep Southern (or ex-frontier plains/prairie(/great basin)) is characteristic of a trend that extends down into "cities" of far smaller populations, the least urban of which by and large share similar geography. Less major cities that are even more sub-urban "shitholes" include at the high end places like Winston-Salem, Little Rock, and Lincoln, and in deeper dregs places like Peoria, Springfield MO, Shreveport, Rockford, Mobile, Augusta, Beaumont, Montgomery, Fayetteville, the Quad Cities, Anchorage, and Columbus GA, among even lower places I haven't ranked yet. A few lesser rust belt cities - Green Bay, Topeka, etc. - horn in there too.

This is not to say that these are necessarily poor places to live. It says merely that they are the most lacking in urban character of places that might be deemed sufficiently large to qualify as cities. To the extent one finds sub-urban character admirable, some of these worst little cities may in fact qualify as the best big towns, or urban suburbs, though to the extent one values small town or suburban character, one may prefer less urban places. For better or worse, many of these lower-ranking cities join larger college towns and vacation/employment destinations (e.g. Madison, Ann Arbor, Durham/Chapel Hill, Boulder, Santa Barbara, Eugene, South Bend, Huntsville, Charleston, Savannah) that may have lesser formal urban character and/but nevertheless express some of the values of urbanity due to a combination of turnover, industry, and/or historical position. To which category to assign places like Knoxville, Colorado Springs (among other front-rangers), Lansing, Reno, Jackson MS, and Tallahassee I'll leave to others.

Which are the most urban (and therefore best) cities? New York, of course, is #1, the deemed-oldest, biggest, and densest of them all. Chicago is in second place, and Boston, San Francisco, and DC follow in that order, but tie on an age-agnostic measure that also helps LA vault ahead of Philadelphia into sixth place. Just behind, respectively, are smaller urban centers of the vast NY and LA metro areas, centered around Newark and sprawling across Orange County, respectively. Baltimore, Oakland/Berkeley, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Seattle follow in that order, but an age-agnostic ranking elevates the Western cities ahead of the Eastern/Central ones, and Miami ahead of them all. These are basically all the cities I deemed above to be truly major and truly urban, though less traditionally so in the case of the later-developed and more car or at least bike-centric Miami, LA(/OC), Seattle, and maybe Minneapolis.

At least on an age-agnostic ranking, every "big city" that follows is less urban than much smaller but more traditionally-urban ones like Providence and New Haven, the biggest little cities or at least college towns in America. Those big cities are also still led in urbanity, at least for now, by the declining but traditional Detroits and St. Louis's of the world, rather than the rising but less traditional Atlantas and Houstons. The latter look set to displace the former, but I wouldn't yet call that conclusion foregone. The one newer place that has cut ahead of most of the traditional big cities, if only on an age-agnostic ranking, is San Jose/Silicon Valley, which trails Orange County and Long Island (which ranks right behind Miami if the largest 'town' in America, Hempstead (or even its core of contiguous urban villages), is acknowledged as a de facto city) as the most urban of suburbs, a class to which the residential Dallases and Houstons of the world arguably still belong.

I did arbitrarily choose not to measure Line Break City

Tldr anyway

go away, gn

move on

I appreciate the effort.

https://m.popkey.co/8ccf78/6GvZl.gif

The only three cities on that shrinking list located west of the Mississippi are cities that are actually on the banks of the Mississippi.

Of particular interest to me and perhaps others, New Orleans ranks just outside the top 25-30 on my measure (depending on whether you separate metro divisions), but like many other smaller but older cities (it was fifth past 100K), that's punching well above its present population-weight. While it trails most of the top 20 primary statistical areas, only Phoenix and Orlando excepted, it beats most outside the top 20, only St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee excepted. Buffalo and Hartford are hot, if that's the word, on its heels.

The only three cities on that shrinking list located west of the Mississippi are cities that are actually on the banks of the Mississippi.

― pplains, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 11:39 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Only two are in the South. Air conditioning and automobiles.

ha! i kept scrolling down and knew it was you

Columbus is basically the only big Northeastern 'city' that never stopped growing on a decadal basis, and that may be because it's maybe the most suburban 'big' city in the Northeast. The others you can divide between the mostly-post-industrial "rust belt" cities that have declined seemingly perpetually since the '50s (at least within their cores - consolidated city-county Indy is an exception and even Detroit is more of a mixed bag on a metro basis), but may now be leveling off, and the mostly-Northeast Corridor cities (plus Minneapolis) that declined for a time (again within their cores only in some cases) and then started growing again (with more fluctuation in the CT cities outside the big NY/Bos metros). In-between Chicago is up and down.

