Transcript
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The speaker introduces the video’s premise: touring the worst neighborhoods he has ever visited and explaining why rundown areas attract so much attention. He sets up his view that the Northeast contains many of the bleakest places before beginning the first location.
i've seen a lot of america so far i haven't been to every corner of this fine country but i've seen the highlights or most of them it's quite a great place the united states is for the most partbut there are some really terrible areas in this nation as we all know and you people of youtube want to see them it's pretty clear whenever i upload a nice peaceful drive through a nice part of the countrythe clicks are yeah but when i drive through a bad neighborhood people on youtube are like i want to see that why is that why do we all want to see run down poor neighborhoods in this video i'mgoing to run through the worst ghetto hoods i've ever visited these are all places that are run down and neglected the crime is really high where people are poor now in my opinion the worst hoods are all in
the northeast sure the west coast has run down areas but the west coast is much more new so the hoods don't have that gritty grimy run down look midwest hoods look pretty bad and southern hoods have large areaswhere there are clearly a lot of issues too but it's the northeast where things look the worst we'll see that shortly but enough of all the intro stuff let's get down to it these are the worst hoods i'veever seen and some of the worst ghettos in the usa we're going to begin in the south in the worst neighborhood in atlanta which i shot in january of 2021.the area i went to is here located just inside the beltline only a short drive from downtown atlanta's been gentrifying fast this is one of the few pockets that still remain this bad so close to downtown odds are
one day these homes won't be here at all so i was lucky to see it the neighborhoods i drove through were called vine city and washington park when i filmed this neighborhood it wasn't a normal trip when ijust kind of lock up into some hood and drive around and try to go unnoticed no way boy this was atlanta this is where the big boys play so i got up as early as possible and i leftdowntown and drove the less than two miles into this area on atlanta's north side that's well known for gang-banging shootings stabbings and everything else you've heard of here's the most dangerous section of atlanta at dawn before they allgot
up
This chapter covers a dangerous pocket of Atlanta and then shifts to Detroit’s northwest side. Atlanta is presented as a high-crime area near downtown, while Detroit is described as a largely erased, nature-reclaimed landscape of gutted homes and abandoned blocks.
now we're going to go to the midwest for the first time i'm going to show you a part of detroit that i visited in december of 2019.the neighborhood we're going to look at is here in the northwest goldberg neighborhood of detroit that's only two miles from downtown of course detroit's well known for being one of the worst places in the nation for crime andpoverty and slums and the auto industry left town decades ago and that was a big part for this city's demise detroit lost more than a million people over the last 70 years and its population is now 60 percentsmaller than it was at its peak but detroit's changed a lot the neighborhood i saw here was mostly just erased block after block were large areas where homes were raised and the city was essentially turning parts of itscity back to nature it's an urban prairie the homes left are mostly gutted or have some sort of fire damage a lot of the alleys look like hiking trails now this neighborhood wasn't very dangerous at least i didn't
see any people lingering and never felt threatened it wasn't the same type of ghetto we're gonna see on this rundown tour it was however a very unique one and a terrible place to
live
so
the eighth worst ghetto i've ever seen is just a few blocks south of montgomery the capital of alabama this particular pocket of town is only a two minute drive south of downtown in a neighborhood called washington park iwent there in january and the cold gray skies and the light rain created a gloom over this part of town which made it look even more dreadful now montgomery isn't a very dangerous place overall it's about average crimewiseand it ranks as one of the safest of alabama's big cities but down here has shootings and robberies and it looks like it's been completely forgotten about this neighborhood is beyond repair and it's well known for shootings androbberies it kind of looks like it's been mostly forgotten about the poverty in the state is beyond belief this is the fifth poorest state in the country in montgomery proper about one in five people lives below the poverty
line but in this part of town it's likely closer to 80 percent i found montgomery to be a very sad place and the poverty seems generational as i drove around this neighborhood though i did see people smiling ontheir porches it's like for some people in the south or at least this part of montgomery poverty isn't what defines
them
you
foreign
The speaker moves through McKeesport, East St. Louis, and Gary, showing how factory loss and population decline have hollowed out entire communities. He emphasizes that these places are not just isolated bad blocks, but widespread urban decay across whole towns.
