Loubilly- The Biggest Billy Bob City in Kentucky

I don’t care for Louisville because I don’t care for the entire clique based society that Kentucky 

largely is where knowing things isn’t en vogue and knowing someone is more important. Kentucky is a majorly screwed up place due to massive amounts of nepotism and I’ve been to 90 out of 120 Kentucky counties and pretty much most of the state is the same. I lived in Louisville, worked in Louisville and lived there 6 years plus another 26 years about an hour away from Louisville that is totally different than Louisville. In fact, we are in a different state and we really couldn’t give a crap about Louisville even though its only about an hour away maybe a bit more.

If we want to jump in the car or SUV we can go to Indianapolis is just over 1 hr and 30 minutes. Its actually even though has some worse crime problems than Louisville a more up and coming city than what Louisville has to offer. One of the best cities for careers, getting jobs and making a living. I prefer my smaller community which is less cliquish can you believe than Louisville. If we go the other way we can be in Bloomington, Indiana which is a nice sized college town of 81,000 and 175,000 county population with plenty of activities, stores, cultural events, sports, walking paths, nature trails and approximation to a couple of nice state parks. Plus, little Nashville in Indiana has a lot of walkable areas where you can go shopping for tourist type things and various items as well as visit Brown County State Park.

Lexington, I never really cared for and I’ve spent the equivalent of a couple of months there over a several year period. People seemed to be rude, standoffish, unable to make conversation unless it was about Kentucky basketball and just generally an unfriendly place with a snobbish sort of mentality. Even in that sense Louisville is slightly friendlier because you’ll find the guy at the bar or in a restaurant to talk to you and even the servers are largely friendly though they get crapped on by people. Lexington acts like its a high class Kentucky city in some oasis in the middle of massive poverty of Eastern Kentucky and even some areas not far from Lexington. The same sort of mentality always struck me as existing in Woodford County and Versailles and even other areas around Lexington.

One thing I have noticed about Lexington is that a lot of the people from the small towns surrounding Lexington and I’m talking about driving distance of a hour that might work there is that they don’t care very much for Lexington. I’ve heard this more than once from people in the hour vicinity of Lexington of driving distance and its the same. They don’t care for the attitude of Lexington that you get in the workplaces, the stores, the whole environment. I’ve heard this from people in Frankfort, Nicholasville, Georgetown, Paris, Richmond, Berea, etc. I used to do sales calls and travel quite often in rural Kentucky for a number of years. A lot of people don’t have a good opinion of Lexington.

In fact I find that Eastern Louisville especially the Hurstbourne up to Prospect over the the edge of Jefferson County has a lot more in common with Lexington than it does Louisville even though its in the same county. There is a big difference between Southern and Western Louisville and the East End. Its a cultural divide, educational divide, attitude divide. While you’ll find friendly people in some extent in all areas, you’ll find a lot of East End versus South End angst. In general the East End doesn’t care for the South End because of educational and income differences and its vice versa that the South End thinks the East End is a bunch of snobs. However, they both of general disdain for anywhere close to downtown all the way over the Ohio River in many cases.

The issue with the East End is that they have a so called higher class mentality than those in the South End because of educational issues and incomes and class mentality. In other words, they think because they are higher up on the food chain that their bathroom doesn’t stink. In reverse, the South End doesn’t care for the East End because they feel the East End gets the nicer homes, better incomes and better neighborhoods and amenities of Louisville.

Both the East End and South End have issues with Western Jefferson County both as a racial animus that is right below the surface. It generally won’t be talked about in terms of someone using vulgar language about minorities. But it does exist and it existed in the 1990s, 2000s, 2007, 2012 and now. It sits below the surface because its not considered polite to make those sorts of comments these days even though the same basic racial attitudes exist in Louisville to this day. It’s the whole divide between Bardstown Road down to Fern Creek and further east being the richer area. The South End is considered pretty much anywhere from the Airport down to the Gene Snyder and further into Hillview, Fern Creek, Okolona, Fairdale, PRP, Valley, Auburndale and then over to the River. The West End is roughly the 9th Street, 7th Street Road divide and over to the river including Russell, Shawnee, Portland, Chickasaw, Lake Dreamland, Shively, Victory Park, Churchill Downs area which is a South End border area. The areas of Germantown, Preston Street, Baxter, Broadway, Downtown, Old Louisville are pretty much considered largely downtown with some influence of the West End and South End and Baxter Avenue on the fringes of the East End along with Cherokee Park, etc.

Neither city really stands out among the top 50 US metros even though Louisville is allegedly by its own standards considered the 16th largest city as of 2003 (pop 694,000 now 750,000 2019 stats) but now probably not even really in the top 25. Its even more provincial than that. Lexington is not even in the top 50 US cities in population but comes in at 60th with 323,000 people. Neither city is a top US destination nor a top business center. They really don’t even register at top US cities for jobs and careers and the pay is about 20 percent lower than the rest of the United States.

The Universities in Louisville and Lexington are nothing to really write home about. In fact, they don’t even rank in the top 100 universities in America despite U of L in Louisville having one of the largest financial endowments and UK supposedly being Kentucky’s largest research university and getting all kinds of state funding. The only thing that either school could really brag about is their sporting programs especially basketball and somewhat in football or baseball. U of L does have a relatively decent law school which in a recent year was ranked something like 95th in law school quality and the engineering school has the potential but its not well ran and the university has it actually in a couple of nondescript buildings on the South side of the campus. By the way, I have a family member that works in the Engineering educational field at U of L so I’ve got a relatively good grasp at what goes on there plus I keep up with their programs and info. Personally, you could go to Purdue or some other Midwestern university and get a better engineering education than you would get at U of L. Sad but true. Probably even the case at any other major Midwestern University or institution like Rose Hulman, somewhere in Ohio or Illinois or some other state. It’s nothing to really write home about these days.

