The Ten Worst American Cities to Live In

Bully Magazine ^ | Ken Wohlrob

[Hillary's Folly]

Bully's "Ten Worst American Cities To Live In" List

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By Ken Wohlrob

10. Seattle

Seattle would seem to have everything going for it. Great music, good restaurants, a beautiful landscape, a range of ethnic cultures, and centralized collection of hi-tech businesses that attract brainy folks from places like San Francisco (ever since that city hit the economic slide). So what makes Seattle one of the ten worst cities to live in? Well it's those same techies who fled San Francisco to seek Seattle's venture-capital rich environment, usually after watching the movie Singles, who have turned this once humble and artistic community into a plague of cellphone sporting, PDA carrying idiots who fly around the streets in their Volkswagens while listening to the Flaming Lips. You know that annoying jackass who walks around in the cellphone commercials saying, "Can you hear me now?" He's the official mascot for Seattle. About the only consolation to all this is that Seattle still has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation.

9. Toledo

The first of the Ohio Triplets on our list, Toledo would be the perfect place to re-make The Omega Man. This mostly due to the fact that this Midwestern hole is so bleak, so gray, so devoid of life, that except for rush hour, you wouldn't know that anyone actually lived in Toledo. Forget civic pride, everyone in Toledo knows the city is a hellhole and just stays home to watch TV. Last time we visited, the only after hours joint was located in a hotel for men. Toledo's official city slogan should be "Toledo…We're…well…ah screw it."

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"What can we say about Miami except that it brings out the worst cheesy tendencies in people of all races, creeds, and colors."

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8. Los Angeles

If you look at some of the most talented people to ever walk the planet that ended up destroying themselves - Hemingway, Bruce, Belushi, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Welles, and yes even Osbourne - all have one thing in common. LA.

7. Salt Lake City

This one should be obvious to any intelligent human: Mormons and lots of them. Need we say more?

6. Cincinnati

If you took Chicago, sucked out every last ounce of culture including its thriving music scenes and quality restaurants and bars, leaving a graying hulk of skyscrapers and a complete lack of night life, then you would have Cincinnati. To some Cincinnati is the greatest city in the U.S. - usually these folks are old, white, Christian fundamentalists, confined to wheelchairs, and are very scared of "coloreds." If you are not this type of person and you live in Cincinnati and like it, you have mental problems and should seek professional help.

5. St. Louis

The "Gateway to the West" has three strikes against it. First is that St. Louis has the highest crime rate of any U.S. city. Second, the main architectural landmark looks like an unfinished McDonald's logo. Third, Bob Costas lives there.

4. Atlanta

Any place nicknamed "Hotlanta" has to suck big time. Here's the catch: Did you ever meet someone who went to New York City and said, "I didn't like it, it was too dirty and oh my God there were all these weirdoes." Usually in the next sentence they'll say, "But I really like Hotlanta, it's so cool down there." That's because Atlanta is the city of choice for suburbanites who don't really like cities. Hence Atlanta has turned into nothing more than an over-sprawled suburb, just with more bad bars.

3. Miami

What can we say about Miami except that it brings out the worst cheesy tendencies in people of all races, creeds, and colors. If you want to see blacks, whites, and latinos at their intellectual lowest, than Miami is just for you. Gaudy neon, bad dance clubs, dopey fashionistas, y'all come back now ya hear!

2. Phoenix

Only an idiot would want to spend most of the year trapped in air conditioning. Such an idiot usually moves to Phoenix. Then this dope will say, "Yeah but it's a dry heat." To make matters worse there is absolutely nothing to do in Phoenix besides run from your car's air conditioning to your house's air conditioning. Or you can play golf. Otherwise, they should tear the whole metropolis down and let it just rot back into the desert.

1. Cleveland

The obvious choice for worst city to live in is Cleveland. Not so much because of the lack of culture. Nor is it the lack of a thriving night life. And it is not the constant economic pall that looms over the city. What really makes Cleveland the worst city in all of America is the fact that it shares many of these qualities with other cities - such as its Ohio Twin, Toledo - and refuses to acknowledge it. As a recent article in the Washington Post pointed out, Cleveland peaked in the 1930s and has been on the downslide ever since. To make matters worse, the Plain Dealer - the local city newspaper - found that the higher a young person's education degree, the more likely said person was to move out of Cleveland. In fact it was one of the only three major metropolitan areas in the 1990s to experience such a mass exodus of intelligence. In essence, smart people leave Cleveland while the dumb stay to crank out children and watch the Indians games. Now if you said this to the average Clevelandite, they would call you an a-hole, pound their fist on the table, and insist that Cleveland has just as much to offer as New York City or Chicago. It's almost as if the citizens have become desensitized to the obvious. At least the Toledoans have a clue, but Clevelandites like their city just the way it is and they're damn proud of it…with the closed steel mills, and bad wing joints, and those horrible blues bands that all play a terrible rendition of "Mustang Sally."

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© 1998-2003 Bully Magazine

[BurbankKarl]

I was there the first part of this month....the ever expanding Mesa to be precise. My buddy laughed when I was breathing in the air in the morning, and commenting that I didnt remember the last time I saw a white dude mowing his lawn.

