3 Hudson Valley Hometowns Top List of ‘Worst Places To Live’
One city in the Hudson Valley is considered the "worst" place to live in New York. Two other local areas are not far behind.
RoadSnacks recently released "The 10 Worst Places To Live In New York For 2021." The website says they use, “data to create bite-sized snacks of shareable information about places and cities across the country.” The website is quick to add their “goal is to show you the real side of places that not everyone wants to hear.”
Three places from the Hudson Valley made the list. RoadSnacks used data from the FBI Union Crime Report and Census to compile their ranking.
- Monticello
- Rochester
- Lockport
- Newburgh
- Utica
- Poughkeepsie
- Binghamton
- Endicott
- Brockport
- Syracuse
Below are the reasons why Monticello, Newburgh and Poughkeepsie made the list, according to Roadsnacks data.
1. Monticello
- Population: 6,433
- Rank Last Year: 1
- Median Home Value: $106,900 (36th worst)
- Unemployment Rate: 10.8% (worst)
4. Newburgh
- Population: 28,255
- Rank Last Year: 2 (Down 2)
- Median Home Value: $159,000 (66th worst)
- Unemployment Rate: 6.6% (49th worst)
6. Poughkeepsie
- Population: 30,381
- Rank Last Year: 7 (Up 1)
- Median Home Value: $196,800 (77th worst)
- Unemployment Rate: 9.4% (6th worst)
Here's how Roadsnacks says they used to calculate the ranking:
To figure out how bad a place is to live in, we only needed to know what kinds of things people like and then decide what cities have the least amount of those things.
We don't think it's a stretch to assume that people like the following things:
Good education
Lots of jobs
Low crime
Low poverty
Nice homes
High incomes
High population density (Lots of things to do)
Short work commutes
Health insuranceThe data comes from the Census's most recent American Community Survey and from the FBI Uniform Crime Report.
We broke crime down into violent crime and property crime to give violent crime a larger weight -- if you did a simple calculation of all crimes per capita, property crimes are normally 7x more common and really bias that ranking.
Furthermore, only cities with at least 5,000 people were considered -- leaving 163 cities.
We then ranked each city from 1 to 163 for all the criteria with a #1 ranking being the worst for the particular criteria.
Next, we averaged the rankings into one "Worst Place To Live Score".
Finally, we ranked every city on the "Worst Place To Live Score" with the lowest score being the worst city in New York