Transcription
Quick, name the fastest-growing states in the country. Florida, Texas, Colorado. Yes, yes, yes. But would you guess North Carolina? It's true. Due to a moderate climate, a relatively low cost of living, and tons of jobs in many areas, the state is booming, fella. Lots of people are thinking about moving here or already have moved here. If you're one of them, places like the Raleigh metro area, in Charlotte, and places along the coast are great picks, although jobs near the coast are very limited. But there are lots of places in the state where you should not move. That's what we're going to talk about today.
North Carolina is a great state, but just like any other place, it's going to have problems with poverty and crime and drugs. A lot of the places that are troubled the most share similar characteristics: ghetto, welfare, shootings, and they're just not good places to raise families, nor are they great places to retire. Ten of those are what we're going to discuss in this video. Let's begin. Damn, this was filmed ages ago. We're not going to be driving through the scenic places where people are all smiles and where folks are headed for a sense of adventure, unless you count scoring drugs and getting robbed adventurous. No, we're going to the bad places.
Places like Durham. Now Durham used to be super bad back in the 90s. Things were rough here, like many of the larger inner cities in America. Crack cocaine surged here, which brought lots of drug-related violence. Things were so bad here that there are still a hundred unsolved murders from that decade alone. Today, Durham's improved crime-wise, but it's still really bad here, especially more recently. Cops say an uptick in guns on the streets and street gangs have resulted in shootings, murders, and assaults. 190 people got shot here last year. Its police chief says any more cops on the streets, but the city council keeps voting that down. If you compare Durham's crime to the rest of the state, it's twice as bad here. There's bad areas all over town where things are still really rough, and the racial and economic division here means the new, relatively wealthy tech nerds that are showing up don't mingle with the old-school poverty-stricken Durhamites who've been here forever. Of course, Durham's put a lot of effort into fixing itself up. Downtown used to be a ghost town, but now it's booming and being gentrified all over, but there's still a vibe here that still lingers. It's almost like you can't scrub the history of depression out of the brick.
Way down in the southern part of the state, where routes 74 and 701 meet in Columbus County, is the teeny tiny little community of Whiteville. The population here is only 5,400 people, but it's the most dangerous place in the state, according to the FBI. People have a one in 10 chance of being the victim of a property crime, which is just off the charts high. Like you don't find much higher property crime rates in the whole country. What is going on in Whiteville? Folks in town say it's horrible and there's nothing to do here but drugs and raw people. Outside of working for the government, there aren't any jobs that pay more than minimum wage. For an hour in every direction, it's mostly fast food and farmland way out here, and a third of people out here live in poverty. As one long-time resident put it, "It's a great town for late-night high-stakes gambling, cheap hookers, and gun-running." That's not nice. Now they're trying to fix things up here in Whiteville. Downtown projects have had mixed success, as grants have helped small businesses open up and some remodeling has been done, though hurricanes have set back plans. This struggling community is up completely, but anything is better than the empty storefronts which have plagued this community for a long time. All of this gets you a home for eighty-nine thousand dollars, the fifth lowest home prices in the state. If you're from out of town, you might be like, "Yeah, cheap small-town living." No, don't move there.
Like most of America, smallish rural communities in North Carolina struggle with drugs. Albemarle, a town about 45 minutes outside of the Charlotte metro area, is located in Stanley County, and Stanley County has the highest drug overdose rate in the state. Historically, smaller, impoverished communities like Albemarle have struggled to contain drug use because of a lack of resources. I mean, when they arrested the head honcho drug dealer here not too long ago, he got out on bond and was dealing the next day. This is also the fourth most dangerous place in the state, where you have a 1 in 16 chance of being attacked or robbed every year. A quarter of the community lives in poverty, and the number of folks out of work here is three times higher than the national average. Crime gets an F, employment gets an F, housing gets a D, and schools get a D minus. Not a place you want to live in, indeed. Average home price: 132 thousand dollars.