The schools in Kentucky are horrid to say the least. When I left in 2012 with my two year old, the schools in Louisville itself were ranked 127th out of 154 Kentucky School Districts. This said with a state whose school system regularly ranks in the bottom 20 percent of states when it comes to education. Kentucky usually ranks 41st, 44th or 47th in education and has been that way for decades when measured against the metrics of other states. My current state of Indiana isn’t great but its right near 20th most years when it comes to getting a public school education and districts vary like they do everywhere. I wouldn’t send my worst enemies children to the Jefferson County Public Schools and probably not to the Fayette-Lexington schools. What a lot of people do in those cities is send their kids to parochial schools and private schools as well as Christian schools which are sometimes better. The only school systems in this region worse overall for being larger city schools are the ones in Cincinnati and Indianapolis has some issues as well but nearly not as bad as Louisville overall. Louisville is the type of place where you can get by but you generally won’t thrive living there and for someone that wants a lot better elsewhere is a vast improvement.

Louisville is an Ohio Valley version of New Orleans. Corrupt cops, corrupt public officials, a broke Sewer District, high taxes, a water company that will screw you anyway they can, 4th highest taxed city in the US, horrible roadways with bomb craters in them half of the time, etc. Not to mention a city that built a basketball arena that will cost 1 billion dollars over the next 30 year to pay off without ever putting anything in it other than the U of L Cardinals. No professional teams, constant bickering between Cards and Cats fans about who is the KING of the Trailer Park and little to no REAL culture. Get prepared to be asked by the local yokels which high school you went to. Not which college and not what type of trade school but which high school because that is their way of relating and knowing where you are from. If its Ballard or Jeffersontown or Trinity or maybe St. X you’re East End and better heeled than someone from Male or PRP or Valley or Fairdale or Southern which is considered lower class. No matter what your true level of education is.

Louisville is like a dysfunctional city that really can’t get its act together. Its like having a circus with a bunch of elephants getting in the way stomping on each other or running to the rest of the animals. Of course from behind are the carnival workers and pooper scoopers that come up from behind and occasionally run into a bowel and get their head stuck someplace dark. It’s kind of like a trailer park with a trailer park mentality just with people with a bit more money and a bit more in the way of resources for decent housing.

It’s kind of like the Louisville way of putting lipstick on a pig but its still a pig and you wouldn’t want to hold it or give it a kiss. They try to dress up the city as much as they can for a few special events primarily that nondescript 2 minute horse race held on the first Saturday of May. They also have a Thurby race on Thursdays as well as Oaks race of 10 or 12 cards on Fridays. The funniest thing about Louisville though is that they actually have to pay celebrities 25k-50k to make appearance fees to show up in Louisville to attend the horse events and then the different parties and galas around the city just to keep up appearances.

Another laughable thing that Loubilly City does is to clean the streets and usually dumpy roadways of Kentucky and especially Louisville proper right starting about April 1st or so every year and then it will remain clean until about June 1st when it starts getting piled back up with burger bags, wrappers, roadside trash, bottles, cans, paper and plastic cups, rubbish, wood that fell off a bubba truck without a tarp, junk thrown from car windows, etc. See the issue is that Louisville looks like a big fast food bag emptied out for 10 months out of the year and then turned around and they make up appearances for the other 2 months of April and May when the bulk of the tourists show.

About 2016, Louisville native Muhammad Ali passed away in Arizona and the city of Louisville decided to have not only his funeral but a funeral procession through the streets of Louisville all over the city. Well, this being June 2016 the streets were already brimming with trash floating across the streets, pop cans and bottles on the sidewalks and streets, food wrappers, cigarette butts, broken bottles, fast food bags and debris everywhere. Only one month after that WORLD FAMOUS horse race the city had to get volunteers and city works employees running triple time in order to get all of the junk picked up to make appearances as usual. So all of the event dignitaries and VIPs showed up and it went off without a hitch. Give it another month or so you could drive down to Louisville and it started looking like someone emptied out the contents of the floorboards of their junk car after a binge week of eating fast food and drinking soda pop.

The same goes for Louisville and its homeless problems. The Mayor of Louisville, Greg Fischer, talks about Louisville being a compassionate city which is the most laughable thing going. Even worse is the fact that the only reason its a compassionate city is because they have a huge hotel used as a homeless shelter right in the middle of the the city. Despite the fact that during 2008 to 2016 they had thousands of boarded up homes that went to rot and government finally got the money to tear them down no one considered fixing the homeless problem. Now the homeless problem is worse because there is less housing and less decent housing and jobs don’t pay often enough to keep people housed, fed, clothed, etc. So instead what you have in Louisville are various shantytowns that have popped up especially around areas just outside of downtown in harder to get areas. Also underpasses under the interstate in Portland, downtown and elsewhere. So the city goes in and talks about compassion then sends in the bulldozers, trash collectors and backhoes to pick up belongings, trash, needles and other unwanted materials. All at a time the city should have been coming up with ways to fix homeless issues and try to help those downtrodden. All the while calling itself a Compassionate City.

That is Louisville in a nutshell always talking about progressive ideas to improve the community, doing absolutely nothing to achieve anything that would improve lives including better jobs and education and delivering nothing but more taxes, poverty and ignorance. Like I call it, Its the Louisville Mentality or (Loubilly-The Biggest Billy Bob City in Kentucky)