now we're down to south and we're going to visit the northeast for the first time we're going to spend a lot of time looking at hoods in the northeast for the rest of this video this is mckeesport apittsburgh suburb where there's about 20 000 people and dropping it's about 15 minutes from downtown pittsburgh actually a lot of pittsburgh suburbs look like this it's alarming and frankly kind of makes you shake your head when you realizehow many run down many of our former great cities have become mckeesport's main drag is filled with abandoned run-down businesses and its neighboring streets are crumbled homes in one section mckeesport have all been abandoned again this is partof the rust belt where factories left a long time ago and the people left to go where the jobs are and whoever is left in parts of mckeesport or those people holding on those who are too poor or
too stubborn to move away i was actually really blown away to see entire neighborhoods look like this mckeesport looks like something you'd see in a dystopian video game or a scene from a war movie
you
the next two worst ghettos i've ever seen are both in the midwest we're going to begin here in east st louis illinois in an area that was actually pretty large i pulled into east st louis on a weekdayin december of 2019.i can't imagine it's changed much since the region had just received several inches of snowfall two days prior but as you can see today the skies are bright the air was crisp and the snowfall made the area appearunusually charming like makeup covering a bruise again a lot of jobs and a huge spike in crime has made this once great place a place where people are fleeing in large numbers crime's atrocious drug use is out ofcontrol and there's no community pride anymore at least the way things looked in mckeesport and in pockets of montgomery and atlanta which we saw earlier it was certain pockets of town that are bad but in east st louis
and in our next worst place it's not just one part of town it was the whole place we're going to see much worse looking ghettos coming up but fewer as vast as east st louis here are some ofthe worst parts of east st louis that i
filmed
now the other midwest city that really stood out is gary indiana which is only about 30 minutes from the south side of chicago again like east st louis it wasn't a particular neighborhood that looked bad and gary thewhole place is a mess downtown gary looks as if it ran out of motivation decades ago but it was the entire sections of town which i drove through which blew me away typically i try to find the worstneighborhood based on crime numbers and poverty levels and everybody wants to see which homes are the most run down but here there wasn't one particular bad part of town it was a whole place what you're seeing here ispretty much what a lot of gary looks like and there's still 76 000 people living here too the rows and rows of slums that you're gonna see are slowly disappearing gary like other struggling communities is slowly being turned
back to nature there were a lot of open fields and wooded areas which looked even more hopeless with the early winter brown tint there really wasn't much of anything in gary that was green people in gary make about15k here it's estimated that four in 10 people lives in poverty and about half the population doesn't have a job at all unsurprisingly homes here cost about fifty thousand dollars on average but in areas like this homes areabout fourteen thousand dollars through a government grant you can actually buy a house here for a dollar but i don't think that many out of towners would be motivated to do that unless they clean this place up alot and that'll likely take a decade or more here's the rest of the worst pockets i saw in gary
indiana
so
Baltimore is presented as a near-perfect example of an inner-city ghetto, with drugs, loitering, and abandonment concentrated in a notorious west-side area. The chapter then shifts to Chester, Pennsylvania, where the speaker is shocked by the city’s widespread vacancy, crime, and economic collapse.
the number four worst ghetto place i've ever seen is back up in the northeast we're actually going to remain up here in the northeast for the rest of this ghetto rundown now when you go to baltimore it smacksyou in the face like you're in baltimore there is no denying you're here when you pull off and make this short trek from the highway into the center of it all baltimore has many many many terrible areas butthe one i focused on was one infamous for being the worst of them all a pocket in this general area here on the west side of town anything west of martin luther king and north and west of pennsylvaniais generally the worst area of baltimore i could find in this hood there aren't any red box machines or atm machines or bike racks there's no water fountains there are no green belts or places to sit and relax
it's liquor stores bars clothing and fast food if you were going to create a ghetto from scratch and follow all the rules baltimore would be a perfect replica it would be challenging to recreate baltimore's run-down desperate inner cityevery corner every building and every person is in its perfect place and perfectly flawed a lot of people were standing around on this sunday morning in march some were looking for drugs and booze some were looking for troublemany were looking for camaraderie the abandonment the trash the almost lawlessness there's nothing quite like it in the country i've ever seen it's the most perfect american ghetto you could ever
create
then towards the end of my trip the gig was up somebody spotted me clearly in the wrong part of town
you know and valerie will be here
