The Worst Places to Live ... Or Are They?

The Worst Places to Live ... Or Are They?

By CAROL VINZANT

Is your hometown awful? Odds are there is some list out there that puts where you live in the most extreme of some dreaded category for the state, region or country. Your curse may be the highest crime, summer temperatures, or insurance rates. Men's Fitness magazine may label you the Fattest City in America, Las Vegas. Fortune may call you the Fast Food Capital of America, Oklahoma City. But you are far from alone. Newspapers, magazines and books are continually churning out lists of the best and worst places to live. A handful of cities seem to perpetually battle it out over who has the most crime.

Sooner or later every place is at the bottom or top of some list. But every time a new list comes out, whether it is scientific or flippant, a civic booster somewhere is wounded. After 14 years of publishing lists of cities and states by livability, crime, education and health, Morgan Quitno Press (recently acquired by Congressional Quarterly) knows to expect a backlash. Cities hire PR firms to discredit the surveys and say the results are distorted, says CQ spokesman Ben Krasney. Local editorial pages are filled with angry letters and talk of the hard to quantify local character.

We decided to take a closer look at the places that are always showing up on the worst-places-to-live lists and give them their say. We look at the complaints, but also assess why so many people stay and others continue to move there. Here’s our take on the cons -- and pros -- of some of the worst places to live in America:

BALTIMORE

A couple of years ago, a local TV station in Baltimore began a story: "Baltimore has inched closer to the top of yet another dubious list." Baltimore's bad rap is mainly crime, but it's also often portrayed as a gritty city in decline.

A Baltimore crime blog polled readers on whether the official murder toll would top 300 in 2007; most thought it would. The final score was 282, the highest since 1999. The most popular images of Baltimore have been the David Simon dramas Homicide and The Wire, about cops waging a dreary struggle against gang wars, corruption and an institutional indifference to drug dealers and murderers.

For all that, though, Baltimore is forever fixing itself up. The first step was the National Aquarium, which opened in 1981. But Nancy Hinds, spokesperson for Baltimore.org admits, “We could never get people to go beyond the aquarium.â€

THe Los Angeles writer is a either a very good liar or a rich bon vivant (I never figured I'd ever use THAT word in a sentence). Maybe she lives in Beverly Hills and lives. shops, works entirely in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. That would explain her unreal viewpoint of Los Angeles. The majority of the city of Los Angeles is a gang-ridden, crime ridden, graffiti covered, grid-locked, third world cesspool.