The 10 Worst Cities to Call Home in California

I’m not going to be the one to call any part of California ‘The Worst’, I’ll leave that to the professionals.

But we do have an obsession with the lists that call out the worst in cities, food, and people. It’s like reality TV, we don’t want to see the best - we want to see the crazy people and the trainwreck situations.

The 10 Worst Cities in the Entire State of California

We grabbed data from RoadSnacks, which used numbers from the American Community Survey and the FBI Uniform Crime Report to find the bad info. They used stats from Saturday Night Science to determine the good things that people like and then used the Survey and Crime Report to find out which cities had the least amount of good things.

With that info, they came up with this list of the Worst Cities in California. Interestingly, most of them are in the southern part of the state.

What Makes These the Worst Cities in The Golden State

Now, there are some places in California that have a reputation as dangerous, dirty, scary, or poor but those aren’t the only factors that make a city the worst. Some cities are too far away from other cities, have high housing costs, or the people aren’t friendly.

The 10 cities listed above may not be horrible places, they just didn’t have enough of the good attributes we looked for when making the list. I’ll admit: I was surprised to not see Oakland or Stockton on the list.

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You could also say that some of the bigger and more popular cities like LA, San Francisco, and San Diego should be the worst because of how big they are and how many tourists there are in them. Maybe that’s a different list for another day.