America’s Most Miserable City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 31, 7:30AM EDT

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America’s Most Miserable City — © pawel.gaul / E+ via Getty Images

WalletHub has released its list of the 23 happiest cities. Researchers found that many people have been under stress recently. This should not be a surprise. The COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Inflation has robbed many people of buying power. Despite a low jobless rate, layoffs have begun in many industries. The housing market is in crisis as high interest rates, brought on by the Federal Reserve, continue to punch higher, lowering prices and creating anxiety among buyers. (These are the best and worst states to retire to.)
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The study does show that where people live and work has a significant effect on their happiness. The researchers used several yardsticks: “In order to determine the happiest cities in America, WalletHub compared 182 of the largest cities — including the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state — across three key dimensions: 1) Emotional & Physical Well-Being, 2) Income & Employment and 3) Community & Environment.” Cities were then rated on a scale of 0 to 100.
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Many of the happiest cities were in California. Among the top 10, this included Fremont, San Jose, San Francisco and Irvine. Others were in Vermont: Burlington and South Burlington. Fremont has a score of 76.1. The highest by far.

Notable among the cities on the list is that they tend to be wealthy and have largely white populations. For example, Scottsdale and Seattle are on the list.
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The other end of the list contains a number of old industrial cities with populations that have declined over the past several decades.

Detroit is at the bottom with a score of 30.60. Huntington, West Virginia, is also near the bottom, as are Cleveland and Memphis.
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Detroit has lost half of its population since 1950 as the large car companies have moved out and shuttered factories. Over 30% of the residents live in poverty. Thousands of homes sit vacant. City services are poor. And, there is no reason to think the situation will ever improve.

Detroit, Mich. (30.60)
Huntington, W.V. (32.83)
Shreveport, La. (33.21)
Cleveland, Ohio (34.16)
Montgomery, Ala. (35.40)
Memphis, Tenn. (35.48)
Augusta, Ga. (36.41)
Jackson, Miss. (37.33)
Columbus, Ga. (37.51)
Gulfport, Miss. (37.82)

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.