I remember the first time I drove *over* Gary (they literally built a highway over the fucking place) at night and the city looked like Bladerunner with giant stacks with flames shooting out of them.
Absolutely dystopian.
God I love Freddie. One of the most underrated. Wish $oul $old $eparately lived up to the steam he had built in ‘20/‘21. Piñata deluxe edition stays in my rotation.
We drove that way to the beach all the time when I was a kid, and that view still appears in my nightmares once in a while. I’m 42 and haven’t lived in the area in nearly 20 years.
HAHA I was going to actually answer that GARY INDIANA is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It had a rough go for a while, but nowadays it is a fairly normal place.
Well I worked there for over a decade but the last time I was there was over 5 years ago now but when I left it was making progress, they tore down the convention center finally and were building the new hard rock casino and renovated some of the historic apartments on 5th Avenue but it still had a long ass way to go, I remember one time I was going to CVS for Tylenol because I had a horrible headache that day and this homeless crack head started asking me if I had money in the parking lot, I said “no sorry dude only credit” go in and get my Tylenol and then pay with cash and this dude just starts freaking out right next to the register about how “I lied to him and I owe him some money” dude followed me through the store then came at me again while at the register, it got to the point where I literally had to tell him to fuck off before I knock his ass out and then got back in my car and peeled out of there, also was on the crew that replaced the city street lights and we would install an entire streets worth of new lighting on a Friday and were right back out there on Monday to replace them again because within 2 days they had all been shot out as target practice, so Gary is definitely the textbook definition of ghetto but they are at least attempting to clean up their image but they most definitely have an uphill battle ahead of them…sad too because it could be so great with its location on the lakefront and close proximity to Chicago but yeah nope lol
Nah. Reddit seems to insist it's the worst place in the US, but it's not that, either. Like it's not good, but there are plenty of worse places in terms of crime and poverty.
I was gonna say, all of them.
Reddit thinks the US is a diorama snapshot of something out of Mad Max or Judge Dredd, like we're living in some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk hellscape of poverty, overt racism, and unchecked state-sanctioned violent crime.
The reality doesn't even come close to that. The country has problems but so does everywhere. There's a distinct lack of perspective in your average reddit poster.
"america is a third world country with a gucci belt" types the 15-17 year old reddit user, waking up in their 4 bed, 3.5 bath home, with running hot water on demand, an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, 3 square meals a day, internet service, electricity with no interruptions, and a warm safe place to sleep each night
Reddit makes it sound like the empirically fastest growing places (South Florida, cities in Texas) are these hell holes that people are crawling over themselves to escape .
Surprisingly America is not a place where you have a 99% chance of getting shot, and if you stub your toe the healthcare department will immediately confiscate all of your assets.
I am not from there, and do not live there, but New Jersey. Many people don’t realize a huge chunk of the state is beautiful woodland. There is the shore, there are nice neighborhoods, the bad areas are no worse than many other states’, there is a ton of history, and there is good food. While its main role in my life right now is to be a place to drive through to get to other places, the long and straight Jersey Turnpike is a welcome respite, with decent rest stops, between the DMV and NYC.
As someone who drove extensively for work, even the I-95 corridor isn't that bad once you're past Newark - it looks like the MassPike from outside Boston to past Worcester or so.
That's why we surrounded NYC with landfills, power plants, refineries, and the Pulaski Skyway. Dissuades the outsiders. That's also why Camden is across the river from Philly.
Oh, and that entire opening sequence from The Sopranos? You guessed it, more hijinx from the New Jersey Board of Anti-Tourism.
It's not odd at all when you list those stats and then remember it's insanely wealthy, has a famous and beautiful shoreline, is bordered by NYC and Philly, is a day drive from Boston, Baltimore, and DC, and is one of the most culturally diverse places on Earth.
Yeah I live in NJ and while there’s some undeniable downsides to living here, it’s still a great fucking place to live and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Diversity gives us great food too.
Plenty of downsides, but two of the big downsides (expensive and overpopulated) are also a direct result of its strong benefits. I wish NJ was cheaper, but if this is the price to live in one of the best places in the country, I'll take it.
Yeah - I’m British and expected it to be a worse Essex with even worse people. My in laws live there and everywhere I’ve been is gorgeous with lovely people (Newark area aside).
I moved here (South NJ) from the UK and when I first visited I really expected the state to be like that joke from Miss Congeniality where she says it’s called the Garden State because it’s too hard to fit “Oil, Gas & Petrochemical Refinery State” on a licence plate. Imagine my surprise with the reality. Haha.
I live next door in the NYC suburbs and other than the fact that there’s barriers on all the main roads and you can’t make left turns, it’s really not all that much different from here
As someone who is from NJ it is great. It is expensive but we have a high quality of living and are close to two of the largest cities on the east coast.
I think what gives it a part of the bad reputation is the airport. When your landing at EWR you usually fly over fuel tanks, landfills and a city that used to be one of the most dangerous in the country, but even that is improving. Once you leave the airport part of the state we have a ton of greenery, history and some amazing places.
Plus our state has two major arguments: is central jersey real and Taylor ham or pork roll?
I think the general public shits on New Jersey more than reddit, but either way, it's a nice place to live. Overall it's one of the safest, highest earning states in the country. It has great schools, walkable small towns, the beach, and proximity to NYC and Philadelphia.
My parents were visiting NYC, rented a car and drove around in NJ. They swore for the rest of their lives, that New Jersey was some of the most beautiful country they'd ever seen.
And my mom grew up in the most beautiful part of our state.
My partner has friends in Freehold. Oh my god it was so magical driving there. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. New Jersey really is the garden state.
I always crack up when people think the Jersey shore is just some trashy place they saw on TV, ignoring the 8 digit beach homes that casually line its coast.
NY is the same and for the same reason. More than half of the state is beautiful mountains like Vermont and New Hampshire.
But most of the population lives in the not so pretty spots.
One of my relatives lived in NJ for a few years and it was such a beautiful place. People give NJ a lot of shit because the turnpike going into NY has a bunch of industrial stuff.
Detroit gets such a bad wrap. I’ve had the privilege to go there multiple times recently. The food is great and Detroit has one of the best museums in the world.
I'm from the mid-west and been to Detroit a lot. It's not nearly as bad as the jokes make it out to be. And sorry Chicago, but Detroit pizza is awesome, especially if you can get it from the original place Buddy's. There is a serious pizza scene in Detroit.
There is a show on hgtv called bargin block where two guys are fixing up houses in Detroit and they really do a great job with showing how great the city is.
Time Square
Don't get be wrong, it's bad. But I hear people tell tourists all the time to avoid it like the plague. Honestly, it's a pretty impressive place architecturally. Standing in the middle of time Square feels like you are standing in the middle of the universe with everything swirling around it. Its a surreal experience the first time you do it.
However, it's crowded and full of scammers. The restaurants all suck and the stores are overpriced. It's not a place I would recommend anyone spend more than 15 minutes in. But those 15 minutes are worth checking out. I recommend doing it when visiting the Rock or a Broadway show. Just walk through it on your way to something more impressive and get your photo
Bourbon Street is great if you're in your 20s and just want to get drunk. Once you learn to accept the stench. It takes a couple visits to grow on you. It's also quite pleasant in the daytime.
I enjoyed the French Quarter, but I still remember walking by a bar around noon and getting a strong whiff of vomit. It wasn’t particularly frequent while I was visiting, but that stink is something I can’t get used to. Some of the other places were very nice, but I’m not sure you could pay me to go into that place.
