America Hates Los Angeles, Poll Says

A recent poll suggests that America just isn't that into Los Angeles.

The poll taken by Public Policy Polling surveyed 900 American voters from April 12 to 15 and asked them whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of 21 cities. Los Angeles didn't finish last, but we came pretty close: 33 percent of people said they favored us and 40 percent said they didn't. (The rest didn't have a strong opinion either way.) That's pretty bad when you compare us to the rest of the list.

It's kind of hard to tell what a poll like this means exactly since there weren't any follow-up questions explaining why people liked us or not, so we're left guessing: Was it something we did? Was it something we said?

We'd like to blame our bad rep on people who resent West Coast liberals or earthquakes, except that America seems to like San Francisco (48 percent), Portland (52 percent) and god, they just can't get enough of Seattle (57 percent). We could blame it on people hating big, expensive cities but America seems to like New York City pretty well (49 percent). We could blame it on people hating our superficial "Hollywood" values, except that Vegas is both better-loved (43 percent like Sin City) and less-hated (33 percent don't). Our best guess for now is that America hates that we insist on putting "the" in front of our freeway names.

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So who are we fighting on our way to the bottom? D.C. is a pretty polarizing city that has almost as many haters as us (39 percent) but it also has a lot of lovers (44 percent). Cleveland is really putting up a fight. America likes Los Angeles better than Cleveland, which is favored by 32 percent of Americans. But we still have way more haters: only 25 percent of respondents said they didn't like Cleveland. The only other cities that had lower favorable ratings were Oakland (21 percent) and Detroit (22 percent). And Detroit was the only city more hated by Americans (49 percent).

The other cities that are both better-loved and less hated than us include Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Philly, Miami, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Baltimore. You can check out the rest of the survey and more analysis for yourself here and here.

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