12 Most HATED Towns in Alabama — #2 Will Genuinely Shock You

Alabama sells itself in two words. This is the countdown those two words were never meant to cover. Twelve towns, and every one of them is a place you already know the name of — not tiny communities nobody in the state could find on a map. A city that stopped paying its retired firefighters and then found it was not legally allowed to go bankrupt. A town the National Guard occupied. A city that lost its Walmart and then lost its police department. A town where the Army burned 661,529 nerve gas shells a few miles from a neighbourhood a chemical company had already paid $700 million for poisoning. Towns do not have personalities. They have records. So the records got pulled. CHAPTERS 0:00 The comment that started this list 1:25 #12 Montgomery - the state took the schools 2:50 #11 Mobile - its worst year in a quarter century 4:00 #10 Gadsden - Goodyear closed after 91 years 5:24 #9 Talladega - a racetrack nobody enters the town for 6:43 #8 Bessemer - the worst crime estimate, and Amazon 8:13 #7 Fairfield - bankrupt, and the county took the police 9:53 #6 Phenix City - martial law 1954, All-America City 1955 11:43 #5 Selma - the fastest shrinking city in Alabama 13:18 #4 Birmingham - 149 in 2024, a record set in 1933 14:48 #3 Anniston - Monsanto, the PCBs, the $700 million 16:40 #2 Prichard - the pensions stopped, the water is going 19:54 #1 Cullman - 114 of 19,319, in a one-in-four state 22:48 The thirteenth town, and why it was left off HOW THIS WAS BUILT Poverty, income, rent and population for all twelve towns come from ONE source and ONE set of tables, so Selma is measured exactly the way Cullman is: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024 five-year estimates, tables B03002, B17001, B19013, B25064. Everything else is a named primary filing: a bankruptcy docket, a governor's proclamation, an SEC filing, a weather-service damage survey, an Army release, a court receivership. Every figure appears on screen with its source as it is spoken. WHAT THE ORDER IS AND IS NOT This is not a computed index and it does not pretend to be one. A scoring formula for "hated" would be invented precision. The countdown escalates by the weight of what is on the record, and that is a judgement, stated out loud rather than hidden behind a decimal point. WHERE THE ESTIMATES ARE Two towns carry a violent-crime figure from a commercial aggregator rather than from the government. Those are labelled as estimates on screen and in the narration, every time, because they are not FBI figures and are not comparable between towns. Direction, not gospel. WHAT THIS DOES NOT COVER This is a record of documented events and published figures. It is not a safety guide and not a claim about the people who live in any of these places. Every town gets roughly thirty seconds arguing the other side, because a list that only prosecutes is a list of insults with a map attached. SOURCES US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024: https://data.census.gov Prichard pensions, NPR: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134057... Prichard water receivership: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12... Anniston PCBs, Solutia SEC 8-K 2003: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... Anniston chemical weapons, US Army: https://www.army.mil/article/68503/ex... Goodyear closes Gadsden, 2020: https://www.wbrc.com/2020/04/24/gadsd... Fairfield Chapter 9: https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/fairfi... Phenix City, 1954: https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/art... Cullman sundown-town record: https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundownt... Cullman County's first Juneteenth, WBRC: https://www.wbrc.com/2020/06/20/cullm... Uniontown coal ash, Title VI: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07... Clotilda: https://ahc.alabama.gov/Clotilda.aspx CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS · Birmingham's 2024 homicide RATE is quoted differently by different outlets, because the population denominator and counting date differ. The count is the hard number: 149, breaking a record set in 1933. · Talladega is on this channel's Alabama retirement list too. Both are on the record, and the video says so on air rather than hoping nobody noticed. · Cullman's figure is 114 Black residents of 19,319, an ACS five-year estimate, which is an average over a period rather than a single-year count. · Prichard's water loss and its population loss are both "about sixty percent". They are two separate measurements, not one number used twice. If a figure here is wrong, say which one and where yours comes from, and the correction gets pinned.