outb0undflight t1_j0cwury wrote on December 15, 2022 at 7:02 PM

> however, the city has definitely improved an extraordinary amount over the past decade or two

In some respects, yes. In other respects, not so much.

>It’s walkable

Worcester is absolutely not a walkable city. Downtown and some other places, sure. But lots of places lack well-kept sidewalks, if they have a sidewalk at all. There's been multiple posts here in the past about it. Look at the heavily residential North Lake Ave. Your options are "walk in the trash-covered grass" or "walk in the middle of the road." And there's plenty of other places in the city like this.

>shows, events

The Hanover is fine and gets an okay mix of stuff, but it's hit or miss. Some years you get Morrissey or Elvis Costello, other years you just get Waitress & Shen Yun again. It's very rare that the DCU gets anything good for concerts, which isn't really their fault, the entire live event industry has changed, but still. I nearly shit myself when Maiden announced they were playing there. And The Palladium, while it'll always hold a special place in my heart, ropes off a bunch of the seating now, charges an arm and a leg for tickets, and yet still has the worst sound system I've ever heard. I don't love Providence by any stretch but every single concert venue I've been to there puts Worcester's to shame.

>and it’s being built up and invested in

Debatable whether or not that's a good thing.

>Literally every city has some crappy neighborhoods, homeless people, gang activity, and higher than normal rent, so that can’t be an argument against the city.

My dude, are you seriously trying to say that "high rent" cannot be an argument for why a city is a bad place to live? There was literally just a study about how crazy the rents in Worcester are getting And yet the city's solution continues to be, "build market rate apartments to attract Boston transplants rather than housing that the people who live here can actually afford."

Ultimately, whenever people make posts that are like, "Worcester's got all this stuff! How can it be as bad as people say!?" it leaves out two things: a) the bad shit about living in Worcester and b) the second half of the equation which is, "Does all the good stuff about Worcester outweigh the shitty parts?" Ultimately that's a personal question, and people are going to come down either way, but it's not as simple as, "Look at all this great stuff, how can you not like living here!?"

Yeah, there's some cool stuff to do in Worcester, but I'd trade fucking Polar Park for halfway decent trash pickup in a heartbeat.

NovelNo87 t1_j0czaxw wrote on December 15, 2022 at 7:18 PM

I agree that high rent is a good argument for a city being a worse place to live. Worcester rent is high relative to what it was 5 years ago and in comparison to similar cities like Hartford and Springfield, but it’s not really much higher than any of the surrounding towns where a lot of the complaints are coming from. It’s not like towns like Shrewsbury, Auburn and West Boylston have very different rents that haven’t gone upon the same amount of time. And honestly one of the only reasons so many people are moving from Boston and elsewhere east of 495 is because rents are rising even more there.

outb0undflight t1_j0d2wr6 wrote on December 15, 2022 at 7:41 PM

>Worcester rent is high relative to what it was 5 years ago

This is the issue, though. I've lived in Worcester for that five years. The city has really not changed that much, sure they've built some new shit, but day to day life in Worcester is no different than it was five yeras ago. But still the rents go up. Some good restaurants have opened, but other good ones have closed. The infrastructure still sucks, trash pickup is a fucking nightmare, the city's leaf collection policy is "push them all in the road, making the roads more dangerous, and we'll come pick them up in like a week," it'll snow 14" and the plows still leave 3" caked on the road...but we got a baseball stadium!

Like I said, the question is what are you getting in return for the money you're spending and is it worth it? In Worcester's case it's getting increasingly hard for a lot of people to justify spending the kind of money it takes to live here.