As my husband was removing asbestos tile floor from our basement rec room yesterday, I found myself thinking: this is not the worst place we've ever lived.

And it isn't. There are a few worse, but nothing will compare (I hope!!) to where we found ourselves for the first 3 weeks of our marriage: The Wayside Motor Inn. Seriously rundown and filthy, but cheap. very busy during the afternoon.
A few years later, when I was interning at the local NBC-TV affiliate, I returned there with a reporter who was checking out the report of finding a dead body.

asbestos tiles / wayside motor inn. yes, I think we have moved up in the world.

Just talking houses or areas? I lived in london for a time. Lambeth. Never again, reading wasn't much better but somehow I liked it, had some cool housemates.
Building wise… I had a bedsit when I was 16, it was cold, damp and had the seediest wallpaper you could imagine. The owner was a filthy old woman with hundreds of cats, all with fleas. not good.
Have had various shitty flats with obnoxious neighbours too. Now have a spacious 4 bed place 100 yards from a sandy beach, can't complain too much.

Probably the house I spent my early 20's in. No real insulation, cheap oil furnace constantly broke down, flooding washing unit which created fields of star shaped fungus all over the cellar, lousy tight parking at the foot of a main intersection (some guy got lost and drove into my lot, hitting my car), asbestos tiles, and snooping prudish neighbors who thought the black/red checkerboard pattern I painted on my walls and ceiling meant I was satanic. They actually had the nerve to complain to my landlord about it, not that he could do anything.

College dorm. Need I say more?
I have only lived at my parents' houses (both my parents and hubby's parents), the college dorms, and two different apartment complexes.
Our first apartment is a close second to the college dorms.

A cot in a leaky tent in the pouring rain surrounded by smelly, snoring, farting, grubby, grease covered, haircut needing, undersexed and under appreciatedlittle dips who can take a tank and do more battlefield damage in five minutes than a grunt squad can do all day.

The sun shined once in 14 days in the field. But on that one day there was so much dust our uniformsturned white.

After thatfifty year old drafty barracks with clapboard walls and mattresses the thickness of wax paper was heaven on earth.

Horse-riding camp. Initially I had to go every school holidays and stay there in order to chaperone my sister, but eventually I liked it too.

-Crappy, cold, dorms with bunk-beds, reeking of stale cigarette smoke and decaying vinyl, nasty fake wood panelling on the walls made up of cheap plywood… Inevitably being stuck with a bunch of slightly younger guys, oversexed and stupid, pissing in the wardrobe and thinking its a clever and naughty thing to do.
Dirty little bastards.

Getting up at 5 every morning to clean out stables, shovel horse shit, carry bags of horse shit, brush horses, curry horses, sweep dirt and mud off of the saddling area, feed and water the horses… horse feed is heavy! Saddles are heavy, bags of horse shit is heavy etc.

Then finally, stinking of crap, we can eventually have our nasty breakfasts…

I only liked it when I finally got my own room and started to skive off and “miss out” on the morning duties… I actually still feel a little bad about that.

Tread title said:
Worst place you've ever lived.

London.

Seriously, I think that place gave me a bad case of depression, that took years to shake off. During my three years living there, I encountered 2 cases of someone I personally knew getting raped (the second time was by my supervisor), narrowly avoided being attacked once and my girlfriend of the time witnessed a dead body in the streets. Not all of these things happened in bad places either. I started working at a hotel, in a town called Enfield, located at the northern outskirts of London. That's where the two rape cases happened. Like I said, and I'm not exaggerating this at all, one of the perpetrator literally was my supervisor at the time. The second case was some serial rapists who was running around at the time and the police and media really didn't start paying much attention to this until two years later when they they realized that it was the same perpetrator behind multiple rapes. It's somewhat unsettling to read a news article about a string of attacks like that and realize that you knew one of those victims.

I later moved to a place near Kings Cross (where Harry went to school). That place is littered in drug use and prostitution. There was this one street I couldn't walk down, without being offered drugs at least once.

And the homeless people, my god the homeless. There were so many of them. There was this one guy who constantly stayed near this one ATM to beg for money and it literally was his home. He slept on folded cardboard boxes and a sleeping bag, located in that same corner. He was there for the two years that I was traveling through the area. There also was this giant bridge that housed a subway station that I used to exit, while I was working for this sales company that housed dozens of homeless people under one of the arches. It was like a tiny community down there. The quickest way to get to my workplace was through that arch and they were always trying to sell some stuff to the foot traffic.
I used to give money to these people but I quickly realized that if I were to give each beggar that I walked passed a pound, I would probably empty my paycheck in two weeks, doing just that. Teaching myself to ignore them killed me inside a little.

Finally, while there were good people hidden among them, I found British people to be exceptionally uncaring bunch. It was like they had all realized that they would never get what they'd want out of their lives and had this giant cloud of gloom lurking over them. This was particularly apparent if you studied the faces of people in the subway tunnels; seeing a happy face was a rarity. Their number one concern was usually themselves and that mentality seemed to get worse the younger the person is. While I was living there I got involved with an American who was finishing her university degree at UCL. She was involved in some program to get kids more interested in higher education and her department handled introducing different cultures. Since she was studding Nordic cultures, she would often represent Iceland and I ended up helping her out with that.