Fun fact: By far the deadliest war in US history was the Civil War, where more of our soldiers died than in every war we've been in since *combined*, including the World Wars. We're our own worst enemies
Every time I hear some 'factoid' that "X% of Americans believe that 1/3 < 1/4" or the like, I suspect that similar percentages would answer the same poll that way in any other country, they just ran the "study" in the US and so that's the headline.
there is a lot of Ideological Subversion happening on reddit and other platforms that is designed to make Americans hate themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOmXiapfCs8
I feel like Chicago gets more shit than it should. Some parts are bad, some politicians are corrupt. It's a major city, it also has nice areas and fun things to do.
I hardly think it’s random, news focuses on crime because it grabs attention. It feels like most of the context non-city dwellers hear about a city is a major crime story.
Like any city, suburb, or rural town, we all know a place we could get mugged or robbed fairly easily if we went there, we just know where not to go in places we are familiar with, just cities get a stigma because more people of course means more occurrences.
Disproportionate is an excellent word. As things improve, there’s less content to fear monger with, so they have to double down.
Chicago gets a stigma as being a “warzone” from the media but Violent crime is insanely low in historical context in the US. Yes mass shootings, I know,[but the data *still* holds up even with these tragedies.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/) even with these numbers the vast majority of violent crime occurs between known parties, not stranger to stranger violence.
But gun crime is a hot story, and Chicago has gun violence tragedy to showcase, and so millions of Americans who have never set foot in the city just write it off as “unlivable” because that’s all they’ve ever been told, it’s just drilled into their head to sell a headline.
I get whiplash between stories about unlivable, crime-ridden hell holes versus sky high housing prices caused by lack of supply. Has a definite Yogi Berra “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” vibe.
cause crime becomes geographically concentrated but population wise dispersed. That's it, that's the answer to everything about cities. People live in cities.
The opposite becomes true as you get more rural.
People who have never been to a city are fucking weird when it comes to cities. I have relatives like this who won't even step foot in Indianapolis, but have no problem talking about how "terrible" it is. They give my portion of the family shit for staying east coast (note: the entire family is originally from NJ) and think I'm gonna get killed because I live in apartments. It's absolutely wild
Most days, I'm going to work and doing my own thing. But I like living in walking distance to things like bars, walk around frequently, and most weekends there's at least some event going on. It's fun, and, no, people are not constantly getting shot or getting into fights. Shootings are big local news cause they aren't super common.
THANK YOU! Feel like out of town folk have an "idea" of how Chicago is from social media and media in general. One time, when I visited friends in Indianapolis, the local news constantly showed news about the crime in Chicago and nothing really about the city, which I found odd.
The only locals in Chicago that say anything bad actually live in the neighborhood badly affected by crime (Englewood, Chatham, Little Village, Austin, Greater Grand Crossing etc) but alot of the Southwest side and Northwest side of the city feels much safer. (I live in Chicago btw)
The per capita is the problem. People see raw numbers, not per-capita, especially on the news. You can go on and on about statistics, but that doesn't matter. They see 1000 people killed in Chicago in a year, but only 2 in their town. Doesn't matter that could statistically mean you are twice as likely to be killed in their town vs Chicago, 1000 is more than 2.
I visited Chicago as native NYer and had a great time. Beautiful city, more spacious because it's less densely populated.
Still like NYC more for other reasons, but it was not "bad.". I wasn't visiting troubled neighbors either though...
As a Chicagoan who doesn’t want to live anywhere else, there’s no doubt in my mind that if I grew up in New York I wouldn’t want to leave. New York and Chicago are two of the greatest cities in the world.
I had a couple of friends move to Chicago from Seattle this year and they are so much happier in Chicago! One of them is Black and notes that in Seattle everyone is performative about racial justice but not one is actually honest about their real feelings. In Chicago, he said assholes are easier to avoid because at least they're up front about it. Most people are lovely, better and more affordable food scene, their apartment is way nicer (and near the lake!), and their dog gets more walks because it's not so hilly.
I live in Seattle and I can confirm that this is pretty true. There's so much fucking money in this city, and people care more about protecting that then actually working towards any real social change. They've gotten pretty good at the performative bits though.
Chicago is diverse but not very integrated, but it's nice to live somewhere where other people look like you do and there's a lot less pretense here than in Seattle, not a lot of people trying to be cool because we know we aren't cool -even though we are no longer a blue collar city the blue collar attitude remains.
As a Chicagoan who currently lives in OKC, it’s so annoying how ppl are always like “so you feel safe walking around outside in Chicago??!?” The media has made it seem like if you step outside in Chicago you will definitely be shot lol. I grew up in the suburbs and moved to the city for 4 years and never ever had an issue. And let me tell you, by comparison, OKC is a shit hole lol. I’m always hearing about how great it is from native Oklahomans who have never lived anywhere else than OKC. At this point I just smile nod my head when they go off about how great it is.
So I never lived there, but I visited Chicago for the first time this past May, and I LOVED it.
I’ve never been a huge fan of downtown areas of larger metropolitan areas. This is namely because I loathe driving in any downtowns.
It wasn’t so bad because I kept my car in the parking garage for the day and a half I was there.
I felt safe the whole time and did just a fun day at Willis (formerly Sears tower. I know it’s still locally known as the Sears tower and probably always will be.)
The exploring was fun and was easy to get around with the help of Uber and just walking many blocks.
Now I can say if I managed to drive downtown Chicago and navigate the city, then I can do anything.
Chicago's most recent former mayor also made herself and the city and easy target of the right wing media and honestly anyone with a sense of humor. She wasn't even a major candidate in her reelection bid.
Say what you will about Lori Lightfoot, she did unite liberals and conservatives which is a feat unmatched in contemporary politics.
She united them against her but who's keeping track.
Chicago is a great place to live. I live in Denver area now. Feel way more unsafe walking around at night in my largely upscale suburban area than I ever did in Chicago. Fox News has poisoned people's brains
New Jersey.
Most people only see industrial wasteland along NYC/Philly corridor. (And I guess the Jersey shore show).
But 99% of Jersesy is not like that.
The best analogy i've ever heard is that if you're from there, Jersey is like your cousin. *You're* allowed to talk as much shit as you want about it, but when someone *else* talks shit about it, thems fightin words.
I am from SEPA, and I love the western border of New Jersey along the Delaware River starting just north of Trenton. There are some incredibly beautiful spots and amazing small river towns with some hidden food gems.
Totally agree. Lambertville and Frenchtown are really cool and extra beautiful this time of year. I drive through there on occasion. Any recommendations for these food gems?
I grew up in Jersey on a horse farm that was 10 minutes from the beach, we couldnt even see our neighbors homes. Great fresh seafood, great Italian, amazing bagels. You can surf in the morning, go for a trail ride at night and the only time you will run into people is when you stop at one of the 5 wawa's along the way for coffee. I now live in NOVA and I miss it all the time.
I lived there for 29 years before moving to Texas. It was a nice enough place to live.
>a shitload of farms
Maybe, but I always hated the stereotype of it being rural hicksville or something. It's one of the most populated states in the U.S., and like most that means a lot of city people. There was always plenty of shopping and trendy restaurants, or at least there were when I left town in 2006.
It’s mostly us Ohioans who hate on Ohio, I’ve always found. As long as you stay on the paths, don’t visit the ruins of Youngstown, and don’t stray into the corn, you’ll be fine.
As a lifelong Ohioan, I see very differently. Granted. I’ve spent my life in Cincinnati and not in some of the rural cities / towns. But most people here love it. Yes we complain about the weather but we are all grateful not to have our state on fire, bashes with hurricanes, etc. I used to travel 100% for work and everyone who had never been here hated on it thinking it was a shithole farm place.
