Top Ten Worst Places to Live (in Fiction)
Let’s face it—finding a decent place to live these days is a nightmare. You’ve got to factor in crime rates, taxes, school systems, secret government labs, portals to hell, etc. And if you’ve got kids? Forget about it. Real estate is hard enough in the real world. In fiction? It’s practically a death sentence. Here are ten places you’ll want to steer far, far away from.
Honorable Mentions:
Raccoon City, PA; Amity Island, MA; Haven, ME; Forks, WA; New New York, NY; Hill Valley, CA; Castle Rock/Derry, ME
10. Eureka, Oregon
Type: Small Town
Crime Rates: Petty
Schools: Nationally ranked
Public Health/Safety: Dubious
Diversity: Average
Weirdness: Weekly
Eureka looks like the perfect small town—Main Street charm, friendly neighbors, cozy parks. But lift the curtain, and you’ll find a government-sanctioned science lab town founded by Truman-era physicists with names like Einstein and Oppenheimer. Today, it’s home to brilliant but absent-minded scientists who cause weekly disasters involving rogue AI, nanobots, unstable wormholes, and once, a spatial anomaly that made everyone’s pants vanish. (Okay, not really. But close.)
The town is essentially run by Global Dynamics, a tech-military megacorp with Pentagon clearance and no concept of safety protocols. Sure, the schools are excellent—if you want your child accidentally turned into a subatomic particle during Show-and-Tell.
Recommendation: Unless you enjoy the constant thrill of being liquified by sentient goo, steer clear.
9. Bayside, California (and formerly, Indiana?)
Type: Suburb
Crime Rates: Mostly teenage
Schools: Laughable
Public Health/Safety: Questionable
Diversity: Tokenism
Weirdness: Frequent
Bayside has a school system run like a sitcom. The principal is a needy man-child, the teachers are cardboard cutouts, and tests are optional if you’re charming enough. Disciplinary standards are non-existent. Fashion, on the other hand, is policed with ruthless consistency.
But beneath the poppy synth soundtrack lies a chilling truth: people vanish here. Teachers. Students. Entire families. The town once struck oil—and then forgot about it. A teen invented an AI robot—nobody cared. A pop girl group achieved national fame—poof, erased from memory. The worst offender is Zack Morris, a teenage trickster god with the ability to freeze time and gaslight an entire town into believing they live in California, not Indiana.
Recommendation: Avoid at all costs unless you're cool with being memory-wiped by a sociopathic teen in acid-washed jeans.
8. London, England
Type: City
Crime Rates: Victorian and modern levels of murder
Schools: Average
Public Health/Safety: Spotty
Diversity: British
Weirdness: Especially around Christmas
London has always had problems—crime, class struggles, Martian invasions—but the city is a minefield of magic, monsters, and mayhem. Victorian ghosts harass the wealthy at Christmas. Chimney-sweep gangs run rampant. Magical nannies gaslight children. And then there’s the time an entire school of wizards just casually blew up half the Underground.
Alien invasions are weirdly common, with most being handled by shady government agencies—or a man in a blue box with a fondness for scarves. Landmarks are often leveled. Residents don’t even flinch anymore.
Recommendation: If you must live here, avoid landmarks, stay indoors at Christmas, and never follow a woman with an umbrella into the sky.
7. Springfield, ???
Type: City
Crime Rates: Cartoonish but constant
Schools: Legally classified as “buildings”
Public Health/Safety: Toxic
Diversity: Yellow
Weirdness: Daily
Springfield exists in a paradoxical state—it borders everything and nothing. It’s plagued by natural disasters, industrial accidents, mutant fish, and a tire fire that’s been burning since the Reagan administration.
The school system is an OSHA violation with hall passes. The nuclear power plant is run by a literal cartoon villain, and the lake is so polluted it dissolves comets. The only consistently competent figure in the town is a ten-year-old girl with a saxophone.
Recommendation: Unless you’ve developed a resistance to radiation and nonsense, best to stay away—especially after season 9.
6. South Park, Colorado
Type: Small Town
Crime Rates: Average, but surreal
Schools: Chaotic
Public Health/Safety: Uninsured
Diversity: Token, literally
Weirdness: From petty to apocalyptic
South Park is cursed with plot relevance. National crises, religious scandals, alien invasions, and war crimes all seem to pass through this sleepy mountain town—and usually end in death. One kid dies so often it’s basically a running joke. The adults are violent, panicky, and generally useless. The kids are occasionally wiser, but also sociopathic.
Reality bends to whatever’s trending. Climate change? Literal monsters. Cancel culture? Actual demons. Don’t even ask about Eric Cartman.
Recommendation: Children under 10 have a slightly lower death rate, unless they wear orange. Then you’re doomed.
5. Angel Grove, California
Type: Suburb
Crime Rates: Giant monster-related
Schools: Okay
Public Health/Safety: Mech-fight adjacent
Diversity: 90s quota-friendly
Weirdness: Kaiju-level
Angel Grove is ground zero for weekly kaiju battles. Every other Wednesday, a giant rubber-suited monster rises from the sea, wrecks a few buildings, gets vaporized, and then comes back Godzilla-sized. The local teens (with attitude) handle the situation via choreographed martial arts and combining robot dinosaurs. The result: citywide destruction and unexplained fatalities no one ever talks about.
Recommendation: Avoid. When even space colonization is a more appealing option than your commute, it's time to pack up.
4. New York, New York
Type: Megacity
Crime Rates: Supervillainic
Schools: Overcrowded
Public Health/Safety: 1980s-tier
Diversity: High
Weirdness: Mostly in Manhattan
Fictional NYC is a non-stop disaster reel. It’s been wrecked by aliens, demons, kaiju, Will Smith, and JJ Abrams. Day-to-day life involves dodging muggers, mutants, ninjas, and whatever Spider-Man accidentally destroys during his morning swing.
While the subway's usually reliable, it’s also home to sewer-dwelling turtles, radioactive slime, and the occasional ghost invasion. The city's residents have adapted by developing a thousand-yard stare and a refusal to look up during UFO attacks.
Recommendation: Only move here if you enjoy chaos and overpriced bagels.
3. Gotham City, New Jersey
Type: Urban Hellscape
Crime Rates: Arkham-level
Schools: Barely functional
Public Health/Safety: Batman-reliant
Diversity: Criminally insane
Weirdness: Psychological
Gotham is America’s leading exporter of brooding antiheroes and clown-based terrorism. The city is perpetually cloaked in shadows and crime. At one point it suffered a massive earthquake and was just… abandoned. For months. Half the population was lost, and the rest probably turned into henchmen.
Supervillains run rampant. The Joker, a known mass murderer, escapes weekly. The cops are corrupt, the mayor's a puppet, and the one billionaire trying to help spends most of his time punching mentally ill people.
Recommendation: Move to Metropolis instead. At least Superman’s destruction is accidental.
2. Sunnydale, California
Type: Small Town
Crime Rates: Demonic
Schools: Cursed
Public Health/Safety: Hellmouth-adjacent
Diversity: Eh
Weirdness: Nightly
Sunnydale has all the signs of a normal town—except for the 12 cemeteries, frequent student deaths, and a booming magic shop economy. Built atop a literal Hellmouth, Sunnydale is a vortex of vampires, witches, and weekly apocalypses.
Between '97 and '02, the town lost over 5,000 residents. And this wasn’t to gentrification. High school is a blood sport. The mayor turned into a demon snake. The principal was eaten. Twice.
Recommendation: Do not rebuild. Let it sink into the Earth like it always wanted to.
1. Cabot Cove, Maine
Type: Quaint Fishing Village
Crime Rates: Statistically impossible
Schools: Average
Public Health/Safety: Actively homicidal
Diversity: White as chowder
Weirdness: Low-key murder cult
Cabot Cove has a murder rate that would make cartel bosses blush. In just over a decade, 8% of the town’s population was murdered—by other residents. Not drifters. Not cults. Regular folks. The police are so incompetent they routinely jail the wrong person, only to be corrected by a crime novelist. That’s right—Jessica Fletcher is the only functioning law enforcement in town.
Some theorize the town has developed a murder-based culture where every dispute ends in stabbing. It’s like Midsommar meets Golden Girls.
Recommendation: Avoid Maine entirely, but especially Cabot Cove. If Jessica Fletcher ever dies, the murder rate will go exponential.