Someone lives a sheltered life.

Obvious you haven't been to some of the smaller Ontario Hick Towns.
Believe me The hammer is heaven compared to places like

Orillia - Haggersville - Woodstock - Angus and Queen and Sherbourne in downtown Toronto.

interesting thread. I'm from Maryland and I'm not sure how anyone could possibly include DC in ****holes of the world. I mean there just don't exist cities of a certain size that don't have some bad areas, and DC is huge.

also confused by Laurel, MD, which is located between Baltimore and DC and borders Howard County:

"Howard County is frequently cited for its affluence, quality of life, and excellent schools. For 2011, it was ranked the third wealthiest county by median household income in the United States by the U.S. Census Bureau. Many of the most affluent communities in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area, such as Clarksville, Dayton, Glenelg, Glenwood and West Friendship, are located along the Route 32 corridor in Howard County. The main population center of Columbia/Ellicott City was named 2nd among Money magazine's 2010 survey of "America's Best Places to Live."[2] Howard County's schools frequently rank first in Maryland as measured by standardized test scores and graduation rates.[3]"

Laurel isn't quite as nice but it's closer to a suburb than a city and the median household income is $49k. pretty safely out of ****hole territory IMO.


some of the ****tier places I've been to in the US are West Virginia, Niagara Falls, Cleveland area of Ohio, and some of the small towns in Utah and Colorado on the drive home from Vegas.

That parts of Malmö are epic ****holes compared to other swedish cities i can agree on but compared to the world rly?

It doesn't need to compare to the rest of the world necessarily. If the drop in living quality is high enough locally it qualifies as a ****hole ITT AFIK (also it needs to be ****ty).

maybe you missed the title of this thread

Kathmandu is the worst city Ive been to and it isn't even close. I've seen Cairo, phnom penh, Bangkok but none of them come even close to the awfulness of Kathmandu in Nepal. It is simply the most hideous, poor, dirty city going. There are narrow streets full of rubble and rubbish, terrible food, awful traffic on crowded streets with no pavements, constant ripping off of tourists, nothing to do; no big landmarks bar a sq they charge you 10 dollars to visit, occasional huge strikes, powercuts everyday. Kathmandu hell on earth

Laurel MD has the worst parts of Howard and PG counties all rolled up in one ****hole. Even though it borders HoCo, it couldn't get much farther in ****tiness.

Camden tho. buy a WIIIIIIIIIIIDE margin.

York PA for sure is awful awful.

Bilbao, Lyon, Frankfurt, Athens for major cities. Mex City is not good either.

I am aware there is a popular museum in Bilbao. Still an armpit.

this thread is very amusing..especially having been at some of the mentioned places it is interesting to see what you guys think..

some of the places mentioned are head scratchers tho...virginia beach? if you think thats a "****hole of the world" you should try camden nj on for size

As someone who drives through Camden to work on a daily basis told me recently,

'You can still get $10-20 BJs right on the blvd, right on the highway. Hell, if you pull over after 7pm, they come running...'

I heard it was pretty beaten up, though I've never been there. Worst places I've personally visited in NA are Newark, Detroit, and Flint. If I had to guess, Camden + Oakland + Baltimore would be equally bad.

Athens was grim when I went there during the olympics and since it's economy has now collapsed I am guessing it is worse now

Camden makes Newark look like Chapel Hill. I'm sure parts of Oak and Balt are no picnic either. Reading would be an even poorer version of Oakland.

Newark used to be much worse I agree, it has def improved the past 10-15 years fwiw.

A friend of mine if flying to Athens on Friday to teach English for a year, cash in hand contract. I am worried on her behalf.

Was there last week and I had the polar opposite experience. Old town is perfectly nice and there's enough to do for 2 days. Bars and restaurants are ridic cheap considering its in eurozone. I never felt threatened or unsafe and everyone we spoke to was super helpful. The nightlife is sick if you get a reputable local to point you in the right direction.

I mean, worst thing that happened to us was a taxi driver taking us to a brothel when we asked where the party was at. We thought we were gonna be hassled/threatened/robbed if we tried to leave without 'indulging their business' but doorman let us out and wished us a good night with a smile!

I don't doubt what you say about Bratislava, just weird that we can have such different experiences

Saigon. Not on the level of awfulness of Kathmandu but still pretty bad.

Bump for Cairo, Illinois and Caruthersville, Missouri

Backpacked through most of South America and Europe in my early 20' s:

The ghettos in Lima, Peru were nasty and plenty dangerous. They have the best weed though so had no choice but to risk them every now and then if we wanted to get the best bananas. It usually ended up in a mob of 4-5 people running after me and my friend to rob us (after they let us get inside their hood) or beat us up. Never got caught (they do give you a head start lol).