I don't know why I even started reading that, but I stopped as soon as Columbus was relocated to the Northeast, a notion that would have been utterly baffling to anyone I ever met in my six years of living there.

Yeah but now I’m sort of interested in whatever drugs Moo is on

msa mdma whatever it is lets do it

The post was edited down from a version that referred to the "Northeast quadrant of the country." Which, stretched slightly at its margins, includes 27 of the first 30 cities past 100K.

speak on that

My reaction to that post was wtf, wtf, wtf, wtf, well, and then, you know, Columbus is in the Eastern Time Zone and about 100 miles away from Canada.

I think the test is whether or not you think Detroit is also in the "Northeast"

If the country looked more like Canada and not some sort of curious turtle, we wouldn't have to have this conversation.

But Detroit is further east than all of Alabama, and Alabama is in the SEC, so....

frightened to imagine what moov's posts look like before they're "edited down'

timecube.txt, basically

https://i.imgur.com/noQitra.gif

Minneapolis is growing not shrinking

http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-is-experiencing-a-population-boom-like-the-roaring-twenties/422600314/

(it's down from it's peak but the population is rising now, and I think will eventually get back to 500k if the current condo/apartment boom continued unabated)

for work we had a client involved in downtown minneapolis commerce and they said that downtown has added 10K population in the last decade

i'd be curious how accurate that list is...because they are comparing 2010 census to mid-century peaks, which most if not all of that loss was probably starting in the late 60s through the 80s and not (necessarily) indicative of what's going on now (though in some cases they could still be shrinking obv)

Residents continue to pour into Minneapolis, which is seeing its biggest decade for growth since the 1920s.

Latest estimates from the Metropolitan Council show the city has grown by about 10 percent since just 2010, adding about 37,374 residents. That puts the city's population, now about 419,000, on pace to reach nearly 450,000 by the end of the decade.

there's a lot of goofy stuff on this the more you look at it.
like Newark's "decline" is from a peak in 1930, it's actually stable and up slightly since 1990

same with New Haven (same since 1990), Washington DC (up over 100,000 people since 1997)

Boston is up 100,000 people since 1990 as well

Cities have gravity.

thinking about starting to pronounce shithole with a soft th. if anyone else wants to get on board i would appreciate the support.

hard h shithole is a shibboleth

I knew something was off with the poor KC showing, and I was right - I had not adjusted the density calculation for its historical footprint as I had done with Louisville, e.g. Reworking the figures places KC just behind STL in the overall ranking (roughly 20th place), and ahead of it, just behind Detroit (and Silicon Valley), in the age-agnostic one. That is, it's firmly in place with the traditional cities that still rank ahead of the bigger Atlantas, Dallas/Houstons, and Phoenixes.

The only large core cities that are still losing people are almost entirely contained within the rust belt.

I left Minneapolis in 1995. Figured I had accidentally started a trend.

Plugging in the Canadian cities, not entirely apples to apples but I think close enough, I rank Toronto and Montreal just behind Philly and ahead of LA. On an age-agnostic ranking, LA beats MTL, but TO pulls ahead of both Philly and LA, while still trailing Boston/DC/SF etc. Vancouver ranks right behind the Twin Cities, just ahead of Seattle, but age-agnostic it pulls ahead of both, right behind Miami.

If we just give you this thread, would you concentrate the entirety of your ILX posting energies on further elaborations of your urban demographic model?

according to my own matrix - i won't bore you with the details of how this is worked out - vancouver, bc ranks slightly ahead of scranton pa, but somewhat behind vancouver wa and perpendicular to boise id. toronto and montreal are tied with sequim wa but slightly ahead of sioux city ia

well, that's not so surprising, vancouver is in the northeast while sioux city, being high on the windy steppe, has long attracted new residents from mongolia as well as the argentinian reaches of the altiplano.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiplano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Assessments
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage

basic stuff can't believe i'm having to explain all this

making amendments to the matrix

I moved to Minneapolis in 1994, btw.

its not a major american city but i was watching the first episode of Flint Town on Netfix, their sad documentary series on Flint, Michigan and i flashed back to years ago when maria and i drove across the country and we were on the highway going by/passing Flint and i got an overwhelming feeling of danger/dread that i had never experienced before. i remember thinking in my head: oh jeez please don't break down please don't break down. like i really really wanted to get past the city exits as quickly as possible. i was afraid that if we broke down nobody would ever find us. or wolves would eat us? it was weird. i've driven through a lot of bad shit in eastern cities, nyc, philly, camden friggin' nj. never felt like that before or since.

just thought i'd share that here.

Flint - the R'lyeh of the USA.