He was cranky that the SNOWBIRDS had all come back from the north, the annual invasion of Buicks and Crown Victorias with MI, MN, WI plates clogging up the roads

[Middle Man]

'..."how can we screw them out of as much money as possible"'

That could have been the motto of the "Honorable" Edwin Edwards!

[Middle Man]

It's been years, but my folks had their car stolen from the "secure-monitored-24-hours-a-day" hotel parking lot, and the staff could not have been less interested in their plight. That was the last trip they ever made to the Big Easy. I'm sure it's the same for many others who once loved the city.

[B Knotts]

I'm a country mouse. There is no such thing as a good city to live in.

Right you are. They're all bad.

[ChefKeith]

They forgot Houston, or were scared to go there and check it out for themselves.

[RANGERAIRBORNE]

At least they wren't beaten or murdered- I used to be amazed in N.O. to see defenseless tourists wandering around off the beaten track at night- hell, I carried a .45 all the time and I didn't feel safe in a lot of those places!

I think that tourists sort of have an idea that anywjhere they go on vacation is a "theme park", nice and safe. Not true at all!!!!

[InvisibleChurch]

indianapolis should be on the list just for its idiotic 95% love affair with its sports teams ... every week the colts are threatened with a tv blackout because we can't sell out a 64,000 seat pillow case, then the papers and channels 6,8 and 13 make a big deal about it and the populace cries and wrings its collective hands, then a corporate sugar daddy steps in and buys the remaining tix .. in general i'm tired of almost every athlete who makes a zillion dollars a year and then complains of working conditions, etc... blah-blah-blah

[Middle Man]

"At least they wren't beaten or murdered..."

My parents were extremely fortunate. The police got a tip that the car had been abandoned in one of the most notorious projects in town, the Desire. On the drive over in a police cruiser to ID the vehicle, the cops warned my dad that it is common practice for thieves to steal a tourist's nice car, then bring it back to the project where all the kids in the 'hood literally smash it to pieces and leave nothing salvageable. Luckily, they retrieved the car with just the vent window jimmied and the glovebox cleaned out. That was still enough to keep them from ever going back.

[xp38]

Ah Detroit. Head due south and you hit Canada. :)

[orangejuice]

You may still not want to live in Salt lake because of them, but yes, Mormons are Christians. The mormon church is actually named, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." The Book of Mormon is subtitled: "Another Testament of Jesus Christ." You can still hate mormons, but, yes, they're Christian. Sorry if this is bad news to anyone (I have a feeling it's not really relevant to most here, but since it came up...)

[WKB]

I guess we'll see who's in Heaven and who's not then we will know for sure.

[Da Dawg]

Notice how this guy cannot spell...
That shows how smart people from Pittsburg are!
Lemme type some examples: younz, skuzz, season on Sun. (and that's saying---(he started a sentence with a ( and no capitol.
And if Pittsburg was most the most livable city, how come there is a faint smell of sulfur in the air? If Cleveland is so damn bad, then how come I live there? To tell you the truth, Detroit is worse than Cleveland. Hell, Seattle is worse. Search Worst Cities in America in Yahoo and click on the CNN thing. Cleveland is in fact, one of the best crimewise. Gary, Indiana is worse than Cleveland! What about Chicago? What about New York? What about Detroit? What about L.A.? You've got Bloods and Crips there. Do you have junkies cleaning windsheilds in Cleneland? NO! Do you have hoboes sitting on benches by Lake Erie? NO! Does Cleveland smell like garbage in downtown? NO! DO we have abondoned steel mills? YES, we have 2. LCD still has a flame so nothing to say there... So in fact, Cleveland shouldn't be rated the worst city in the U.S.A. This guy is just probablly a loser waiting for his second paycheck from 1987. I agree about Toledo.

[nutmeg]

Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA should be on this list!

[stanz]

Well, Hartford and NYC missed the list. We must consider ourselves lucky </sarcasm>

[whattajoke]

Detroit and Hartford definitely belong in the Top 10.

Easy there... The "Hartbeat" is "New England's Rising Star!" It's funny though, I live in a affluent town adjacent to Hartford which is a very disirable place to live... But Hartford itself, while currently going through a multi billion dollar face life and renewal, still has a loooooooooooooooooooong way to go.

[FLAMING DEATH]

You got it.

Debating the 10 best cities is like debating the 10 best places to have surgery without anesthetic. They all suck.

[Pietro]

LOL,

everything you said!

Or were you being sarcastic (ie pretending to be series but in fact just telling a hugh joke)?

Either way, you qualify as Exhibit A.

[nutmeg]

Well, Hartford and NYC missed the list. We must consider ourselves lucky

NYC would never be on any of my "worst cities" lists! (Except regarding its politics maybe) Hartford... definitely!

[RightWhale]

It's missing Pittspuke as well.

Pittsburgh isn't a city. It's a TOWN. The TOWN has a lot going for it, for a TOWN.

[theauthorsucks]

Very unfunny. I’ve done some research on this author and this guys a joke. Can someone be any more of a cliche? I saw your You tube videos- STUPID!!! Ken W. should shut up and go mop floors or something.