This is my reply to someone that wanted to know if they should consider moving to Louisville.
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As someone that lived there 5 plus years and then lived in areas about 50 miles or so from there for 2 decades plus I would tell you to stay away. Don’t do it because the quality of life and quality of services and people that you find in the Louisville region is horrendous. The medical care that you receive there while much of it is hyped as a medical center is in many cases substandard. It’s like the professionals and physicians and people fields like that are totally clueless when it comes to new procedures and ways to battle infirmities.
Another problem with Louisville is that its suffering from too much NIMBYism to get anything done because no one wants anything to change all that much. Its calling itself liberal or progressive and maybe it is in Cherokee Park area or Highlands some of the central and eastern areas of the city. However, its largely populated by conservative acting dirt pluckers that are only a couple of generations away from Appalachia. You’re dealing with people even in professional jobs and educational pursuits that act as if they’re some of the Beverly Hillbillies but at least that show was funny. Its the whole Billy Bob mentality even in Eastern Louisville/Oldham County.
The further South you go from the river expect people to be even worse than it is in the East End. Its like the worst trash from Kentucky and Appalachia decided to move there at some point. Their communities in Southern Jefferson County look like someone emptied out their vehicles on people’s yards. The educational level is purportedly about High School graduate level but I’ve spent plenty of time in the Northeast, Midwest, West, etc and the average High School graduate in those places has more common sense than the average Louisville resident. It particularly gets bad in Southern Jefferson County in places like Shively, PRP, Valley Station, Fairdale, Okolona, Hillview and further into Bullitt County.
Bullitt County is somewhat of a jobs center because of its proximity to the Louisville airport but the problem is that most of these jobs are lower wage and lower mentality warehousing jobs. In fact, even though its only 15 or 20 miles from Louisville and U of L and Jefferson Community College-KCTCS as well as Bellarmine University, its the worst educated county in the whole state of Kentucky. In fact, it was also where Louisville businesses in the paint and resin industries among others sent their toxic waste for decades starting in the 1950s through the mid 1980s that leached into the local water supplies as well as creeks and streams and ultimately probably the Salt River.
The educational system in Louisville and Bullitt County is largely garbage as well. You have 20 something year old adults that can’t spell basic words and compose at least some sort of a sentence. No one expects 100 percent perfection but the facts are that the general area around Louisville is severely uneducated and that’s being a snob that simply calling it like it is. Kentucky as a state ranks 47th in educational attainment and most years K-12 education ranks in the low to mid 40s usually between 41st to 45th.
Even worse is that the Louisville Jefferson County Public Schools ranks 127th out of 158 Kentucky school systems in a recent year seems like it was 2017 or 2018. Just look it up. It’s been that way for decades though to the point that even high school graduates get to grade 12 and can’t pass the basic skills to graduate but they are passed into the system anyway. For example in a recent year, only 52 percent of the JCPS graduates were proficient at 12th grade English literature and composition. Something like only 40 percent were considered proficient as 10th graders at basic math skills and science was even worse if I recall correctly about 36 percent were proficient at scientific education.
That doesn’t speak well of the educational system in Louisville. That’s the real negative of Louisville along with the provincial population and largely who you know based local job market. You can do so much somewhere else if you have the ambition, education and background than staying in Louisville or even moving there. Start a business elsewhere that you really want to live or get a career path going that pretty much guarantees you the ability to basically sign your own paycheck by having the skills that employers want. What you’re dealing with in Louisville is poorly educated people often end up running the businesses they started with. Even funnier is when one of the Louisville local yokels scrutinized my resume once and started circling what he presumed where spelling errors. The funny thing about it was that I was a school spelling bee champion and participant in every contest for several years as well as going nearly an entire 2 years in 7th and 8th grade without missing only one spelling word on tests weekly over those 2 years. I haven’t lost anything either.
Oh and before I end this diatribe, one more thing that I will tell you about Louisville is that you’ll hear this out of the Loubilly media regularly how Louisville is different and Louisville is unique and Louisville is this or that. Don’t believe it. It’s just another way of them pumping themselves up locally while their local economy, educational system and other socioeconomic issues are ignored. Its like the mentality of the Louisville population. They really think they are culturally and educationally smarter than they truly are when in fact most of them act as if they just came out of the hills after wearing overalls and then jumped into a three piece suit.
