Since When Is Poughkeepsie A Great Place To Find A Job?
So, Forbes is running a story on the 10 best US cities to find a job and it lists my good old city, Poughkeepsie, NY, at Number 17 because the list really goes to 25. You do have to click on their slide show to see it though.
As for Poughkeepsie, I don’t know what the hell it’s doing on this list. If you haven’t graduated from the Culinary Institute and aren’t opening a restaurant there’s nothing here. Yeah, whoopie, we have the IBM plant. The town is crap. Housing is crap. The natives are crap. It used to be safe two years ago when I moved here. I don’t have statistics but I don’t feel safe anymore with myself or my belongings. It is , in general, a giant craphole. Almost everyone I know here works in NYC or Albany. The people I know that don’t work at either place, work at IBM, car dealerships, the local school district, the galleria, or restaurants.
The only construction going on is more half-million dollar homes that only people who work in the City can afford. I like how they include Middletown and Newburgh in the Poughkeepsie metropolitan area. There are vast rural areas between Poughkeepsie and Middletown. Sure, there’s some cities but they aren’t that big. Poughkeepsie is at exit 13, Middletown is at exit 4 and 3. There are 18 miles between exit 5 and 4 and long stretches of fields. There’s no way this is a metropolitan area. If you wanted to include Hyde Park, Arlington, LaGrange, Pleasant Valley, Wappingers Falls, Fishkill, and, possibly, Beacon into this mythical Poughkeepsie metropolitan area, great. At least they are all within 10 miles of Poughkeepsie. But they don’t and haven’t a clue about the area. Really, how do these people come up with these statistics?
Middletown is about 75 minutes away from Poughkeepsie and is a crap city too. I know. I grew up there. And trust me. No one in Middletown or Newburgh considers themselves part of this imaginary Poughkeepsie Metropolitan area. Everything up here is east and west of the Hudson River. Poughkeepsie is on the east side of the river, Middletown and Newburgh are on the west side. Maybe they had to include Newburgh and Middletown because that’s where all the improvements are happening in the health care industry. It certainly isn’t happening in Poughkeepsie.
Just a sidenote: I can’t wait to move from Poughkeepsie. It’s the worst city I’ve ever lived in. If you commute, you probably don’t notice all the things that make it crap but, if you work in Poughkeepsie and spend the majority of your time here, you see it every day. I honestly don’t know how this place ranked so high.