There, I got a first hand experience of what was happening to the youths of London and teachers would often voice their opinion about it with me. Apparently there had been allot of horror stories going on about how terrible the discipline system had been in the past (just watch a movie that features a British school and I guaranty you that it has a nun slapping kids with rulers) and the opinion of the general public was that teachers weren't allowed to punish kids. Lobbyism had effectively neutered teachers ability to discipline kids in any way possible and thus whenever kids caused any mischief, teachers couldn't do anything about it. Learning that you could get away with mischief led to bigger attitude problems and now Britain has a generation of young adults who think they're untouchable.
If you had asked a teacher back then if they could have foreseen something like the big London riots of last month, they would have said absolutely; it was only a matter of time before something like this would happen. They were giving out these warnings years ago and nobody was listening.

Yeah, this has become long enough for people to think that I got a serious chip on my shoulder when it comes to Britain. Bottom line, I know there are good British people out there but living in your capital leaves a lasting impression that isn't to be desired.

Well, the worst HOME I've ever had was thetwo up two downI was in between the ages of one and ten. The damp was allegedly so bad my parents were worried about my sister and I getting athsma. Spiders were so huge that they'd only be able to get killed via hoover. In the back yard there was a small “hill” that was actually buried garbage and scrap metal. There was broken-off car parts sticking out and everything.
The buildings were SUPPOSED to be temporary when they were first constructed in the 50s following the Clydebank Blitz. They're still up to this day.
Still had great memories living there even though Clydebank in general tongue-kisses arse crack. Which is sad considering it's got a rich history that everybody there ignores. It used to have both the worlds biggest clock and digital clock,the shipyards producedthe QE2 and Queen Mary and the town has a settlement history going back to pre-roman times.

I've lived in one (permanent) house my whole life…it's a bit small, but I like it a lot. The city I'm in is not so nice.

We have a huge homeless problem here. To give you an idea, in reference to Product's post, I was surprised by the lack of homeless people when I visited London. Generation after generation of screwed up people are coming out, mostly due to the awful state of the nearby reserves. The only thing that's been done about it is that the city hired patrols to keep the homeless away from certain parts of town, which is really silly.
We're murder capital of Canada, I think car theft capital as well. Gangs. Money marts in strip malls. Lots of general unhappiness here.
It's not the worst place in the world, but it's certainly not somewhere people dream of living. The provincial government has had to put a ton of incentives in place for people who stay in Manitoba after uni.

On a lighter note, every summer for around 5-7 years my family went out to a cabin. It was a lovely location, but my family couldn't afford to buy a cabin(good lord, who can?) or to rent a nice one, so we stayed in this little falling-apart shack every year.
It was literally just four walls and a roof, divided into three “rooms” for the five of us and our dog. I got a top bunk to myself, but it only had a leaky air mattress so I would usually wake up halfway through the night, basically sleeping directly on the metal bars. The bed was very old and squeaky so I couldn't move around at all without waking up the entire family.
The cabin didn't have a bathroom, so we had to share one with about a dozen other families on our hill. There was a little boy who always peed on the floor. And the door didn't lock properly - it either wouldn't work at all or it would stick and you'd be trapped in the washroom.
It often got horribly cold at night, so we'd all sleep fully dressed with sweaters on. Then during the day it would be very hot, so we'd either spend the whole day in the water or my dad would put a giant ice block in front of a fan.
It all sounds funny now, but at the time I was miserable staying out there.

These are fascinating insights into the experiences of the DDers!
I'll try to think of one…there've surely been a few (though probably not as interesting as some of the tales in this thread).

There was the time I was ramblin' across North America (as I'm wont to do) and stayed in the crawlspace in ayesinback's asbestos-filled basement. Itchy!

They had a fully furnished guest room, I recall, but ayes claimed it was not suitable for sub-humans. Not sure what she was getting at.

I remember it was a very small hole in the floor, and ayes shoved me inside using the handle of a mop.

Crazy times, and I'm so grateful that this ol' wandering chunk o' coal found such good folks to give him that solace!

'Scuse me a moment; my cough is flaring up!

I had to think about this for a while… I can't say I've lived in any really bad PLACES… Sure, some have been run-down or in boring towns, but the only thing that has been able to make me hate the place I'm in is the people I'm with–and only in a few areas, both at college.

The dorms were pretty bad. I ended up rooming with Mr. Popular and getting phone calls at 4am and people just barging into the room in the middle of the night to play Halo with him. I was taking school a lot more seriously than him and had early-morning classes. I don't hate the guy, but we were a bad match.

Later, I moved to a house a few blocks south of campus and stayed there for the remainder of college. Most of the roommates I had were great, but in the last year, a group of three guys moved in and they were terrible. They kept stealing my food and belongings, wouldn't pay the bills, and if I tried to address the situation, they'd gang up on me. All three of them were from another country, and I could tell they were always saying bad things about me because I had studied their language for a few years. If I hadn't tempered myself and kept my head on straight, I'm sure I would have become a racist or something… But luckily they weren't there for more than a semester and I know better than to judge a whole country by these bad examples.

Thinking back, I know I should consider myself lucky. In this thread I've been hearing about leaky tents and serial rape… the worst I've dealt with is unpleasant roommates.

I went to visit a friend out of state for a week or two once. His house was like a crack den, random people just seemed to crash on his floor, his house was so messy and had that smoky haze to it. I'm sure just breathing the air made me high. I swear one night I heard a hobo battle a crack whore for a spot on the floor. It was pretty scary and I'm not a hundred precent positive I wasn't violated in my sleep. I also lived with my parents for the first 20 years of my life. If I had to pick between the two, without hesitation I'd go back to the crack den.