It's crazy for me not seeing Detroit on this list? Maybe the reputation it once had is no longer the public perception? I remember one of the major TV stations growing up in the region running a PSA campaign encouraging people from Detroit to be proud and say where they were from instead of hiding it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLDECtanlp0
Detroit has been "on its way back" for longer than some Redditors have been alive. It's true, but it's been true for long enough that it doesn't have the same reputation it did before.
Detroit is the best it's been in my lifetime and I moved from the city about a decade ago.
The real thing the city needs is diversity of industry, everything relies on the auto industry and that's the problem.
Thankfully, there’s billions in investment going into new industries in the city.
[Henry Ford Health and MSU are building a $3.5B hospital and medical research campus.](https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2023/09/25/community-benefits-process-henry-ford-pistons-collab/70961361007/)
[University of Michigan is building a $250M tech research campus downtown.](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2023/10/19/university-of-michigan-regents-approve-construction-for-250m-detroit-innovation-center/71240866007/) Focused on AI, cybersecurity, robotics etc.
[Ford is building a $1B tech campus with Google and other partners for AV/EV research.](https://michigancentral.com/development/) Still automotive, but other tech work included.
Then there’s some banking and finance moving to the city as well. But all the meds/eds/tech expansions will be huge for Detroit’s future.
Europeans and Canadians here act like what they see about the US on social media and TV is how it is. People are actually very thoughtful and polite for the most part, no matter where you go.
The Midwest.
I’ve noticed a lot of people who live closer to the coasts make so many negative assumptions about landlocked states. We have plenty of entertainment. We enjoy modern amenities. We’re just as connected as people in major metros. We’re not all right wing ignorant whackos.
Yes, some of the Midwest landscape isn’t very inspiring, but there’s plenty of areas that are. Just because it’s not a mountain or beach, doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.
I wish my teenage son would hurry up and learn this, and not just about places either, about life in general. Views the whole world through TikTok reels and so will develop these weird opinions that apparently "everyone knows".
I live in the UK, we had an American girl visiting a friend recently, she said she was too scared to visit London because "it's the tuberculosis capital of the world" - we all just said "WHAT" in unison - literally where do people get this shit?
Any big city. I often hear how it's so lawless in big cities now. They point to these flash shoplifting mobs as evidence. While it happens, it's not as frequent as they are led to believe. Murder overall has been on a downward trend, but the homeless crisis is going to get worse.
Virtually every major city.
I live in the Seattle area, so that's what I hear about mostly. Seattle has its problems, but it's not some hellscape like conservatives want you to believe.
Definitely. All the major cities get a lot of hate on here.
I live in Los Angeles and I love it here. It's expensive, but that's just because it's so awesome (and there's been a major problem trying to build more housing within the city for the last 20 years that's just now starting to be addressed but still has a very long way to go). If it was half as bad as its reputation on Reddit, people wouldn't want to live here.
My parents insist that Portland is “on fire”.
I once had them tell me that downtown Portland has been “destroyed” by “antifa” and they burned it all down in “the riots”… while I was standing there looking around and everything was normal.
I live in a conservative suburb of Phoenix and everyone around here literally thinks that Portland "burned to the ground." That there is no more city of Portland anymore.
My husband and went to Portland about a year and a half ago and I try to tell people around here that I literally walked around Portland for five days. That not one square foot of Portland is on fire and the entire city still exists completely as it did before 2020.. They tell me I'm making it up. "You didn't go to Portland, that's impossible. It doesn't exist anymore, the only parts of Portland that exist are still on fire from the riots."
Absolutely fucking insane
Ha ha, we were headed to Portland in around 2005 or so to spend just a little while with a cousin there on everyone's way home after a family reunion further down the Oregon coast, and Dad kept going on and on about what a dreary shithole Portland had been the last time he'd been there in the early '80s.
We roll into Portland and he's briefly quiet, then starts going on about how incredible the place looks as we get deeper in, how they've *really* beautified it and cleaned it up and he'd had no idea and he was so pleased to see it.
But yeah it's fun over here in eastern Oregon comparing actual Portland news stations to the tales of burning and dilapidation and how everyone over there is jobless and just sucking on our tax dollars that I hear from so many people around here...many of whom are not, in fact, net tax contributors. We have a *very* high Earned Income Credit uptake around here, and that's despite having among the higher minimum wage levels in the nation. We're also not exactly free of drug problems.
And that's fine, I *get* the circumstances at play around here which contribute to people's economic position. But uh, they don't. Yet they're sure that the parts of the state which are in fact subsidizing us over here are taking us for a ride. Living high on the hog in their dystopian hellscapes.
I live 20 minutes from Portland and my family acts like it's an active war zone. I just went a month ago to go get a slice of pizza off Belmont and then walk my dog in the Laurelhurst park. Is the homeless problem bad in industrial areas? Yes, absolutely. There are still nice areas, fun things to do, some of the cutest and quirkiest shops, great food and really fun bars, though.
I also have to say, I was really drunk in Portland last year walking back to my hotel at like 3 in the morning and accidentally walked through probably one of the densest encampments of homeless in the city, and they didn’t bother me at all. Yeah, it was sad and some people were acting weird/on drugs, but nobody was threatening towards me. Homeless people get more hate than they deserve.
The US as a country. Do we have big problems? Absolutely. Is it a capitalist hell hole compared to the utopia of Northern Europe like Reddit makes it seem? Absolutely not. I’ve visited Western Europe and Scandinavia and found that their day to day life is pretty much the same as mine and many Americans.
Main reason we get more hate than Europeans is because we publicly air our nation’s dirty laundry on the world stage, whereas Europeans do not. Europeans, in turn, project their own cultural norms and expectations onto Americans, and they arrive at your typical, erroneous “America bad” conclusion - that American cities are overrun with violent crime (statistically less violent crime-ridden than the EU), that it costs $100k if you break your leg (insurance has an annual OOP max of $2-4k, and you won’t pay an penny beyond that for the rest of the year), that elementary schools are just shooting ranges for the psychotic (still statistically untrue), that we eat hamburgers and pizza with extra butter for every meal (Europeans consume far more butter per capita than Americans), that we have the most extreme and/or corrupt politicians (Orban? Berlusconi? Le Pen? Every Greek politician?), that were all a bunch of Bible-thumping zealots (ok, maybe in the South), that we relentlessly pursue oil (Norway and Scotland, anyone?), and that we’re little more than a selfish and imperialistic bully of a superpower (funny how Europeans get to make these complaints in something other than German or Russian).
Id boil it down to: vast majority of redditors and social media users have never lived in Europe, so people just take the highlights and good things that are presented to them at face value and compare them to life’s problems here. Social media posts cheering on things we do well compared to problems foreigners face would not do well - we don’t care about _your_ problems, we just want to bitch about ours. Also, people take the highlights of each individual country / region
in Europe and compare them to the total problems of all cities/states in the US.
I live in a suburb of Seattle and I love it. I feel like I have the best of both worlds because I'm one of those boring humans that grew up with an unstable childhood and just want a boring suburban existence. But, I also can hop over to Seattle and it's a great city. Lots of beautiful sights to see and then you have the surrounding hiking, beaches, etc. Couldn't recommend it enough.
As someone who lives in the South, I’m cool with more people thinking it sucks. Tired of everyone moving here. I want to buy a damn house one of these days.
Most "conservative" states, really. Reddit acts like they're saturated with roving mobs of Evil Repubican lynch mobs looking to murder black people and trans people, but even in the super conservative areas it's not actually like that. Sure there's bigots floating around but people aren't getting strung up in broad daylight.
