Boise, ID is #1?
Here’s what they won’t tell you for fear of being accused as racism or whatever.
1. Boise includes Nampa and Caldwell which have seen increasing amounts of Hispanic gangs and other illegal aliens. One county commissioner once billed Mexico for the additional cost of jailing illegal aliens who had been convicted of various felonies.
2. The area economy is almost all based on services or farming. What few middle-class manufacturing jobs that exist are being moved overseas to places like Korea despite the state having some of the lowest wage rates in the country.
3. People who have been laid off from one of the few decent paying jobs resort to fighting over the low-paying part-time service jobs. I know numerous people who are working two or three separate part-time jobs to survive.
4. Contrary to popular belief, teachers are one of the few groups of people in the area that make a very good salary while their students have some of the poorest test scores in the country.
5. Government cronyism on a local level. Nampa just got rid of a tax-and-spent mayor. Unfortunately, he used his connections to run for and get a county commissioner position. Now the rest of the county can join Nampa as having the highest property taxes in the state.
There was an local article about a year ago calling the area’s “service based economy” a preview of the rest of the country’s economy. Lots of people fighting over a few crappy paying jobs, decreasing middle-class jobs, and a few good paying jobs which go to the boss’s kids.
That’s a rotten shame. I was thinking about Boise for retirement. It seems there’s nowhere safe and decent you can go anymore unless you’re extremely wealthy.
Besides all that, I wonder how much the Section 8 exporting the poor into better neighborhoods has contributed to the decline.