Here's one for far cheaper than that, not too far away, only about 30 miles north, is Salisbury, up in Rowan County. It's halfway between Charlotte and Winston-Salem. Think Lexington, but a little bit worse, if you can believe it. There's about 33,000 people here, many of them are in danger. They call this place Shotsberry for a reason. It ranks 10th in the state for crime rates. Salisbury is a poster child for medium-sized, challenged communities in this state: high poverty, extremely high violence, regular gang violence, no mountains, no beach, an overweight population, lots of drugs, drunks, and very little culture. On a bright note, there are a few big companies with Salisbury ties. Soft drink company Cheerwine is headquartered here. This is also home to regional budget supermarket chain Food Lion. Rack Room Shoes, a budget shoe outlet, was founded here too. But because it's centrally located, home prices are going up by 11% a year here. Why? Ask folks buying the homes up. But it's bad news for people trying to rent here.
We have a tie: Rocky Mount and High Point. They are both struggling in many ways. Rocky Mount is kind of a Raleigh suburb. They call it Murder Mount, locals do, anyways. It's the same kind of thing we've heard here before: high crime, drug use, nothing to do. They do have a Target here, though, which makes it somewhat tolerable for moms. The schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Even the Food Lions have security guards at the door. What is going on in Rocky Mount? But the somewhat high poverty levels are no excuse. There are plenty of blue-collar jobs here. Just clean up the violent crime and create things for families to do, and it wouldn't be so bad here. You don't want to be in the wrong part of High Point after the sun goes down, either. This city is also a pretty dangerous place where shootings happen all the time. Local news reported High Point is the 25th deadliest city in the whole country, with a murder rate of 16 per 100,000 people. Apparently, there are more guns on the street now than ever before, at least according to one city official. Like a lot of places on this list, it's a segregated town where the black community lives in one part and the white folks live in another. The downtown area doesn't really have much going on, but the annual furniture market brings in 100,000 people from all over the country, so at least there's that. It's too bad a lot of the furniture companies have shut down here, though, due to cheap overseas alternatives. But you can always commute into nearby Greensboro or Winston-Salem for a job, but that's 30 minutes away, and then you have to come home to High Point every day.
That brings us to Winston-Salem. Now this city of nearly 250,000 people is the fifth biggest in the state and well known across the country for its history in tobacco manufacturing. R.J. Reynolds was here, and this is where they made Camel cigarettes, as well as Winston, Salem, and Doral. But the number of people employed in cigarette manufacturing has plummeted from thirty thousand to three thousand. Sure, there are a lot of good jobs here, and it's growing, and they're gentrifying the place, but twenty percent of the community here lives in poverty, and there are really large parts of town that are completely run down where crime and drugs have taken hold. 50,000 people in this city live in conditions that most would consider a ghetto. For perspective, there's only 21 cities in this whole state with more than 50,000 people. Last year marked Winston's deadliest in the last 25 years, and crime has increased here for five years in a row. Winston's trying hard to gentrify itself, and people are moving in. There are just so many bad spots that they outweigh most of the positive aspects of living here. And like Durham, there's a dingy vibe that lingers that you can't really erase, no matter how much gentrifying you do.
Now a lot of people in North Carolina haven't heard of Laurinburg, located near the South Carolina border in Scotland County. The LBG, the Burg. A whopping one-third of this community of sixteen thousand people lives at or below the poverty line, and it's super cheap to live here too, meaning it's a very poor place with little opportunity. It's really just churches and fast-food outlets. That's one reason why this city loses more than 100 people every year. 15% of the population here is out of work, and most of them chronically. It's also the fifth most violent place in the state, and it has the second highest burglary rate in the state too. Like every single day here, there's a burglary. For such a tiny community, that's just so sad. I mean, everybody knows everybody here, and they just clearly don't give a crap about each other. The school taxes are high, but they're still closing schools down here. The county can't afford to build new ones, or they say they can't. A home is 76,000, which is bottom of the barrel for this state. Here's one for a lot less again. Small-town North Carolina folks, you get what you pay for. But hey, Laurinburg, at least you don't have some weird leg sculpture like they do in Henderson, which is also a bad place to live in the state. Look at that sculpture. What is that?