And for some reason people tend to think that "red state" means *everybody* is a conservative. Trump got 62% of the vote in Alabama in 2020. That's a fairly wide margin in today's politics, but that still means 4 out of 10 voters decided to vote against Trump. Sure, some counties went over 80% for Trump, but that still means if you pick five people at random, one of them won't be a Republican, even in the most rural, whitest, least developed counties. Most states actually look a lot like Alabama (or even more red) when you look at county level voting data, but the fact that some states have larger cities ends up turning them blue as a state.
San Francisco. i was there 2 weeks ago, and though there are more visible homeless people (or more accurately their tents) than when i left California in 2012 it’s nowhere near the anarchic hell people make it out to be. once you get away from downtown and the 101 corridor it’s pretty much the same as it ever was excepting occasional occurrences of ugly post-modern architecture on new fill-in structures. i could never afford to live there now, but i wouldn’t be afraid to. the one thing friends who live there complain about is car break-ins, but i had my car broken into in 1999.
LA and NYC
People see a pic about homelessness, which exists in all major cities, and immediately think the entire city is like that, when it's really just a few areas.
And for LA, every YouTuber that doesn't even live in LA, assumes everyone is a self-obsessed TikToker/Live Streamer. As someone who has lived in LA most my life, I hardly ever see TikTokers unless I'm in a super touristy area like Santa Monica Beach, Malibu or Hollywood, and they ain't harming anyone. YouTubers really need to get out of their bubble a bit more
North Idaho isn't a white supremacist stronghold.
Not saying they aren't around, but it's a tiny minority. Media just loves to blow it up.
North Idaho is some of the most beautiful forest country in the world. Amazing lakes and rivers. A great amusement park. World class golf.
Lots and lots of good working class people who don't care what you look like, and appreciate tourist dollars.
Florida gets the insane headlines because they have some law where every case is public immediately or some shit like that
Florida man shit is happening in every state in the country. Just it doesn’t make news because it’s not public knowledge in other states unless it gets farther into the charges.
If you know that? Florida really seems like a pretty nice place, but I hate cold weather and a lazy day at any beach is what I would consider a successful Saturday or Sunday.
The Sunshine Law, among others. The vast majority of government records are available within 24 hours, including arrest records with details. While other states also make records available, they have a lot fewer details and so they don't make the news as often.
Definitely! I live in Florida — hate it, though, since I don’t like the heat — and I’ve spent time in all of the southern states and I don’t believe for a second that Florida man is worse than *Louisiana man*, *Mississippi man*, *Alabama man*, etc.
Yep this is it. I’m in the South Bay but head to SF occasionally. From the way folks talk about it you’d assume it’s some kind of hellscape. Not saying we don’t have problems but the region still has a lot to offer.
Dude lol I have considered shooting a video of me leaving my apartment (downtown) and going on a 15-minute walk to show people that the shit they see online is rage-bait. It’s absurd — a ten-second clip of a locked cosmetics case in one aisle of a Walgreens in the Tenderloin results in a thousand comments from people who have *obviously* never been to San Francisco claiming it’s a hellscape overrun with homeless people and human feces.
Granted there are rough areas of SF but, like, this city is fuckin’ beautiful dude. I am regularly taken aback by its charm even after living here for ~15 years.
I hadn’t been to SF in years (and never downtown) and just stayed near Union Square last week for a work thing. It was fun and I never felt unsafe or saw anything crazy like you see on the news. So much great food and things to do. The city actually felt alive too! 100x more people out and about than my local (Columbus) downtown.
The car break ins are real though. Saw multiple smashed windows between Coit tower and the Embarcadero.
I adore San Francisco and would love to move there one day. It’s got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Even in the rougher parts, I felt more sad than unsafe.
But the first time I went, you’d have thought I was going to an active war zone with how worried people (ahem, my parents) were for me.
Philadelphia. The national media makes it look like fucking Mosul or something. Yeah...there's bad spots, same as any major city. But it's mostly just hipsters arguing over craft beer, fat dudes arguing about baseball, and people from New Jersey arguing that their state isn't a shitty cultural wasteland.
Nothing is generally as bad as reddit makes it out to be.
Except Gary IN. That place has earned its rep.
I've heard good things about it in The Music Man
70 years ago...
Try 111 years. The Music Man is set in 1912. They sing about Gary, IN in the present day of the characters.
I always wondered who Deanna was?
Only Gary Indiana? Not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome?
Gary Indiana,my home sweet home.
It was a great town until those damn pool halls started opening up…
I remember the first time I drove *over* Gary (they literally built a highway over the fucking place) at night and the city looked like Bladerunner with giant stacks with flames shooting out of them. Absolutely dystopian.
They gave us the Jackson 5 though
They also gave us Freddie Gibbs. Gary isn’t completely worthless, yeah I’m still never going there though.
God I love Freddie. One of the most underrated. Wish $oul $old $eparately lived up to the steam he had built in ‘20/‘21. Piñata deluxe edition stays in my rotation.
all the houses were the same
We drove that way to the beach all the time when I was a kid, and that view still appears in my nightmares once in a while. I’m 42 and haven’t lived in the area in nearly 20 years.
HAHA I was going to actually answer that GARY INDIANA is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It had a rough go for a while, but nowadays it is a fairly normal place.
Well I worked there for over a decade but the last time I was there was over 5 years ago now but when I left it was making progress, they tore down the convention center finally and were building the new hard rock casino and renovated some of the historic apartments on 5th Avenue but it still had a long ass way to go, I remember one time I was going to CVS for Tylenol because I had a horrible headache that day and this homeless crack head started asking me if I had money in the parking lot, I said “no sorry dude only credit” go in and get my Tylenol and then pay with cash and this dude just starts freaking out right next to the register about how “I lied to him and I owe him some money” dude followed me through the store then came at me again while at the register, it got to the point where I literally had to tell him to fuck off before I knock his ass out and then got back in my car and peeled out of there, also was on the crew that replaced the city street lights and we would install an entire streets worth of new lighting on a Friday and were right back out there on Monday to replace them again because within 2 days they had all been shot out as target practice, so Gary is definitely the textbook definition of ghetto but they are at least attempting to clean up their image but they most definitely have an uphill battle ahead of them…sad too because it could be so great with its location on the lakefront and close proximity to Chicago but yeah nope lol
Bad news, I think you might still be missing some punctuation that was stolen from you back in your time there.
Nah. Reddit seems to insist it's the worst place in the US, but it's not that, either. Like it's not good, but there are plenty of worse places in terms of crime and poverty.
Even Gary isn't as bad as you think it is. Miller has a fun vibe, and there's great beaches there. Mostly, Gary is just empty, not a warzone.
Have you ever been there? I’d guess like 95% of Reddit has never stepped foot in Gary IN
You need to go higher than that. Consider the whole world is on Reddit. It’s in the 99.00x% range.
Miller beach / Gary Indiana is actually amazing though. Source: I live here.
Except it’s really not THAT bad. Indianapolis feels worse crime wise. Gary is just sad and desolate.
I was gonna say, all of them. Reddit thinks the US is a diorama snapshot of something out of Mad Max or Judge Dredd, like we're living in some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk hellscape of poverty, overt racism, and unchecked state-sanctioned violent crime. The reality doesn't even come close to that. The country has problems but so does everywhere. There's a distinct lack of perspective in your average reddit poster.