Also, there is this town called Uchiza near the Brazil border. Whatta hellhole, the cocaine cartels drove everyone away in the 80's and killed/raped/slaved everyone that went against them. It's straight out of a horror movie, 80% of the locals moved away the people that stayed are so violent, saw 2 guys get into an argument and fighting w their machetes. ****ing brutal stuff.

Marseille is a piece of **** too. France in general is just ****ing sad.

The UK:

Grade one:
Stoke
Blackpool
Luton
Middlesbrough
Anywhere in a 50 mile radius of Birmingham
At least half of the greater Manchester area.
Well over half of the north east, and East, and Wales.
At least 98 percent of the Scottish towns and cities (bar beautiful Edinburgh and obviously rural areas)

And in case someone from aforementioned areas sees London in my location.... (in fairness to people from aforementioned areas they tend to be aware of being from a ****hole)

Places to avoid in London:

Anywhere northeast, the vast majority of East, huge swathes of South London, a lot of North London's poorer districts. Camden Town gets a special mention.

Also the M4 corridor, all of Essex, Surrey and Kent have their fair share of cesspits.

Pretty sure I covered all the bases there.

So as it turns out basically all of the UK is a ****hole. That said it had very pretty countryside and you wouldn't be putting your life on the line walking the streets pretty much anywhere

I haven't read this all the way, but damm this is thread of the year material!

Just some comments from someone that lived in 5 different countries in Europe and travelled a lot...although in US i have to admit, I've only visited NY, Boston and Atlanta, being my impression that midtown is always nice, everything else is not better than any eastern european suburbs, sometimes even worse.

1- Brussels is horrible, just horrible, bad weather, very grey, dirty and if you leave to Charleroi you will find yourself in a mix of soviet wasteland and muslim ghetto.

2 - Milan is not a beautiful city for Italian standards, but still has a lot to offer. Nightlife is very good and I am not talking only about the posh-designer-clubs, in Milan you can go a bit retro in the industrial area, wierd in Plastik and just do a quiet night on the Navigli. Culturaly you can see everything there is to see during a short weekend. The weather is also not that great, but is just in comparison to the south of Italy, that even with sunnier conditions has a bunch of ****hole city's like Bari, Foggia, Napoli among others...

3 - Horrible places i've been in, are:
- Vyborg (Russia, close to Finland border) - just a place to get cheap cigarettes and where everybody will try to trick you into buying anything from taser-cellphones to guns
- Luanda (Angola) - the most expensive city in the world, the police will try to rob you, the hotel will try to rob you, everybody will try to rob you if you find yourself alone in some areas. Dirty as hell, horrible traffic, 90% leave in barraks.
- Minsk (Belarus) - just plain wierd, nothing to see, everybody looks lost in their own mind and clueless to why they exist. The last dictatorship in Europe does not help, but people look extremly unhappy and although it is not dirty is just ugly as hell. Brest is a nice city tough.

Read most of the thread, not all of it, +1 to a lot of the english sh*tholes people are mentioning such as hull (certified, and apparently the youth prison has the dubious reputation of being the YOI you're most likely to receive a puncture wound in from what i can gather), areas of birmingham (pretty much most of it), bradford etc. etc. oh yeah and blackpool in the winter, precisely as one poster already described it, a sh*thole that hasn't had a lick of paint since the 60s and is full of bizarre pre-formed plastic monstrosities that sit dormant and unnerving most of the year round; a truly baffling and utterly grim place, and all the buildings are without fail grey/brown and complete with peeling paint, drab design and plastered in flyers advertising the upcoming 1987 visit by the moscow state circus...





however, i recently happened upon a seaside resort that trumps it, and having got home from my mini vacation i googled the place only to discover that it topped the english indices of deprivation in 2010, beating out inner-london gangland and northern post-industrial wasteland alike. it's called jaywick and it is essentially a small village of tin shacks that was built as a holiday resort for poor londoners back in the 40s, and is now over-populated by illiterate inbreds (literally) living in 70 year-old temporary beach huts that are often without running water, electricity etc. and are literally falling apart. i know a girl who used to teach at the local school and she says plenty of kids ran to the sea each morning to bathe etc. due to lack of washing facilities.

you couldn't make the place up. it's the closest i've seen in this country to suburban detroit/gary IN type places where tumbleweed blows across the street between two crumbling wooden shacks, while mangey three-legged dogs hop around hopelessly looking for a place to die among the weeds sprouting up through the cracked pavement...

while i'm here, shameless shouts to the most certified ghetto stomping ground of my formative years, pretty moist really but thought it was well ard when i was a young tearaway...

^ Omg wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies! Amazing

Oi, Brummy here! This is a very peculiar city because there isn't as much economic segregation as you find elsewhere. For example, my parents house is quite a fancy semi-detached on a nice road, yet it is literally a 5 minute walk away from one of the most deprived, cesspit looking estates you will ever see. The whole city is like this, you are never very far from either a nice section or a sh*thole section (with the exception of Solihull).