I lived there for the better part of several years and if you’re thinking about moving there by all means don’t because its actually a very regressive city and area. They like to pronounce it as being someplace you’ll just love but overall unless you’re an upper middle class American family making 80,000 or above a year its really not all that special. Most people that live there are there because they were native born Louisville residents and or from Kentucky. If you want to live in a middle sized to larger city there are several options which are much better than Louisville and that’s most anywhere in the Eastern Us within a few hundred miles from Louisville.
Nashville, TN is much more economically and job wise progressive than Louisville and same could be said for Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, Kansas City, St. Louis Metro (not city), etc. That’s just the smaller cities of the region not including Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, etc. If you’ve got any real talent and abilities you can score a good job somewhere else and don’t waste your time on a declining city such as Louisville. Not to mention Louisville which might as well be called LouBilly because of the high percentage of hilljacks, bubbas and rednecks isn’t really anything to brag about. It’s main claims to fame are Muhammad Ali, the Kentucky Derby, bourbon and basketball.
If it wasn’t for those four things you would be looking at a city with not much more to offer than say Chattanooga which is 1/4 the size of Louisville. Nothing to against Chattanooga or Knoxville or other smaller cities but Louisville likes to puff up its chest real big about what a great city and urban area that it is yet its economically and educationally backward that is considered progressive while being in one of the worst states in the United States. Worst states for college educated people, worst states for K-12 education, 47th in just about everything out of the 50 states including personal income, family income, median income, educational achievement. Not to mention the worst state for retirees, children, minorities right down there at the bottom of most of the southern states.
Louisville is actually close enough to the Northern tier of states that it should be much more progressive economically, socially and overall quality of society things such as education, the arts, museums, cultural events. However, its like a big cow town based on the Ohio River where nothing really changes economically or improves because its been ran by the same type of small minded hilljacks even in the City/Metro Council and mayors that are basically mayors of a large Mayberry. That’s why businesses don’t largely come to Louisville because of the crummy schools in Kentucky as well as the lack of educated people along with being the 4th highest taxed city for local taxes in the country. Add in a fair amount of hidden racism and bigotry and low class culture and education and that is what you have in Kentucky and even in a so called progressive city like Louisville.
Louisville often gets compared to Portland, OR but its a laughable comparison for anyone who has actually been to both of those cities as well as anywhere else that has a similar type of lifestyle. Its not progressive at all whether that’s the crummy local economy, homeless people everywhere because their increasingly crummy jobs don’t pay decent wages, temp services galore, low wage employers that dominate Louisville especially low wage service industry jobs that don’t pay much above minimum wage when an apartment costs 700 to 1000 a month. Yeah, it looks cheap compared to Nashville or Chicago or Boston or NYC or the West Coast. Yet, you’ll find out that the local wage structure is about 25 percent below the national average in Kentucky without the resulting cost of living savings that you would get for being in a smaller city.
You can do better than Louisville…even if you’ve been a lifelong loser with limited educational/training prospects and abilities. It’s just not all its cracked up to be and I spent most of the last 15 years in that region so I know what it consists of probably better than most of the people that have lived in Louisville their entire lives. It’s that self absorbed and clueless in cultural advances that many of its residents and local yokels actually believe that Lou-A-Vull aka Louisville which sounds locally like Lou-A-Bull is actually someplace that is the end all and be all of society and culturally superior to anywhere else you could pick up and move to.
Despite the fact that much of the Louisville and Kentucky population but also over into Southern Indiana hasn’t really spent any real amount of their lives outside of the local region and in many cases has no real idea how the real world outside of Kentuckiana actually works.