Louisville talks about pride in community but much of the city is ran down and looks like a dump. It’s not the worst place I have ever seen compared to say Memphis or New Orleans or North St. Louis or Detroit but there is a serious lack of awareness of environment and cleaning up after themselves. Not to mention the 2018 Hepatitis A outbreak which got thousands sick in Kentucky and Southern Indiana because people aren’t smart enough to use soap and water after they have sex or use the bathroom because it was transmitted by the fecal oral route. That doesn’t say much for common sense in Louisville.
Add in the overrated horse race in May that had its name trademarked by Churchill Downs and its really nothing to brag about. A couple of outdated cheesy museums of old firearms and the Ali Center and that’s about it. The zoo is nice but there are only so many times you can go to the zoo in Louisville. Cincinnati has a much better zoo as does St. Louis and Chicago. Alcohol is a big problem in Louisville as there are a lot of people that rely on alcohol just to survive the crappy existence they just above homelessness in Louisville. That’s another thing that Louisville has a huge problem with homelessness and did far before 2017 or 2018 when other parts of the country like LA, San Francisco, Seattle started to. It’s largely linked of course to drugs but also to lousy companies in Louisville relying on low wage jobs and temporary employment policies. Add in the fact that Louisville has a large homeless shelter right downtown it attracts people like flies. Nothing against the homeless but Louisville doesn’t have any concrete ideas of how to house these people and get them off the streets.
Interstate underpasses look like encampments in various areas of the city where trash, needles and other refuse is allowed to pile up leaving very unsanitary conditions for the general population. Louisville prides itself in being a so called compassionate city but its really a moniker and not the truth in any way or form. It’s actually a place where the people by and large are uber narcissistic to the max. Just with a slight coating of so called Southern hospitality to make people think they’re actually decent, honest and respectable people. Look behind the coating and you’ll find mentalities of people that simply don’t give a darn about anyone. Most of them don’t even like themselves and where they live at. However they refuse to do anything about so they choose to live in the personal dung heap that they exist in. Expect to deal with people who are entitled to the max even in regular jobs. People that refuse to do their jobs because they know no one really cares. Plus in the 1980s Louisville got the reputation as being Strike City because of all of the labor problems. Some of that was due to lousy employers but most of it was because people wanted to be able to run the show and screw off at their jobs. In a high percentage of cases, Louisvillians are seriously lazy and its even worse in the hotter months because that means effort and most people can’t hack it. Even factory workers were that way when I lived there that they didn’t want to do anything expect get paid to complain and whine which doesn’t cut it where I grew up.
The whole Derby experience is a bunch of people mostly well off from outside of Louisville that come to experience the race and make some money and hob nob with each other. The Derby Festival committee regularly pays out appearance money to various celebrities just to get them to come to Louisville and we’re talking appearance fees of 25k, 50k and perhaps more. Otherwise they wouldn’t even bother showing up in Louisville for a horse race that only last a couple of minutes. The Derby Experience is laughable in that its the same lousy events every year including a boat race, balloon launch, marathon and fireworks. It lasts two weeks and the riverfront area is filled with trash not only from the people at the fireworks but also from the Ohio River regularly getting near or out of its banks in February to April. Its amazing the amount of junk from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and WVA that ends up along the river as pollution and no one picks it up until close to Derby time.
That’s another point that I must make is that Louisville will look like an overturned garbage can in the middle of the street for 10 months of the year. Trash on the streets from fast food bags, plastic cups and bottles, glass bottles, paper waste, wooden junk and plenty of other refuse just left there. Including needles. Then about late March or early April the City of Louisville will jump into action and have community volunteers and jail inmates make sure to clean the city up right before all of the Derby visitors show up in late April for Thunder. So the city will look much better from mid April until mid May. Then by June it starts looking like toilet bowl all over again.
Back in 2016, Louisville native Muhammad Ali passed away and the city had jump into action in early June to prepare his funeral route and procession and of course the funeral ceremonies including the Yum Center. The first thing they did according to local media was to send people out to clean the streets again even though it was only one month from the local famous horse race. See that’s the Louisville mentality in a nutshell only to keep up appearances but behind the scenes it looks like crap most of the time. Its all about keeping up appearances or keeping up with the Jones family in Louisville even though the quality of life is severely lacking. Even suburbs in other metro areas are nicer and more clean and orderly than what I’ve experienced in much of Louisville. Unless its a high level neighborhood it lacks a level of cleanliness that most people would expect.
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