Is Poughkeepsie the Pits?

  |  February 25, 2013
Flickr/photo by ExiledOnMainStreet/ Creative Commons license

Flickr/photo by ExiledOnMainStreet/ Creative Commons license

The reason we ask is that the Poughkeepsie Journal reported last week on a Forbes’ piece, which listed the city as one of the country’s most miserable spots.

While no one is claiming the city of 75,00 or so to be an upstate Shangri-La, it’s also not a place most folks consider to be the East Coast’s answer to Detroit (the city which topped the list of miserable places) — they usually reserve that honor for Newburgh. So a bit of digging by the Journal revealed that the designation, in fact, comes from the city’s relationship with Newburgh and surrounding struggling towns.

“Kurt Badenhausen, Forbes senior editor, said he was referring to the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown Metropolitan Statistical Area in the story he wrote and list he compiled. The United States Census Bureau defines the area as consisting of both Dutchess and Orange counties.

In drawing up his list of ‘most miserable cities’ Badenhausen said he looked at nine factors for the 200 largest metro areas in the U.S. They include violent crime, unemployment, foreclosures and taxes.”

For the record, we consider all three cities in that MSA to be rife with potential: within striking distance of NYC, full of architectural treasures, and suffering from crime, poverty, mismanagement, underemployment and a host of other ills that we, in the cloud of optimism from which Upstater reports, consider surmountable.

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