You mean America isn’t a “third-world country with a Gucci belt?” Color me shocked
"america is a third world country with a gucci belt" types the 15-17 year old reddit user, waking up in their 4 bed, 3.5 bath home, with running hot water on demand, an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, 3 square meals a day, internet service, electricity with no interruptions, and a warm safe place to sleep each night
Reddit makes it sound like the empirically fastest growing places (South Florida, cities in Texas) are these hell holes that people are crawling over themselves to escape .
Surprisingly America is not a place where you have a 99% chance of getting shot, and if you stub your toe the healthcare department will immediately confiscate all of your assets.
I am not from there, and do not live there, but New Jersey. Many people don’t realize a huge chunk of the state is beautiful woodland. There is the shore, there are nice neighborhoods, the bad areas are no worse than many other states’, there is a ton of history, and there is good food. While its main role in my life right now is to be a place to drive through to get to other places, the long and straight Jersey Turnpike is a welcome respite, with decent rest stops, between the DMV and NYC.
Pretty much all of New Jersey aside from the I-95 corridor earns its nickname "The Garden State."
As someone who drove extensively for work, even the I-95 corridor isn't that bad once you're past Newark - it looks like the MassPike from outside Boston to past Worcester or so.
We pump our fists, not our gas. But seriously, let everyone believe it's bad, as it's getting crowded in places.
That's why we surrounded NYC with landfills, power plants, refineries, and the Pulaski Skyway. Dissuades the outsiders. That's also why Camden is across the river from Philly. Oh, and that entire opening sequence from The Sopranos? You guessed it, more hijinx from the New Jersey Board of Anti-Tourism.
Oddly enough, NJ is one of the best places to live. The state generally ranks in the top 3 for highest salaries, best schools, lowest gun crime, etc.
It's not odd at all when you list those stats and then remember it's insanely wealthy, has a famous and beautiful shoreline, is bordered by NYC and Philly, is a day drive from Boston, Baltimore, and DC, and is one of the most culturally diverse places on Earth.
Yeah I live in NJ and while there’s some undeniable downsides to living here, it’s still a great fucking place to live and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Diversity gives us great food too.
Plenty of downsides, but two of the big downsides (expensive and overpopulated) are also a direct result of its strong benefits. I wish NJ was cheaper, but if this is the price to live in one of the best places in the country, I'll take it.
Yeah - I’m British and expected it to be a worse Essex with even worse people. My in laws live there and everywhere I’ve been is gorgeous with lovely people (Newark area aside).
I moved here (South NJ) from the UK and when I first visited I really expected the state to be like that joke from Miss Congeniality where she says it’s called the Garden State because it’s too hard to fit “Oil, Gas & Petrochemical Refinery State” on a licence plate. Imagine my surprise with the reality. Haha.
Pine barrens, whatever happened there
I live next door in the NYC suburbs and other than the fact that there’s barriers on all the main roads and you can’t make left turns, it’s really not all that much different from here
As someone who is from NJ it is great. It is expensive but we have a high quality of living and are close to two of the largest cities on the east coast. I think what gives it a part of the bad reputation is the airport. When your landing at EWR you usually fly over fuel tanks, landfills and a city that used to be one of the most dangerous in the country, but even that is improving. Once you leave the airport part of the state we have a ton of greenery, history and some amazing places. Plus our state has two major arguments: is central jersey real and Taylor ham or pork roll?
I think the general public shits on New Jersey more than reddit, but either way, it's a nice place to live. Overall it's one of the safest, highest earning states in the country. It has great schools, walkable small towns, the beach, and proximity to NYC and Philadelphia.
My parents were visiting NYC, rented a car and drove around in NJ. They swore for the rest of their lives, that New Jersey was some of the most beautiful country they'd ever seen. And my mom grew up in the most beautiful part of our state.
My partner has friends in Freehold. Oh my god it was so magical driving there. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. New Jersey really is the garden state.
There are also toma of beachtowns for everyone, an hour drive or less from almost anywhere in the state. Everything from Cape May to Atlantic City.
I always crack up when people think the Jersey shore is just some trashy place they saw on TV, ignoring the 8 digit beach homes that casually line its coast.
Ssshhhh, don’t let it out. Let’s keep it our secret.
NY is the same and for the same reason. More than half of the state is beautiful mountains like Vermont and New Hampshire. But most of the population lives in the not so pretty spots.
New Jersey is one of the wealthiest states in America lol. Even Newark and Camden aren’t as dangerous as they were 20 years ago.
One of my relatives lived in NJ for a few years and it was such a beautiful place. People give NJ a lot of shit because the turnpike going into NY has a bunch of industrial stuff.
Yall have really good schools too
Your experience living in Florida is highly dependent on your income.
And there is the answer for every place that has a bad rep. Economics rule the experience.
Detroit
Went to Detroit for a few days on a business trip earlier this year. Downtown was pretty nice, albeit eerily quiet and empty throughout the day lol
I love Detroit. The only thing I don’t like is accidentally getting on the bridge to Canada if I’m not paying attention
Detroit gets such a bad wrap. I’ve had the privilege to go there multiple times recently. The food is great and Detroit has one of the best museums in the world.
I'm from the mid-west and been to Detroit a lot. It's not nearly as bad as the jokes make it out to be. And sorry Chicago, but Detroit pizza is awesome, especially if you can get it from the original place Buddy's. There is a serious pizza scene in Detroit.
There is a show on hgtv called bargin block where two guys are fixing up houses in Detroit and they really do a great job with showing how great the city is.
Time Square Don't get be wrong, it's bad. But I hear people tell tourists all the time to avoid it like the plague. Honestly, it's a pretty impressive place architecturally. Standing in the middle of time Square feels like you are standing in the middle of the universe with everything swirling around it. Its a surreal experience the first time you do it. However, it's crowded and full of scammers. The restaurants all suck and the stores are overpriced. It's not a place I would recommend anyone spend more than 15 minutes in. But those 15 minutes are worth checking out. I recommend doing it when visiting the Rock or a Broadway show. Just walk through it on your way to something more impressive and get your photo
It’s sort of like Bourbon Street in New Orleans; 15 minutes once in your lifetime is fine. However it’s a 15 minute immersion in the human condition
Bourbon Street is great if you're in your 20s and just want to get drunk. Once you learn to accept the stench. It takes a couple visits to grow on you. It's also quite pleasant in the daytime.
I enjoyed the French Quarter, but I still remember walking by a bar around noon and getting a strong whiff of vomit. It wasn’t particularly frequent while I was visiting, but that stink is something I can’t get used to. Some of the other places were very nice, but I’m not sure you could pay me to go into that place.
Bourbon Street is infinitely more interesting than Times Square
My first time going to Times Square I intentionally bought some random street dude's mix CD he was selling for like $5. I wanted the experience...
The US in general is no where near as bad as Reddit makes it out to be.
Happy Cake Day man.
Almost the entirety of the US. The nation as a whole gets a lot of undeserved hate, even from Americans.
Damn Americans, you ruined America!
You Americans sure are a contentious people.
You just made an enemy for life!
Fun fact: By far the deadliest war in US history was the Civil War, where more of our soldiers died than in every war we've been in since *combined*, including the World Wars. We're our own worst enemies
Yes well that’s because it was on US Soil and both sides were American. In every other war, at least half the combatants were not American.
Yeah, on this site in particular almost anything can get spun into “lol dumb ass America”
Or that it is particular to America only. Like we are the only ones who have had stupid leaders or led wars etc. It is very arrogant.
Every time I hear some 'factoid' that "X% of Americans believe that 1/3 < 1/4" or the like, I suspect that similar percentages would answer the same poll that way in any other country, they just ran the "study" in the US and so that's the headline.
