re: Have all the big cities in America turned into violent/ugly places?

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You sound like a stereotypical 80 year old elderly man in his underpants drinking cheap beer and screaming at his television.

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or an 18 year-old that's never been anywhere that's just now learning to drink beer and operate an Iphone at the same time?

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Yeah, but it's not. Its in Chicago.. so...

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And it's in a part of Chicagoland that you or I will ever see, so...

Yeah, Chicago is a beautiful city.

No, I went to NYC last October and was surprised how nice and helpful everyone was, except for a run in with one a-hole on the subway.

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Have they always been cesspools of violence, drugs, mentallly ill leftists, rampant homelessness, and degeneracy?

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I'm sure some Boomers can remember when large American cities weren't hellholes like most are now.

I'm Gen X and I have no living memory of large American cities being anything other than what most are now.

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White millennials are moving back into the cities.

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not Detroit.

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not Detroit.

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There is actually quite a bit of new development happening in central Detroit these days. It isn't the total wasteland that it was in the early 2000s.

I remember in '01 when I would tell people I "live downtown", they'd look at me like I was insane. And then ask "where?" because they couldn't even imagine that there were people living "downtown".

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I'm sure some Boomers can remember when large American cities weren't hellholes like most are now.

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Actually they were closer to hell holes when boomers dominated the landscape and are pretty cool, safe places today. This idea that the are cesspools of violence, etc, is imaginary old man, never visited a city nonsense.

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No - post-Reagan (and Giuliani had a lot to do with it in NYC), some urban areas experienced a rebirth with additional resources - there was particular emphasis attacking the crime associated with cocaine trafficking in Miami, for example. Atlanta, NYC, Washington D.C. - all rose up from being considered relatively crime ridden to relatively prosperous (within reason - you still have to mind your cross streets, alleys, and times of day, baw).

On the other hand, we've seen the utter collapse - particularly in the rust belt, of places like Detroit and Chicago (although parts of Chicago are still pretty awesome, the general collapse is driving a net downward trend - think Detroit 25 or 30 years ago.)

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Chicago is actually much, much, much better than it was in the 1980's and 1990's. It followed the relative path of New York and LA, just not as sharply. Chicago isn't going down the path of Detroit for a whole host of reasons any time soon, but there are huge problems that will bring a reckoning soon enough. 2015 was the least violent year Chicago had since the early 1960's. The last 18 months or so are definitely concerning, but I do not believe it's a permanent trend, and it's still very localized to certain neighborhoods unlike it used to be,

Chicago over the last forty years is actually a great microcosm of what happened to the country writ large. Violent crime dropped significantly but became a lot more concentrated. There has been a hell of a lot of gentrification, all while incredible wealth has become even more concentrated. Loss of manufacturing hit certain areas of the city pretty hard, while enormous growth in the service industries has enabled other parts of the city to boom and then continually gentrify outwards.

Chicago is losing people, but that's a fairly deceiving stat. It's largely losing the working class and the impoverished, as it's too expensive to live in a decent area for many of them, and the bad areas are too violent (and the schools too poor). Starting in the early 1990's and continuing until about 2011, the city aggressively started tearing down the huge public housing projects that had been nests for some of the worst crime in the country. Tearing down Cabrini Green alone forced almost 30,000 people to move away. Henry Horner and Robert Taylor were at least that size, if not bigger, as well. Median income has actually gone way up in the city over the last decade or two.

And I would disagree on New Orleans. It was once a great American city and still out punches its weight in cultural influence (and perhaps even economic with the port and location) perhaps more than anywhere else in America.

Go walkin on sunshine in Little Rock or Birmingham or Memphis after dark dumbass