Flint is among the two dozen or so that have declined under the 100K mark, along with other frequently-dismissed cities like Camden, Gary, Scranton, Trenton, and Youngstown, but I still rank it just ahead of Ann Arbor for urbanity

wow, that's crazy that trenton has less than 100k people. i always think of it as more populated. even my ailing neighbor springfield, ma has more people than that. they might not all be happy about it, but they are there.

worcester has an even bigger population than springfield. almost 200 thousand. little-known fact.

The Trenton metro area, which is coterminous with Mercer County, is much larger, 370K, but Trenton proper has been under 100K for the past four decades or so.

Worcester is a fascinating city. All of the advantages of the first half of the twentieth century, and all the disadvantages from the second half.

This fella would like a word with you about saying Ohio is the Northeast.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYYCl24X4AIiCP-.jpg

Yeah but Butler Co. is SW.

Layers upon layers, like cheese on chocolate on spaghetti.

Mmm chili mac

It's 100 miles from Columbus. That'd still be the same metro area in Texas.

Please to read again: "Northeast" was shorthand for "Northeast quadrant of the country" (for which I assume no visual aid is necessary). While I'm not sure the Western Reserve shouldn't be incorporated into a "Northeast" that the Feds officially extend to the Western NY/PA borders (and I'd tend to extend it below the Mason-Dixon to include DC), I wouldn't regard anything west of the Appalachians in those states as the Northeast.

tbf you also have previously located arkansas within the appalachians so i'm rolling with the assumption that all of this geography is loosely or indeed randomly assigned

And no one else has ever used "Northeast" as shorthand for "Northeast quadrant".

Please to read again: I wrote a post that referred to the "Northeast quadrant of the country" then subsequently used "Northeast" as a shorthand reference to same. I then edited the post without noticing that I had excised the former description. Thank you for your concern.

I grew up in Zone 17 but when my parents divorced my mom moved us into the Moot Realm. Still have family there.

salt lake city is a waking nightmare for the most part. it's a place that gaslights you for wanting to partake of things like "clean air" and "genuine culture"

streets are too wide for the chariots

Please to read again: I wrote a post that referred to the "Northeast quadrant of the country" then subsequently used "Northeast" as a shorthand reference to same. I then edited the post without noticing that I had excised the former description. Thank you for your concern.

― Moo Vaughn, Thursday, March 15, 2018 10:47 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i too would like to thank ez snappin for his concern in a very sincere manner. (also dude that earthless record is ill)

The top 75 US/CDN cities on my age-half-inclusive measure (of traditional urbanity?)...
NYC
Chicago
Boston
San Francisco
Washington, D.C.
Philadelphia
Toronto
Montreal
(Newark)
Los Angeles
Baltimore
(East Bay)
Minneapolis-St. Paul
Vancouver
Seattle
Orange County
Providence
Miami
Long Island
(Camden)
Detroit
New Haven
St. Louis
Kansas City
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Denver
Milwaukee
Dallas
Portland
San Diego
Atlanta
Houston
(Wilmington)
San Jose-Silicon Valley
New Orleans
Buffalo
Hartford
Bridgeport-Stamford
Rochester
Sacramento
Cincinnati
Fort Lauderdale
Worcester
Columbus
Riverside-San Bernardino
Hampton Roads
Tampa Bay
Lehigh Valley
Louisville
Ventura County
Fort Worth
(Tacoma)
Honolulu
San Antonio
Grand Rapids
Phoenix
Las Vegas
Albany
(Reading)
Syracuse
Richmond
Austin
(Trenton)
Stockton
Charlotte
Omaha
Fresno
Springfield MA
Indianapolis
Salt Lake City
(Akron)
Orlando
Raleigh
Toledo
(Scranton)
Memphis
Albuquerque
Dayton
(Santa Rosa/Sonoma County)
El Paso

The top 50 on my age-agnostic measure (of big-city-ness less concerned with traditional urban form?)...
NYC
Chicago
Boston/Washington, D.C./San Francisco
Toronto
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Montreal
Miami
Vancouver
Seattle
Baltimore
Twin Cities
Detroit
Kansas City
St. Louis
Pittsburgh/Dallas
San Diego
Sacramento
Houston/Portland
Denver
Cleveland
Milwaukee/Atlanta
Hartford
Tampa Bay
Las Vegas
Phoenix/Buffalo
Rochester
New Orleans
Hampton Roads
Honolulu
Cincinnati
Columbus
San Antonio
Louisville
Grand Rapids
Fresno
Austin
Charlotte
Albany
Orlando
Richmond
Syracuse
Raleigh
Salt Lake City
Springfield, MA
Albuquerque
Indianapolis