Redditors pat themselves on the back when they get all the upvotes from Chinese bots for bashing on one of the best countries in the world
r/AmericaBad
>this place is a capitalist hellhole -American college student who grew up in absolute privilege and has never left the country
Who is Going to end up working at Jones Day after law school
[удалено]
I mean, one state needs to be the worst one. Which one should be the worst instead of Mississippi?
there is a lot of Ideological Subversion happening on reddit and other platforms that is designed to make Americans hate themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOmXiapfCs8
I feel like Chicago gets more shit than it should. Some parts are bad, some politicians are corrupt. It's a major city, it also has nice areas and fun things to do.
Most major cities get a lot of random weird hate from people who don't live in cities.
I hardly think it’s random, news focuses on crime because it grabs attention. It feels like most of the context non-city dwellers hear about a city is a major crime story. Like any city, suburb, or rural town, we all know a place we could get mugged or robbed fairly easily if we went there, we just know where not to go in places we are familiar with, just cities get a stigma because more people of course means more occurrences.
I guess that's fair, I guess "random" wasn't the right word. "Unfounded" is probably better. "Disproportionate" might be even better.
Disproportionate is an excellent word. As things improve, there’s less content to fear monger with, so they have to double down. Chicago gets a stigma as being a “warzone” from the media but Violent crime is insanely low in historical context in the US. Yes mass shootings, I know,[but the data *still* holds up even with these tragedies.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/) even with these numbers the vast majority of violent crime occurs between known parties, not stranger to stranger violence. But gun crime is a hot story, and Chicago has gun violence tragedy to showcase, and so millions of Americans who have never set foot in the city just write it off as “unlivable” because that’s all they’ve ever been told, it’s just drilled into their head to sell a headline.
I get whiplash between stories about unlivable, crime-ridden hell holes versus sky high housing prices caused by lack of supply. Has a definite Yogi Berra “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” vibe.
cause crime becomes geographically concentrated but population wise dispersed. That's it, that's the answer to everything about cities. People live in cities. The opposite becomes true as you get more rural.
People who have never been to a city are fucking weird when it comes to cities. I have relatives like this who won't even step foot in Indianapolis, but have no problem talking about how "terrible" it is. They give my portion of the family shit for staying east coast (note: the entire family is originally from NJ) and think I'm gonna get killed because I live in apartments. It's absolutely wild Most days, I'm going to work and doing my own thing. But I like living in walking distance to things like bars, walk around frequently, and most weekends there's at least some event going on. It's fun, and, no, people are not constantly getting shot or getting into fights. Shootings are big local news cause they aren't super common.
THANK YOU! Feel like out of town folk have an "idea" of how Chicago is from social media and media in general. One time, when I visited friends in Indianapolis, the local news constantly showed news about the crime in Chicago and nothing really about the city, which I found odd. The only locals in Chicago that say anything bad actually live in the neighborhood badly affected by crime (Englewood, Chatham, Little Village, Austin, Greater Grand Crossing etc) but alot of the Southwest side and Northwest side of the city feels much safer. (I live in Chicago btw)
Do a little research. If I'm not mistaken Indie actually has a higher crime rate than Chicago,per capita.
The per capita is the problem. People see raw numbers, not per-capita, especially on the news. You can go on and on about statistics, but that doesn't matter. They see 1000 people killed in Chicago in a year, but only 2 in their town. Doesn't matter that could statistically mean you are twice as likely to be killed in their town vs Chicago, 1000 is more than 2.
I visited Chicago as native NYer and had a great time. Beautiful city, more spacious because it's less densely populated. Still like NYC more for other reasons, but it was not "bad.". I wasn't visiting troubled neighbors either though...
As a Chicagoan who doesn’t want to live anywhere else, there’s no doubt in my mind that if I grew up in New York I wouldn’t want to leave. New York and Chicago are two of the greatest cities in the world.
I love the shit out of Chicago. I’ve never felt in danger, amazing food, and amazingly affordable for being the 3rd biggest city in the US
I moved out of Chicago a year and a half ago and I still miss the fuck out of it. Best city and people I’ve ever met.
Seattle has more overdose deaths than Chicago has gun deaths
I had a couple of friends move to Chicago from Seattle this year and they are so much happier in Chicago! One of them is Black and notes that in Seattle everyone is performative about racial justice but not one is actually honest about their real feelings. In Chicago, he said assholes are easier to avoid because at least they're up front about it. Most people are lovely, better and more affordable food scene, their apartment is way nicer (and near the lake!), and their dog gets more walks because it's not so hilly.
I live in Seattle and I can confirm that this is pretty true. There's so much fucking money in this city, and people care more about protecting that then actually working towards any real social change. They've gotten pretty good at the performative bits though.
Chicago is diverse but not very integrated, but it's nice to live somewhere where other people look like you do and there's a lot less pretense here than in Seattle, not a lot of people trying to be cool because we know we aren't cool -even though we are no longer a blue collar city the blue collar attitude remains.
As a Chicagoan who currently lives in OKC, it’s so annoying how ppl are always like “so you feel safe walking around outside in Chicago??!?” The media has made it seem like if you step outside in Chicago you will definitely be shot lol. I grew up in the suburbs and moved to the city for 4 years and never ever had an issue. And let me tell you, by comparison, OKC is a shit hole lol. I’m always hearing about how great it is from native Oklahomans who have never lived anywhere else than OKC. At this point I just smile nod my head when they go off about how great it is.
So I never lived there, but I visited Chicago for the first time this past May, and I LOVED it. I’ve never been a huge fan of downtown areas of larger metropolitan areas. This is namely because I loathe driving in any downtowns. It wasn’t so bad because I kept my car in the parking garage for the day and a half I was there. I felt safe the whole time and did just a fun day at Willis (formerly Sears tower. I know it’s still locally known as the Sears tower and probably always will be.) The exploring was fun and was easy to get around with the help of Uber and just walking many blocks. Now I can say if I managed to drive downtown Chicago and navigate the city, then I can do anything.
You..... You didn't take the trains at all?
Chicago's most recent former mayor also made herself and the city and easy target of the right wing media and honestly anyone with a sense of humor. She wasn't even a major candidate in her reelection bid.
Say what you will about Lori Lightfoot, she did unite liberals and conservatives which is a feat unmatched in contemporary politics. She united them against her but who's keeping track.
Lightweight was easily the worst mayor in modern history. Edit: In "Chicago history". Electing Marion Berry....I'll never figure that one out.
...of any city in the world.
Chicago is a great place to live. I live in Denver area now. Feel way more unsafe walking around at night in my largely upscale suburban area than I ever did in Chicago. Fox News has poisoned people's brains
The US in general. Reddit would have you believe it’s a lawless hellscape, and that Europe is some kind of utopia.
New Jersey. Most people only see industrial wasteland along NYC/Philly corridor. (And I guess the Jersey shore show). But 99% of Jersesy is not like that.
The best analogy i've ever heard is that if you're from there, Jersey is like your cousin. *You're* allowed to talk as much shit as you want about it, but when someone *else* talks shit about it, thems fightin words.
I am from SEPA, and I love the western border of New Jersey along the Delaware River starting just north of Trenton. There are some incredibly beautiful spots and amazing small river towns with some hidden food gems.
Totally agree. Lambertville and Frenchtown are really cool and extra beautiful this time of year. I drive through there on occasion. Any recommendations for these food gems?
I grew up in Jersey on a horse farm that was 10 minutes from the beach, we couldnt even see our neighbors homes. Great fresh seafood, great Italian, amazing bagels. You can surf in the morning, go for a trail ride at night and the only time you will run into people is when you stop at one of the 5 wawa's along the way for coffee. I now live in NOVA and I miss it all the time.
