According to RoadSnacks Website, they used data science to determine which Tar Heel cities are the real pits. After analyzing 129 of the Tar Heel State’s most populous cities, they came up with this list as the 10 worst places to live in the state:
- Wadesboro (Photos)
- Selma (Photos)
- Henderson (Photos)
- Lumberton
- Lexington (Photos)
- Eden
- Laurinburg (Photos)
- Dunn (Photos)
- Long View
- Marion (Photos)
Here is what RoadSnacks Website says about it.
What? Where are these places you wonder? And before you get all riled up and say we’re picking on small town America, that’s not the case. We understand there’s a lot of good in every place.
However, according to data (which doesn’t measure things like beauty and ‘friendly people’), there are far better options in the state for making a place home.
How we determined the worst places to live in North Carolina for 2018
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 insurance
The 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 5,100 people were considered — leaving 129 cities.
We then ranked each city from 1 to 129 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 North Carolina — Wadesboro. Read on for a detailed look at the 10 worst cities in North Carolina.
This list is a scientific analysis based on real data and is completely unbiased.
Click here to see a breakdown of each city and why they are the worst places to live in NC.