Property Management Nation

Time and again, all you see are lists of how great places are.  Live here, buy there, the biggest places, the tallest places.  Enough already!  Every city from the smallest village to the largest metropolis has its pros and cons.  We already know plenty about why these cities are great, now let’s take look at why they also can suck.

Los Angeles

Try this.  Enter a bar in Anytown, USA and shout that, “Anytown, USA is a big steaming pile of manure!”  A few minutes later, you’ll likely wake up outside with a big black eye.  Try that trick in LA, however,  and you’ll likely be cheered and bought a drink.  LA is packed with irony the way Snickers bars are packed with peanuts.  Why?  Because people move to LA and complain it sucks, when it is they who are making it suck in the first place.  The traffic?  The cost of living?  The difficulty of achieving their fragile Hollywood dreams?  All  caused by the sheer glut of people who arrive in LA everyday.  LA is an enormous city packed with people who simply don’t want to be there.  They showed up for their Hollywood dreams, failed, and now they’re bitter but won’t go home.  Then, we as tourists show up and wonder why the locals all have an attitude.  And that’s just it, they’re not locals.  If you’re looking for the laid back California attitude, try going somewhere where you’ll actually find Californians.

New York City

NY City via Flickr

New York’s problem is quite simple.  They believe their own BS.  New York is the girl who’s an 8 hanging out with a bunch of 3’s, so she’s convinced herself she’s a 10.  What are we talking about?  New York markets itself as the biggest, greatest, most wonderful place on Earth, just like dozens of other cities across the globe.  The only difference is New Yorkers actually believe it.  We’ve all heard it, that off-putting, good god make it stop New York City, New Yorker pride.  We get it.  New York is awesome.  But that is also why it so tragically sucks.  The natives take a great city then ruin it by setting tourists’ expectations so high they can’t help but be at least a little disappointed.  The Big Apple?  New York City isn’t big.  It has an enormous amount of people, and it’s incredibly tall.  But geographically speaking, it’s a postage stamp.  Broadway?  Wall Street?  Madison Avenue?  Stare at your map for a few seconds and you’ll cruise right past them.  New York is considered huge, because its neighbors are so small.  It’ only considered fast paced because the rest of the east coast is so incredibly laid-back slow, especially the south.  New York City is a nice normal metropolis just like any other big city.  And don’t let the New Yorkers tell you otherwise.

Seattle

Seattle via the SeaFarer on FLickr

Think San Francisco is smug?  Boy are you in for a shock.  Head on north and give the Pacific Northwest a try with Seattle as its smirking smug-thumping heart.  The pacific Northwest is infested.  “With what?” you ask.  Wimpy Californians.  That’s right.  People who find the land of endless summer too hard to bear all inevitably flee for the evergreen forests of the pacific northwest.  Now note, we’re not saying all Californians are wimps, just that ones who are and are old enough to move can probably now be found in Seattle.  And boy, are they smug about it.  It’s a shell they’ve formed.  “We’re not wimps!  We’re enlightened!  Why would anyone live anywhere else?”  Well, maybe because we like to drive over 40mph on the freeway and not have water bottles thrown at our hoods when we whisk past at an apparently insane 65mph.  And take heed fellow travelers.  When you see a merge sign in Seattle, move over.  It doesn’t matter if there’s two miles until the pinch-point.  Using that open lane is considered opportunistic and therefore rude.  Forget the fact that highway designers have outright stated that you’re supposed to drive all the way to the pinch-point and by not doing so you create needless traffic.  Los Angeles traffic comes about, because there are too many people on the road.  Seattle traffic exists, because there is no match for the self-satisfaction one can achieve by purposefully inconveniencing oneself to prove they’re “superior”.  But hey, at least there are plenty of pretty trees to stare at while you’re needlessly sitting in traffic.

The Mid-West

Cornfields in the Midwest via flick and James Jordan

Yep, the fly over states, and we’re just going to clump them all together.  Why?  Because we know that’ll drive them crazy.  But really, the reason to clump them together is because they all suck for the same reason.  If LA is full of bitter people, New York full of itself, and Seattle populated with wimps, then the Midwest is the place with the minority complex.  Any time there’s an election, you’ll hear the Midwest refer to itself as the “Heart of America”.  The real America, where real Americans live.  Not those loonies on the coasts.  Well, want to know what else those loonies are?  They’re the vast majority of the US population.  Over half of the people in the Unites States live within 50 miles of the coast, let alone the amount who live in the rest of those states.  Ironically, when it comes to the United States, the fringe can be found in the middle.  But don’t let the mid-westerners hear that, or you’ll have to listen to how much safer and better the mid-west is, how nothing bad ever happens there.  Want to know why nothing bad ever happens in the mid-west?  Because nothing happens there at all.  It’s safe and it’s “nice”, because it’s boring.  Good deal.  No wonder everyone flocks to the coasts.

No place is perfect.  With that in mind, nearly every place on Earth could make it on this list.  We’ve been to LA, NYC, Seattle, and Mid-West, and admittedly, we’d happily go back.  There are some great things about these cities/areas, but sometimes it’s fun to just dive in and talk about why things also suck.