The Worst Cities in America

The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Downtown Modesto, California, on a Sunday night. One of the oldest corners in downtown Modesto is dominated by bail bonds businesses. Photo: Inkyhack [Flickr] Every city has something to be proud of, but some cities, despite their beauty, charm, or cultural importance, also have features of which they might be a little less proud. Here are a few cities with dubious distinctions.

• According to a survey by AutoVantage (an auto club like AAA), Miami, Florida, is the city with the rudest drivers. • A Cornell University study determined that New York City has the lowest quality of housing. The World Health Organization says that New York is also the noisiest city in the United States. • Because of high divorce and unemployment rates and consistently gloomy weather, the city statistics analyzing firm BestPlaces named Tacoma, Washington, the country's most stressful place to live. • Breathe easy if you don't live in these places: Greenville, South Carolina (where residents suffer the most respiratory tract infections); Scranton, Pennsylvania (the worst city for asthma sufferers); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (the pollen capital of America). • Based on the number of accidents and fatalities, the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations named Boston the most dangerous place to ride a bike. • Zero, a group dedicated to slowing population growth, determined what cities were the best and worst in which to raise children based on the quality of healthcare, education, public safety, transportation, the job market, and the natural environment. The best was Fargo, North Dakota; the worst was Newark, New Jersey. • According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, Sarasota, Florida, is the city most hostile toward homeless people. • Forbes magazine named Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the worst city for single people. Reasons: expensive beer, few nightclubs, and not enough single people. • Worst traffic congestion: Los Angeles. (Not coincidentally, it also has the worst air pollution.) • City with the bumpiest, most pothole-infested roads: Seattle. • In 2007 Men's Health magazine analyzed various cities' obesity rates, eating habits, and other data, including how much time people spend exercising and sitting in traffic. Result: Las Vegas was judged the nation's "fattest city." • The city with the most suicides per capita is Medford, Oregon. • Decatur, Illinois, has the highest skin cancer fatality rate. • America's most rat-infested city is Baltimore. • New Orleans leads in both gun- and diabetes-related deaths per capita. • Hallmark Cards call El Paso, Texas, the city with the worst sense of humor, based on polls in which very few people said they considered themselves funny. (The city also has very low sales of Hallmark's humorous cards.) • City with the highest percentage of lawyers: Washington, D.C. Nearly 2% of all residents are attorneys. • According to the book Cities Ranked and Rated, the worst overall city in America is Modesto, California. The city scored a 0 on the book's 100-point scale for its high cost of living, high unemployment rate, lack of activities, and the highest car theft rate in the United States.

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. Proving that some things do get better with age, the latest Bathroom Reader is jam-packed with 600 pages of fascinating trivia, forgotten history, strange lawsuits and other neat articles. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Lordy, I can tell you about the roads in Seattle. Part of our problem is it's difficult to pave on a twenty per cent grade, asphalt roads change back to concrete, brick, or even cobblestone when it comes time to mount a steep hill. A lot of downtown was built on landfill--we had to raise the streets a good ten to thirty feet in the 1890s to help with drainage--the roads in Pioneer Square sit on century-old sawdust and brick vaults. They undulate wildly, in some places the street dips a foot and a half below the level of the sidewalk. In other parts of the city, when pot holes develop in asphalt roads you can see that they just paved over the original bricks, which themselves were laid over the cobblestones with which the street was paved eighty years prior.

Strangely our brick streets are in much better condition than our concrete or asphalt streets.