California. The American dream. The state where you can get the sun, surf, mountains and deserts. Where dreams are made and movie stars bask in the glory of their own self worth.
Where you have to ration your water. Sit in traffic. Pay too much for your house.
While California is overall, a glorious state, it has some serious, glaring issues, just like most other states. But most of the people reading this live there, and are already aware of this fact, so we won’t dwell on it.
Instead, let’s have some fun and look at only certain areas where things are the absolute worst.
After analyzing all 630 cities with a population over 5,000, we came up with this list as the 10 worst places to live in California:
Desert Hot Springs
Lucerne Valley
Adelanto
Hemet
San Jacinto
Clearlake
Joshua Tree
Mendota
San Bernardino
Hesperia
It looks like San Bernardino (9th worst) actually isn’t as bad as you might think. And, as is the norm when we run these rankings, the largest cities are somewhere in the middle. The best city in California? Foster City, located in the San Francisco area.
Actually, eight of the ten are in southern California, and the other two are in central California, making a case that No Cal is better than So Cal. Not like that was in question in the first place.
Read on below to see how we crunched the numbers and how your town ranked, and check out the abridged chart at the bottom of the post for a complete list of all cities.How do you decide if a place is lousy or not?In order to rank the worst places to live in California, we had to determine what criteria people like or dislike about a place. It isn’t a stretch to assume that people like low crime, solid education, great weather, things to do and a stable economy.So we scraped the internet for those criteria, asked for the opposite of those things, and it spit out the answer. Like magic.How we crunched the numbersWe threw a lot of criteria at this one in order to get the best, most complete results possible. Using FBI crime data, the government census, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Sperling’s Best Places, this is the criteria we used:Population Density (The lower the worse – meaning there isn’t a lot to do)Highest Unemployment Rates
Adjusted Median Income (Median income adjusted for the cost of living)High Housing Vacancy RateEducation (Low expenditures per student and high Student Teacher Ratio)Long Commute TimesHigh CrimeThe Worst WeatherIf you’d like to see the complete list of cities, from worst to best, scroll to the bottom of this post to see the abridged chart.Two additional notes. We use Sperling’s Best Places for our data, which pulls in the numbers from the cited sources. Crime numbers are reported by the city agencies to the FBI, and are measured in the number of crimes per capita.Additionally, ‘vacant homes’ includes foreclosed or unoccupied homes, and includes vacation homes that aren’t used for most of the year.