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That was going to be my next shittiest city!! 
because of the actions of ONE person? Dayem! Aren't you glad you don't have any assholes in your town? Oh, wait . . .
Here, this was recently:
New apartment complex for the chronically homeless - 70 apartments nearFresno tent city
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1161929
As was this:
The Anti-Chick-fil-Hate protest:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021070515
And then there's this about Peace Fresno
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021070515
I could post THOUSANDS more but go ahead and ignore all the people who made these things happen and, by all means, focus on ONE jackass. 
Attended grad school there at ESU.
IBP was the major employer. During the summer months when it was hot and humid, you could smell IBP all over town!
Nothing like the putrid smell of a slaughter house to whet your appetite! 
Every place I have been to
has been an adventure!
It was a slum back then I hear but it's now gentrified.
Manhattan was undoable. The rent was too damn high! 2000 a month for a studio apartment.
From the pictures I've seen of the JC waterfront in the 70s, it's unrecognizable.
It went from this:
And this:
To this:
And we have the coolest statue ever:
SF just doesn't love you Ben.
but it's not even close to the worst.
For the record, Stockton is pretty far down there. 
Remember this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallegly_amendment
Lots of money in the area, Democratic and Republican, insulated and often unaware of where their food comes from, or who's changing the sheets and cleaning the toilets in the hotels they stay at.
And I'll have you know, sir, my truck, it's art! 
I love California where they don't salt the roads and old junk cars last forever.
In exchange for ignoring this eyesore my neighbors can always borrow tools and use the basketball hoop. It all works out.
Loved the city for most of my time in what was still Czechoslovakia at that moment, but my rule since has been to avoid deadly riots whenever possible. 
year-round bad weather, and the employers treat their employees worse than dogs. Thankfully, that gig ended on schedule.
But I'm still not going back. No offense.
i LOVE IT!
and i miss it a lot
both when you buy 
and when you sell
when you're winning, that is.
But yeah, I'd forgotten how bad it is away from the boardwalk, but it's pretty shitty.
The beach is so lovely, though. I guess that's all of the 'Jersey Shore', though.
It was my first time there. My daughter has her own baby now so that tells you how long ago it was.
These are indeed grim. I've spent quite a while in Juarez and it's everything most people think, but to me poverty is not the be all and end all of urban blight. I've lived in Buffalo and found it humdrum but not particulary horrible despite swathes of quite shocking decay. I lived just outside East St. Louis for years and yep it's dangerous as hell and squalid. But even crime and poverty fail to make a city truly terrible to me. Crime and poverty can be found in areas of almost all cities after all. No to me the "worst" mantle has to transcend the ubiquitous blight of urban living. It has to have a bloody minded zeitgeist that seems to try to make you miserable, as a city. Not just to have some desperate denizens.
My choice is not particularly poor and not particularly high crime, although it certainly has both. Binghamton NY has a bad start to begin with, in that it has the insane property taxes and hyper-paranoid bureaucracy that dominate the state but has neither the cosmopolitan zest of NYC nor the beauty of the real upstate scenery. It also has the winter weather of upstate NY but seemingly avoids the pleasant fall of places like the Finger Lakes. Grey, endless grey. But all that is just the state and accident of locale. The city itself takes this ball and chain and welds them to several more, starting with a road system designed to frustrate from start to finish. There is but one straight through road in town, and it manages to combine too many stop lights and too few places to turn left - which should be impossible. Then, in a place that gets many feet of snow and solid ice for months, the entrance ramps to the "highways" (they don't actually go anywhere, intended seemingly to take you around the place rather than to it - the highway builders knew something I didn't) are universally roller-coaster level corkscrews. And not just the ramps - there's a 90 degree bend in the highway itself! Needless to say the words "snow plow" are as unfamiliar in town as "professional employment". I have never seen so many "end of 30mph limit" signs anywhere else. Wouldn't it be more informative, simpler, and cheaper to make, signs that told us what the new speed limit is?? And no you can't know by the road type - the fully divided exit-less four lane exiting town has a 35mph stretch for no plausible reason. Every road is not just pothole ridden - you can see and avoid those too easily. They are also surfaced in a bizarre ripple profile that literally has an unsuspecting car bottoming out and then leaving the ground with no warning.
House hunting should be easy in a depressed market and lackluster local economy. Unless that is you want absurd luxuries like sewers, municipal water, gas heat and - holy of holies that is nigh unattainable - central AC. Then you are stuck in one of the two or three newer developments in town - all of which are in floodplains in a place where we had two century-level floods in the brief time I lived there. When you do find a house, surely it's simple enough to get power to that gas and AC you finally found with a phone call like everywhere else, maybe even on-line? Nope - in person only, and with no hours outside 9-4
People on DU often bemoan chain stores and pine for mom and pop alternatives. Binghamton should at least make them happy. That is if they like their mom and pop bar restaurants - not dives mind you, nicer sports bar places - with not just no doors on the bathroom stalls but no dividers beyond 8" of projecting tiles that measures 2' top to bottom. Or if they are fine with no food choices beyond fish fries, pizza and marinated chicken (the local "delicacy" . Even Applebees starts to look great after a while. You'd think that at least the absence of recent construction and chain dominance would at least make it charming and eclectic. Nope - endless streets of identical dilapidated featureless square houses converted into apartments, and moribund unimaginative retail clustrered into strip malls guess where - on that no-left turn stoplight nest of course.
Despite being for many years the hub of a massive conglomerate like IBM, Cultural opportunities are limited to a seventh-tier opera company that puts on four student shows a year, golf, and........no that's it. Every single person you meet grew up there, and every single one bemoans the lack of good-paying professional jobs - so guess which demographic left and which one is left? And what conversation does that leave possible but about drunk Jack who was in Mrs. Pollini's class's latest drunken session? If you like parochial ill-educated insular white-bread cliqueism, Binghamton's for you.
But look on the bright side - it's only a bit over an hour to the big city........ of Syracuse. If on the other hand you want to go somewhere where the word ponounced "tie" occasionally has an H in it, it's 200 miles.
Maybe not the very worst, but it has to be worst college town. So flat, so ugly, so nothing to do.
all time worst? probably Al Hufuf, some podunk town in Saudi Arabia that's been there for 1000 years. 115 degrees with everyone using their air conditioning at eye level to dump out their heat -- which raises the ambient street temperature to something between 125+ to Hell. has about the charm of the worst imaginings of a podunk highly religious hellhole in america, and yes i've been through most of the states in the usa, except the executions are "delightful" public affairs. and the sanitation in the public bathrooms leaves every single vision of a bad bathroom you have in your mind completely and totally overshadowed (i'll leave you with the tidbit of 'there were clumps of shit dangling and dripping off of everything, including the ceiling').
but there's worse towns in SA i've heard, never been to them mercifully.
only recently? portside Callao, Peru. rough place. see all those pics of Camden or Detroit with boarded up houses? yeah, cut half of those buildings in half, just blow the roofs off completely, throw huge piles of trash in the streets, add feral dogs everywhere eating that trash or 'meat substances' in the street, dust, etc. and then add large groups of idle young men glowering with the rare roving policia to harass the 'hornets nest'. and those are the pleasantly underpopulated areas, not the seeming crowded alleyways filled with commerce.
all y'all are sheltered. i look forward to visiting Lagos, Nigeria once, perhaps in a steel cage or hamster bubble. from what i've heard it makes my two entries seem like a vacation!
Disneyworld landscape of air-conditioned Republican values, gated McMansions, SUVs with reflective black windows, and this billboard:
