Already facing a tide of outmigration, Alaska today finds its largest city pegged among the top five of the “30 Worst Places to Live in the United States.”

So much for the old idea of selling Anchorage as a comfortable, civilized, climate-change refuge on the edge of a vast wilderness ripe for recreational exploration.

And to think the listicle posting website Facty ranked Anchorage this low even without a mention of the city’s return to something approaching climate normal with cold, snow and lots of folk complaining about slippery and/or unplowed roads. 

Facty did, however, note the city’s problem with crime. Anchorage residents who’ve witnessed the community’s unwillingness to deal with the miscreants in its sizeable homeless population prone to stealing anything that isn’t locked down will not find this a surprise.

The Facty website does not call them out specifically but does report that “crime is …an issue. Statistics show that Anchorage is safer than only 5 percent of cities in the nation, making it one of the most dangerous places to live in the U.S. Property crimes and motor vehicle thefts make up the majority of crimes.”

Could be worse

Still, Anchorage is not as bad as San Fransisco, number three on the Facty list.

If you think Anchorage has problems, go watch the ABC report on the “brazen” burglars who drove a car through the door of an upscale Dior store in the Bay City a month ago, filled it up with $250,000 in merchandise and drove away.

Retail, smash-and-snatch crime of all sorts has been out of control in the Bay City for several years and this month crime claimed the job of Mayor London Breed, who first won election by campaigning to defund the police.

Politico cited “anger over ‘street chaos”’ and the pandemic for her ouster.

Breed, reporter Dustin Gardiner wrote, “has led the city for over six years as it battled against surges in deaths from drug overdoses, brazen retail theft, widespread homelessness and a decline in population as newly remote workers fanned out to other parts of the state and country.

“The city has started to bounce back from its post-Covid hangover, but it wasn’t enough for voters.”

How exactly the pandemic caused “brazen retail theft” is unclear and “widespread homelessness” was a problem in San Fransisco long before the pandemic. The HomeMoreProject traces that problem back to the 1980s.

Whatever the reasons for these problems, however, Facty rated San Fransisco, once one of the country’s greatest cities, right up on the stinker list. The situation is so bad major retailers have been fleeing the city’s downtown, local media reported at the start of this year. 

After the San Fransisco downtown Old Navy reported its closing in July 2023, NBC described it as “an all too familiar story in downtown San Francisco; another major retailer has become the victim of rampant shoplifting.”

Really bad

The way some San Fransisco residents or former San Fransisco residents make it sound, it’s hard to believe there could be cities in a worse state of deterioration.

But Facty declared Houston even worse and ranked Memphis as the number-one bad place to live.

Memphis has a nation-leading homicide rate, and conditions there are such that Local Memphis reports that Memhisites are following the behavior of Alaskans and leaving.

“In 2010, the U.S. Census showed the Memphis population at 646,889,” reporter Richard Ransom wrote. “Ten years after that, the number of Memphians fell to 633,104.  But the decline in just the past three years, according to census estimates, is eye-opening. The 2023 estimated population now sits at 618,639 – a drop of 14,465. The U.S. Census estimates the city lost 5,200 people in the last year, or 14 people every day.”

Young professional William Woods, 39, told Ransom he left primarily because there were better job opportunities elsewhere but noted the irritating crime problem in the city.

“The thing I don’t miss is the crime,” Woods said. “I’ll say that. For Mother’s Day, I came home to visit my Mom and also hang out with friends. Within the first four hours, I was woken with a car break-in.”

All too many Anchorage residents are likely to find this familiar. The social media website Nextdoor posts an almost daily litany of break-ins, car thefts and suspicious people caught on Ring cameras while they case Anchorage homes.

And often things are worse.

The Anchorage Police Department today warned the citizenry to expect an increased police presence in the University-Medical District of the city after an unexplained shooting there last night that sent one injured person to a nearby hospital.

APD was warning walkers, runners, fat-tired bicyclist, cross-country skiers and dog owners who frequent the parks that sound the University of Alaska and the Providence Medical Center to travel in groups, stay aware of their surroundings, “avoid wearing headphones or getting too absorbed in your phone,” and “consider carrying pepper spray, a personal alarm or other self-defense tools like bear spray.”

Welcome to the battle zone. Sounds a little like Memphis or Houston, which is regularly in the running for the most dangerous state in Texas. Facty, however, in large part put Houston number two worst on its list because of climate problems in the form of increasing storms as the planet warms, and the stagnant air already there.

“The city’s air quality is dismal, with only 41 percent of days classified as ‘good’ in 2021,” Facty said. ” Yet, the local government hasn’t done much to improve things.”

As if there is all that much it can do. There are approximately 400 chemical manufacturing facilities in the Houston area, among them two of the four largest old refiners in the country. Add in heavy traffic and stagnant air, and it’s the perfect storm for air pollution.

Government officials are generally reluctant to shut down businesses, because that costs a community jobs, or restrict traffic, which angers voters. All of which puts Houson in something of a pickle.

Coming in fourth in the Facty rankings, just in front of Anchorage, was Mendota, Calif. with nearly 39 percent of the population reported to be living below the poverty level, a high rate of unemployment despite that, and a struggling school system.

Mendota is a city of less than 12,000 people billed as the “Cantaloupe Center of the World.”

How a small, rural community came to be lumped in with major urban areas in the Facty list is unclear, but Mendota has made this sort of list before.

USA Today in 2019 named it the country’s worst place to lie, which led ABC30 Action News in California’s Central Valley to investigate. The result was a story with this headline: “Is Mendota the worst place to live? Residents say that’s a distorted view.”

Mayor Rober Silva questioned the way data was used to define the city, and Louise Zuniga, a relatively new Mendota resident, defended the city.

“I’ve been working here for a year and a half and I think it’s a peaceful place,” he said. “I know I’ve heard about gangs and other things going on but I am a public servant, and I see nothing but hard-working, honest people here. It humbles me to serve them. I’m proud of working here.”

ABC30 did note that the city did have a high crime rate with about 60 violent crimes per 10,000 people per year, but that wasn’t much higher than nearby Fresno, a nearby urban area about 45 times larger, that posted a rate of 56 violent crimes per 10,000 per year.

Facty did not cite the sources for its information and provided no information on what metrics it used or what experts it consulted to reach its conclusions on which cities are worst. Its list is probably about as accurate as the “fact checking” done by most mainstream news organizations.

But no matter accurate or inaccurate the report, it’s seldom good for a city to be identified as among the top-five worst in the country, especially when people are already fleeing that city.

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified Mendota.