What’s the most depressing city you’ve lived in? Why did you make you feel this bad?

10 comments

1. Birmingham, it’s so gloomy. Always raining, always trouble.I hated Birmingham.

2. Lived in NYC for about 5 months. No idea why people would ever want to live there. It’s dirty as hell, all over the place, even central park is absolutely filthy. There’s psychopaths all over the place you can barely go a day without seeing some psychopath screaming on the streets about something.

   The food and art and stuff is amazing but it’s like 1/50th of what you do, and getting to and from it all is just disgusting, gray, and dreary at all times.

   I absolutely hated it after about 2 months.

3. London, for a few years. Nothing works. Streetlights, street cleaning, public transport, water supply, plumbing, electricity,…

   People are interesting because from everywhere, but too many crazy people around.

4. Toledo, OH. I had a 90 minute commute every day and it’s a place so boring it should just be called “city”.

5. Honolulu. Traffic sucks, real estate is garbage and insanely priced, local politics is awful, the people are frequently (though not universally) very standoffish, and I hated being stuck on a hot rock in the middle of an ocean.

6. Berlin. Its a giant fever dream turned into a city.

7. I never lived there but Green Bay is a hole. It has a really weird vibe and I’m not the only one who noticed this.

8. NYC is both the most depressing and greatest at the same time. It’s mad expensive, there’s like infinite crazy people, the subways are crazy like I was with my gf and I saw some guy get shoved onto the tracks, some other guy tried to follow us home from the subway, the crime is kinda high, there’s fucking rats. But at the same time the place got the most hilarious people, the food is crazy, the city is just a whole vibe like it feels like a movie

9. Lived in? Probably Baltimore or DC

10. I lived near Buffalo and Niagara Falls for a few years (the actual town I lived in was nice), and couldn’t wait to get away. Niagara Falls is a dump (literally, in the case of Love Canal), and Buffalo just isn’t very nice or interesting. The region basically defines rust belt, and the mentality really hasn’t adjusted to the new reality. The factories that would employ masses of unskilled labor simply aren’t coming back, they’ve been gone for 40+ years, yet the populace still hasn’t adjusted to the needs of the modern knowledge-based economy. Its the kind of place where you learn to expect people to not show up for work, or to get the job you hired them for wrong 3-4 times before getting it right. Despite having some nice parks and outdoor activites in the region, good luck getting anyone outside away from their TV, especially.on Sundays during the football season.

    I actually found myself socializing far more on the Canadian side of the border when I lived there. Completely different attitude and outlook on life, and its where I met my wife.