Third on our list is the city of Fayetteville, or Vietnam, as they call it. That's because this is the 10th most dangerous place in the whole state and by far the biggest city with the highest rate of violence in North Carolina. Skybolt Road has all sorts of drama going on. There's a reason the Walmart Supercenter on Skybolt closes its doors at 11. There's even a rumor they tell soldiers not to go there after dark. Twenty percent, or more than forty thousand people here, are chronically unemployed and living in poverty. There are far more cons than pros living in Fayetteville. The schools are underfunded, there are limited jobs here, and there's lots of homelessness. Entertainment-wise, it's not small-town life, but for a city of 200,000 people, there's not a lot to do except hang out in a small area along the historic district on Hay Street. There's a lot of homeless and drug dealers down there too, and recently they had ranked 15th highest in the nation for its STD rate. That sucks. Don't laugh, Spring Lake, you're not much better. One somewhat reputable website said Fayetteville's the worst city in the U.S. for finding jobs. Another ranking put Fayetteville as one of the 10 worst places to raise a family. And this is despite being a big military town.
Now we've come to our second worst place to live in the state. Lumberton is another struggling community along the South Carolina border. It's home to 20,000 people in Robeson County. They too are losing people every year, folks who want a better life. Crime in Lumberton's terrible. It's so bad that the city actually stopped reporting its yearly crime rates to the FBI. You can see here, prime numbers are missing. Remember, it's called Robeson County. There's a lot of robberies. Like many other places on this list, much of the community is on government assistance. 40% of Lumberton lives in poverty.
Where's the worst place to live in North Carolina? It's Kinston, way out in the middle of Lenoir County, surrounded by cotton, tobacco, corn, and bean fields. Kinston's population is 20,000 and dropping by the week. Two neighborhoods in Kinston ranked as the worst neighborhoods in the whole state. They're both on the city's east side. This report was based on poverty, blight, and jobless rates. The report says there are some serious issues here that need to be addressed. I'm not saying gangs created the drug problem, but they do come hand in hand. The guns are coming from somewhere, and the only time the police usually catch somebody with a gun is after they've shot somebody. The report also points out that these rundown areas should just be brought down. So I thought, since I live in North Carolina, I should probably go see Kinston firsthand and check out what the worst city in the state looks like up close. Little Kinston has the third highest rate of folks out of work in the whole state and is pretty much the most dangerous place in the state per capita too. The crime index here is a one, that's out of a hundred, meaning it's safer than one percent of all U.S. cities. That's bad. Like nearly four times higher than the national average. Bad. Where people here have a one in 13 chance of being the victim of a crime every year. That's like every third house on every block. Folks, you can buy a home here for a hundred thousand dollars on average, but this one's only twenty-eight thousand dollars. I bet if you offered them 10 grand, they'd take your call. They call it a good rental property. I bet they do. I'll put the entire segment of the worst neighborhood in North Carolina in an upcoming video.
All right, so that's pretty much the worst places you could live in North Carolina. Now I know places like Durham and Fayetteville and Winston-Salem are working hard to improve their communities and bring in jobs, and they're not doing a bad job, but there are large parts of those cities that are ghetto and run down and dangerous. And the other places we talked about are all out in the sticks. They're all places that are poor and dangerous and, well, there's nothing to do. There's a lot of other places I could have talked about too, places like Goldsboro and Greensboro and Rockingham and Henderson. Those places are also pretty bad places to go. As people continue to move to this state, they're going to places in the Raleigh metro area, in the Charlotte metro area, and along the coast because those places are safe and not dangerous. Trust me, if you're going to move to the state, don't move to the areas I just talked about. Avoid them. You'll thank me later. Carolina is a state where there's a lot of stuff to do. Carolina is a great place. There's a lot of stuff for you if you move here. Don't go to the places that are bad, 'cause you won't be happy. You know, you certainly won't. You can find all the fun and the jobs and the areas where it's safe and good. [Music] Hey guys, if you learned something new about America or what it's like to live in America, great. You should think about subscribing and turning on your notifications. You can also click one of these videos or playlists for more. You can also now buy my songs on iTunes and other formats. Click the link in the description. Thanks for watching, and remember, while we all might have different views, we should all be nice to each other and try to make the U.S. a better place in a positive way. This is Sage Nyx Manager. This has been a Corner House Entertainment production.