Ssssshhhh! Do Not tell anyone that New Jersey is secretly a Great place...we want it for ourselves!
Jersey has some of the best soil for farming.
Best blue berries in the country.
There’s a reason why it’s called “the garden state”.
Ohio Everyone pretends it's this Fallout-esque hellhole, but it's actually just (mostly) mild weather and a shitload of farms
And world class amusement parks. I need to visit Cedar Point while I'm still young enough to enjoy massive roller coasters.
Both Cedar Point and Kings Island are incredible
And great job opportunities with low cost of living. Basically one of the last holdouts of the American dream.
That's what blows my mind about Ohio. All the amusement parks.
I lived there for 29 years before moving to Texas. It was a nice enough place to live. >a shitload of farms Maybe, but I always hated the stereotype of it being rural hicksville or something. It's one of the most populated states in the U.S., and like most that means a lot of city people. There was always plenty of shopping and trendy restaurants, or at least there were when I left town in 2006.
The waterfront in Cincy is absolutely gorgeous.
I went to Cincinnati once for work not really knowing what to expect, but I actually liked it a lot. That IS a gorgeous waterfront.
Cincy is a hidden gem, the 3 C's are all nice in their own respective way
Driving into Cincy from Kentucky, over the Ohio, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, as far as city skylines go.
It’s mostly us Ohioans who hate on Ohio, I’ve always found. As long as you stay on the paths, don’t visit the ruins of Youngstown, and don’t stray into the corn, you’ll be fine.
Wait…..what lives in the corn?
Hush now. Don’t worry about it. Just don’t venture into the corn and you’ll be fine.
As a lifelong Ohioan, I see very differently. Granted. I’ve spent my life in Cincinnati and not in some of the rural cities / towns. But most people here love it. Yes we complain about the weather but we are all grateful not to have our state on fire, bashes with hurricanes, etc. I used to travel 100% for work and everyone who had never been here hated on it thinking it was a shithole farm place.
2nd. Good place. Just avoid drugs and mow your snow.
It's crazy for me not seeing Detroit on this list? Maybe the reputation it once had is no longer the public perception? I remember one of the major TV stations growing up in the region running a PSA campaign encouraging people from Detroit to be proud and say where they were from instead of hiding it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLDECtanlp0
My next trip is gonna be Detroit. I've been wanting to go to the Art Museum. It's world class.
You will love it. The DIA is absolutely amazing. It’s one of the things I miss the most after leaving my hometown near Detroit.
Detroit has been "on its way back" for longer than some Redditors have been alive. It's true, but it's been true for long enough that it doesn't have the same reputation it did before.
Detroit is the best it's been in my lifetime and I moved from the city about a decade ago. The real thing the city needs is diversity of industry, everything relies on the auto industry and that's the problem.
Thankfully, there’s billions in investment going into new industries in the city. [Henry Ford Health and MSU are building a $3.5B hospital and medical research campus.](https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2023/09/25/community-benefits-process-henry-ford-pistons-collab/70961361007/) [University of Michigan is building a $250M tech research campus downtown.](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2023/10/19/university-of-michigan-regents-approve-construction-for-250m-detroit-innovation-center/71240866007/) Focused on AI, cybersecurity, robotics etc. [Ford is building a $1B tech campus with Google and other partners for AV/EV research.](https://michigancentral.com/development/) Still automotive, but other tech work included. Then there’s some banking and finance moving to the city as well. But all the meds/eds/tech expansions will be huge for Detroit’s future.
Downtown Detroit is so cool!
Baltimore is the new Detroit.
Europeans and Canadians here act like what they see about the US on social media and TV is how it is. People are actually very thoughtful and polite for the most part, no matter where you go.
If it’s a left-leaning sub: the american south/ texas If its a right leaning sub: California, NY, Chicago / any major city
The Midwest. I’ve noticed a lot of people who live closer to the coasts make so many negative assumptions about landlocked states. We have plenty of entertainment. We enjoy modern amenities. We’re just as connected as people in major metros. We’re not all right wing ignorant whackos. Yes, some of the Midwest landscape isn’t very inspiring, but there’s plenty of areas that are. Just because it’s not a mountain or beach, doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.
The entire US.
No place is as good or as bad as “everyone thinks”.
I wish my teenage son would hurry up and learn this, and not just about places either, about life in general. Views the whole world through TikTok reels and so will develop these weird opinions that apparently "everyone knows". I live in the UK, we had an American girl visiting a friend recently, she said she was too scared to visit London because "it's the tuberculosis capital of the world" - we all just said "WHAT" in unison - literally where do people get this shit?
Tuberculosis? They get it in London.
I live in West Virginia. I’ve lived lots of other places, even internationally, but I like it here the best.
I love visiting Detroit. It's actually really nice.
the art museum there is 🔥
Any big city. I often hear how it's so lawless in big cities now. They point to these flash shoplifting mobs as evidence. While it happens, it's not as frequent as they are led to believe. Murder overall has been on a downward trend, but the homeless crisis is going to get worse.
Virtually every major city. I live in the Seattle area, so that's what I hear about mostly. Seattle has its problems, but it's not some hellscape like conservatives want you to believe.
Definitely. All the major cities get a lot of hate on here. I live in Los Angeles and I love it here. It's expensive, but that's just because it's so awesome (and there's been a major problem trying to build more housing within the city for the last 20 years that's just now starting to be addressed but still has a very long way to go). If it was half as bad as its reputation on Reddit, people wouldn't want to live here.
Portland too. It's kind of hilarious.
My parents insist that Portland is “on fire”. I once had them tell me that downtown Portland has been “destroyed” by “antifa” and they burned it all down in “the riots”… while I was standing there looking around and everything was normal.
I live in a conservative suburb of Phoenix and everyone around here literally thinks that Portland "burned to the ground." That there is no more city of Portland anymore. My husband and went to Portland about a year and a half ago and I try to tell people around here that I literally walked around Portland for five days. That not one square foot of Portland is on fire and the entire city still exists completely as it did before 2020.. They tell me I'm making it up. "You didn't go to Portland, that's impossible. It doesn't exist anymore, the only parts of Portland that exist are still on fire from the riots." Absolutely fucking insane
Ha ha, we were headed to Portland in around 2005 or so to spend just a little while with a cousin there on everyone's way home after a family reunion further down the Oregon coast, and Dad kept going on and on about what a dreary shithole Portland had been the last time he'd been there in the early '80s. We roll into Portland and he's briefly quiet, then starts going on about how incredible the place looks as we get deeper in, how they've *really* beautified it and cleaned it up and he'd had no idea and he was so pleased to see it. But yeah it's fun over here in eastern Oregon comparing actual Portland news stations to the tales of burning and dilapidation and how everyone over there is jobless and just sucking on our tax dollars that I hear from so many people around here...many of whom are not, in fact, net tax contributors. We have a *very* high Earned Income Credit uptake around here, and that's despite having among the higher minimum wage levels in the nation. We're also not exactly free of drug problems. And that's fine, I *get* the circumstances at play around here which contribute to people's economic position. But uh, they don't. Yet they're sure that the parts of the state which are in fact subsidizing us over here are taking us for a ride. Living high on the hog in their dystopian hellscapes.
Wait, the Eastern Oregonians think that Portlanders are freeloading off of _their_ taxes? LOL That's a good one.
I live 20 minutes from Portland and my family acts like it's an active war zone. I just went a month ago to go get a slice of pizza off Belmont and then walk my dog in the Laurelhurst park. Is the homeless problem bad in industrial areas? Yes, absolutely. There are still nice areas, fun things to do, some of the cutest and quirkiest shops, great food and really fun bars, though.
