"Phoenix, Arizona": People Are Not Holding Back Their Hatred For These 19 Cities, And The Reasons They "Should Have Never Been Populated"

u/TrixoftheTrade recently referenced this King Of The Hill clip where the family is in the Phoenix, Arizona heat, and Tilly Hill says, “This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance.” u/TrixoftheTrade then wanted to know from Redditors what other cities make people wonder, “Why would anyone build a city there?”Trix then referenced that it could be due to things like geographic isolation, inhospitable weather, and lack of natural resources that shouldn’t be host to a major city.

u/cream_top_yogurt agreed with the King Of The Hill reference: “Phoenix, Arizona, no question: it is the fifth-largest city in the US, is located in the middle of the desert and gets 17 centimeters of rain a year… the real irony is that Arizona is ultra-conservative, and yet its massive major city exists only due to many billions of dollars of government investment.”

Here is what else people said in the thread:

1.“Las Vegas makes sense as a smallish service hub for regional transport and the dam. In its current form, it is preposterous.”

—u/cg12983

2.“Dubai (actually, most other Gulf cities are no better).”

—u/Sir_TF-BUNDY

“Dubai can reach Phoenix temperatures WITH the humidity if I am not wrong.”

—u/Swimming_Concern7662

“Oh indeed, for certain men like me 🌈, it is criminalized :(“

—u/Victorian_Rebel

3.“New Orleans. Nothing says humans are arrogant like building a city in a flood-prone bowl under sea level.”

—u/InAllThingsBalance

4.“Definitely New Administrative Capital, Egypt. Dude comes to power as a result of a national revolt against corrupt governments that keep screwing over the poor, and his entire takeaway from it is, ‘I should really build a whole dystopian city so that my aristocrats and I can stay away from the plebs.'”

—u/Lookoot_behind_you

5.“Dallas. Never have I seen such a waste of land.”

—u/peskypedaler

“Such a frustrating place. There’s actually some really cool stuff in DFW but it’s just such a terribly designed clusterfuck that you can’t really enjoy it.”

—u/Goodbusiness24

6.“Mexico City in the way it currently exists. Originally, the Aztec city upon which the modern-day Mexico City was built (Tenochtitlán) sat upon both natural and artificial islands in Lake Texcoco. The lake was drained to prevent flooding, and underground water deposits were pumped to supply the city, turning the regional climate into a semi-arid zone and making it so that the city suffers from water issues to this day. With the unplanned and uncontrolled growth the city has suffered, the existing issues have worsened, especially the lack of water, which is becoming a critical issue. It also doesn’t help that the ground upon which the original city was built is soft, and the buildings there are slowly sinking.”

-E / Chench3

7.“The Villages, Florida.”

“In/Bellydancerem.”

“Nothing says affront to the will of God like a rampant geriatric venereal disease.”

—U/mstrdsastr

(The Villages are known as the STD capital of the world.)

8.“Jakarta, Indonesia. We will keep pumping out the groundwater, clogging the rivers with garbage, and concreting over every square inch until this whole place sinks under the waves.”

—u/Outrageous_Giraffe43

9.“San Francisco, California. It’s a little below one million people, but it is a perfect example of a city being forced on a geographic spot. The area is constricted in size; half of what is now the city was miles of sand dunes, and another large portion is mud flats, which is not optimal for building infrastructure in a seismically active area. The city has two microclimates where it can be sunny in the eastern half and rainy in the western half. There is not adequate water or power nearby, and it relies on a 100+ mile long waterway from the Sierras to meet its needs. It is a city that was forced into the geographic spot to take advantage of an easy-to-defend harbor.”

—u/PizzaWall

10.“Adelaide. Take the driest continent on earth and draw a box around the driest part of that. We’ll call that South Australia. Then plop a city in the box and invite English people to live on the surface of the sun in the only free settlement on the continent while surrounded by convict settlements.”

—u/Twistedjustice

11.“London. It’s been there so long we’ve forgotten, but practically the entire center is a reclaimed marsh that lies at sea level, and if the Thames barrier ever fails, it will flood far inland.”

—u/Didsburyflaneur

12.“Minneapolis. It’s not about people living there, it’s about the amount of people living there. Some places where humans have lived for thousands of years just aren’t suited for the massive resource needs of a one million+ population modern city. Like if the native Americans who originally lived in what is now Pheonix ever attempted to create a golf course, they all would have died of dehydration immediately because all their water would go towards attempting to cultivate greens lol…just because we can create a city almost anywhere now doesn’t mean we should.”

—U/Syrioffer

13.“In The Netherlands, maybe Almere. We turned the sea into land and built a city on it.”

—u/Frietworld_Hallum

14.“Houston. Fucking. Texas. Sprawling shithole that is hot, humid, full of bugs, with awful traffic and hurricanes.”

—u/bananastand512

15.“Macau, China is so weird. All the casinos have advertising with beautiful slim Chinese people in tuxedos and gowns besides luxe sportscars, and the general patronage is fat mainlanders in sports gear clutching plastic bags.”

—u/Blitzer046

16.“Washington, DC, is truly a hive of scum and villainy, to quote Obi-Wan.”

—U/rwade71

17.“Naples. Let’s build a city under an active volcano (Vesuvius) in one of the most seismically active locations on the entire European continent. Somehow, it is also one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Western Europe. Maybe the secret to longevity is insanity.”

-E / broads

18.“Canberra. As we couldn’t decide between Sydney or Melbourne as Australia’s capital, Canberra was placed roughly midway between the two. It was designed by American architect Walter Burley Griffin. Everything is so spread out, filled with brutalist architecture, and is described by many as empty and soulless.”

—u/VBlinds

19.“Edmonton, Canada. The people are very nice, and I feel bad for insulting their lovely city. But it’s too far north and is such a God-forsaken cold hell hole in the lengthy winter. The sun rises at 10 a.m. and sets at 3 p.m. on the shortest day of the winter. There was one February where it was -30 C air temperature, but -50 C with windchill. Edmonton is VERY flat and windy, FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH FFS! Who put that city in the middle of nowhere like that? Wtf?”

—U/tribe303

Well, what do you think of this list? Got any cities to add? Let us know in the comments!

Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.