that was the one and only time i stopped anywhere in baltimore that wasn't at a red light the top three worst places i've seen so far in my life are all in a very small general area we're goingto begin here in chester pennsylvania which is just about 20 minutes from the outskirts of philadelphia there really wasn't one bad part of town that was the worst in chester i drove through downtown and up and down pocketsthroughout chester it was a cold cloudy and somewhat rainy morning in march of 2021.chester is widely considered the worst place you can live in pennsylvania which is saying a lot considering the number of outright rundown places that exist in this state and as you're going to see on this drive chester's fallingapart it's filled with burned out and vacant homes there's trash everywhere and shuttered businesses this is a crime riddled town where there's no jobs where drug use is rampant and where the schools are in miserable shape it's all
a recipe for disaster and no growth and because of the crime and the poor economy there aren't any major restaurant chains there's no grocery stores or retail chains in chester again just like about every other place on thislist the city has seen a huge loss in jobs however while the population is down tremendously since its peak in 1950 the population loss is kind of slow to a trickle it's like whoever was gonna leave has alreadyleft and now those that remain are just stuck inside a ghetto box to fend for themselves i had heard of chester before but i hadn't seen it before this trip and because it's not so well known i wasactually kind of shocked at how bad this place is and wondered why more people don't talk about this truly terrible
place
oh
yes
victim
oh
The focus turns to Kensington, Philadelphia’s most infamous neighborhood, known for open-air drug markets, homelessness, prostitution, and severe blight. The speaker stresses that the scale of decay and addiction there is hard to believe without seeing it firsthand.
not too far away is philadelphia a city that's run down and where murders and drug use are well documented the city of philadelphia really earns its nickname filthy delphia much of this city except for the western burbs areall falling apart and filled with trash and grime but there's one part of philadelphia that's the worst of the worst that neighborhood is kensington here on the city's northeast side kind of along the delaware river just across thenew jersey state line i was there the day before i was in chester in early march kensington is notorious for rundown buildings crime homelessness drug abuse and abandoned buildings the type of stuff you might see on any givenday in kensington are things you might expect to see in third world countries just a couple years ago this was an uncontrolled community of panhandling drug abuse theft prostitution homelessness trash and murder kensington has also been called the
biggest open-air drug market on the east coast and this part of town is why philadelphia is in the top 10 for drug overdoses in the nation drug users around the world know kensington as the walmart of heroin apparentlythe city's been trying to fix this place up but some say the government is just about forsaken this part of town it's beyond sad and mind-blowing how a place like this can exist in america but words can't reallysay enough about this place you have to see it for yourself here's kensington the worst part of philadelphia and one of the worst places i've ever visited in my
life
this is
86.
so
ah
so
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The final chapter covers Camden, which the speaker describes as the scariest and most intimidating place on the list because of its dense, neglected, and heavily policed streets. He closes with a call for civic action and community pride, arguing that places improve only through hard work and care.
now rarely am i intimidated by a ghetto but the last place on this list and the worst place i've ever seen in person was truly scary it's camden a city of 74 000 people in the south part ofnew jersey just right across the river from kensington i came to camden the day after i had seen kensington it was early in the morning and of course it was raining so i thought that would kind of puta damper on the street crowd making it safer for me to drive through camden's worst pockets undetected but that was not the case all over camden were people milling about in their burned out neighborhoods many of the abandonedhomes had been taken over by squatters there was a police presence every few blocks people just stood around on their porches probably waiting for the rain to stop so they could get back to their street lifestyle but it
was the row after row of just neglected homes that was really astounding and camden's ghettos are all jam-packed together it's constricting and intimidating like you can't look away and everywhere you go it's all the same the long streetsof broken homes and graffiti and trash look like a maze without an escape and the dreary skies and the light rain made the ghetto feel even more ominous you can only imagine what goes on here at night camden'sbeen completely neglected it's burned out it's abandoned and it's left to survive on its own to me it appears the only people who can live here are hardened folks who can stand to live in such a forlorn cornerof new jersey the fact that a place like this exists in our country is a testament to just how out of touch with reality our nation has become camden the crown jewel of all inner city ghettos the flagship
ghetto of all ghettos there are very few places in the united states that have the inner city blight the crime and poverty than camden does it's perhaps america's ugliest facecareful
turn right onto mount ethereum avenue then turn right onto jackson street
hey guys so if anything i just talked about upset you or made you sad or mad well then do something about it call your local leaders and demand change chip in and help those in need make your communitybetter because communities don't get better without hard work and determination america is a great place it just needs some more love and pride this is sage nyx manager this has been a corner house entertainment production