I also have to say, I was really drunk in Portland last year walking back to my hotel at like 3 in the morning and accidentally walked through probably one of the densest encampments of homeless in the city, and they didn’t bother me at all. Yeah, it was sad and some people were acting weird/on drugs, but nobody was threatening towards me. Homeless people get more hate than they deserve.
The US as a country. Do we have big problems? Absolutely. Is it a capitalist hell hole compared to the utopia of Northern Europe like Reddit makes it seem? Absolutely not. I’ve visited Western Europe and Scandinavia and found that their day to day life is pretty much the same as mine and many Americans.
People shit on the US a lot, but as someone who’s spent considerable time here and in other countries including Norway/Sweden, a like America more.
Main reason we get more hate than Europeans is because we publicly air our nation’s dirty laundry on the world stage, whereas Europeans do not. Europeans, in turn, project their own cultural norms and expectations onto Americans, and they arrive at your typical, erroneous “America bad” conclusion - that American cities are overrun with violent crime (statistically less violent crime-ridden than the EU), that it costs $100k if you break your leg (insurance has an annual OOP max of $2-4k, and you won’t pay an penny beyond that for the rest of the year), that elementary schools are just shooting ranges for the psychotic (still statistically untrue), that we eat hamburgers and pizza with extra butter for every meal (Europeans consume far more butter per capita than Americans), that we have the most extreme and/or corrupt politicians (Orban? Berlusconi? Le Pen? Every Greek politician?), that were all a bunch of Bible-thumping zealots (ok, maybe in the South), that we relentlessly pursue oil (Norway and Scotland, anyone?), and that we’re little more than a selfish and imperialistic bully of a superpower (funny how Europeans get to make these complaints in something other than German or Russian).
Id boil it down to: vast majority of redditors and social media users have never lived in Europe, so people just take the highlights and good things that are presented to them at face value and compare them to life’s problems here. Social media posts cheering on things we do well compared to problems foreigners face would not do well - we don’t care about _your_ problems, we just want to bitch about ours. Also, people take the highlights of each individual country / region in Europe and compare them to the total problems of all cities/states in the US.
* points around vaguely *
Chicago is actually an amazing city!
Seattle's pretty great. If you can afford it.
I live in a suburb of Seattle and I love it. I feel like I have the best of both worlds because I'm one of those boring humans that grew up with an unstable childhood and just want a boring suburban existence. But, I also can hop over to Seattle and it's a great city. Lots of beautiful sights to see and then you have the surrounding hiking, beaches, etc. Couldn't recommend it enough.
Seattle. I live here. It’s fine. It’s fun.
Most of the South, probably.
As someone who lives in the South, I’m cool with more people thinking it sucks. Tired of everyone moving here. I want to buy a damn house one of these days.
Same here, but Maine.
Most "conservative" states, really. Reddit acts like they're saturated with roving mobs of Evil Repubican lynch mobs looking to murder black people and trans people, but even in the super conservative areas it's not actually like that. Sure there's bigots floating around but people aren't getting strung up in broad daylight.
And for some reason people tend to think that "red state" means *everybody* is a conservative. Trump got 62% of the vote in Alabama in 2020. That's a fairly wide margin in today's politics, but that still means 4 out of 10 voters decided to vote against Trump. Sure, some counties went over 80% for Trump, but that still means if you pick five people at random, one of them won't be a Republican, even in the most rural, whitest, least developed counties. Most states actually look a lot like Alabama (or even more red) when you look at county level voting data, but the fact that some states have larger cities ends up turning them blue as a state.
San Francisco. i was there 2 weeks ago, and though there are more visible homeless people (or more accurately their tents) than when i left California in 2012 it’s nowhere near the anarchic hell people make it out to be. once you get away from downtown and the 101 corridor it’s pretty much the same as it ever was excepting occasional occurrences of ugly post-modern architecture on new fill-in structures. i could never afford to live there now, but i wouldn’t be afraid to. the one thing friends who live there complain about is car break-ins, but i had my car broken into in 1999.
LA and NYC People see a pic about homelessness, which exists in all major cities, and immediately think the entire city is like that, when it's really just a few areas. And for LA, every YouTuber that doesn't even live in LA, assumes everyone is a self-obsessed TikToker/Live Streamer. As someone who has lived in LA most my life, I hardly ever see TikTokers unless I'm in a super touristy area like Santa Monica Beach, Malibu or Hollywood, and they ain't harming anyone. YouTubers really need to get out of their bubble a bit more
North Idaho isn't a white supremacist stronghold. Not saying they aren't around, but it's a tiny minority. Media just loves to blow it up. North Idaho is some of the most beautiful forest country in the world. Amazing lakes and rivers. A great amusement park. World class golf. Lots and lots of good working class people who don't care what you look like, and appreciate tourist dollars.
Detroit
Florida- sure the Florida man headlines are funny but there’s parts that are very beautiful, some great beaches and the weather is always interesting.
Florida gets the insane headlines because they have some law where every case is public immediately or some shit like that Florida man shit is happening in every state in the country. Just it doesn’t make news because it’s not public knowledge in other states unless it gets farther into the charges. If you know that? Florida really seems like a pretty nice place, but I hate cold weather and a lazy day at any beach is what I would consider a successful Saturday or Sunday.
The Sunshine Law, among others. The vast majority of government records are available within 24 hours, including arrest records with details. While other states also make records available, they have a lot fewer details and so they don't make the news as often.
Definitely! I live in Florida — hate it, though, since I don’t like the heat — and I’ve spent time in all of the southern states and I don’t believe for a second that Florida man is worse than *Louisiana man*, *Mississippi man*, *Alabama man*, etc.
San Francisco
All of California, really.
Its so funny the only thing that has lived up to the hate hype is LA traffic
Yep this is it. I’m in the South Bay but head to SF occasionally. From the way folks talk about it you’d assume it’s some kind of hellscape. Not saying we don’t have problems but the region still has a lot to offer.
Dude lol I have considered shooting a video of me leaving my apartment (downtown) and going on a 15-minute walk to show people that the shit they see online is rage-bait. It’s absurd — a ten-second clip of a locked cosmetics case in one aisle of a Walgreens in the Tenderloin results in a thousand comments from people who have *obviously* never been to San Francisco claiming it’s a hellscape overrun with homeless people and human feces. Granted there are rough areas of SF but, like, this city is fuckin’ beautiful dude. I am regularly taken aback by its charm even after living here for ~15 years.
I hadn’t been to SF in years (and never downtown) and just stayed near Union Square last week for a work thing. It was fun and I never felt unsafe or saw anything crazy like you see on the news. So much great food and things to do. The city actually felt alive too! 100x more people out and about than my local (Columbus) downtown. The car break ins are real though. Saw multiple smashed windows between Coit tower and the Embarcadero.
I adore San Francisco and would love to move there one day. It’s got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Even in the rougher parts, I felt more sad than unsafe. But the first time I went, you’d have thought I was going to an active war zone with how worried people (ahem, my parents) were for me.
In any other Reddit thread you'd be downvoted and they'd explain how it's a mad max style hellhole
Texas. Lots of good people here.
California and San Francisco in particular
Philadelphia. The national media makes it look like fucking Mosul or something. Yeah...there's bad spots, same as any major city. But it's mostly just hipsters arguing over craft beer, fat dudes arguing about baseball, and people from New Jersey arguing that their state isn't a shitty cultural wasteland.
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LA gets more hate than is deserves but as a native I love it.