Thank God I left the hellhole that is Tacoma!
I moved to Idaho this spring after seven terrible years living near Tacoma. I can't imagine a worse place to live. My husband and I rented a house on two acres across the street from a golf course. We had a beautiful, park-like yard full of wildlife. Sounds nice, right? It wasn't. I picked up more trash out of my yard than we ever threw away ourselves. We're talking condoms, dime bags, fast food wrappers, diapers, bottles of urine, you name it. Every day.
The trash was bad enough, but I'm just getting started. My favorite story to tell people about Tacoma is the time I got punched in the face and robbed at the Fred Meyer in University Place. It was the Saturday afternoon before Easter and the store was packed. I was waiting for my friend to unlock her car. I had my purse on my shoulder and my friend's purse was in the cart, which I was holding onto. Three crackheads in a Crown Vic pulled up and the woman in the backseat jumped out and grabbed my friend's purse. I yelled, "Hey", which gave my friend time to grab this lady by the hair. My friend ends up wrestling with her in the back of the Crown Vic. Meanwhile, the man in the passenger seat gets out, comes around, punches me in the face, and steals my purse while I'm laying on the ground. This is all pretty bad, but what makes it even worse is that probably fifteen people saw it happen, and no one helped us at all. The cop who took our report was utterly uninterested as well.
What else? I had my mail stolen repeatedly, including two stolen checks that were altered and cashed, and several attempts at identity theft. My husband installed an amp for my car stereo and I had it about two days before my car was broken into and it was stolen. The cop who took that report told me what a nice neighborhood I live in. I told him he had to be kidding. We had bums living under a tree in our yard for a while. My husband had to call the police to stop a girl from being raped in the street in front of our house. We've also called the police twice to report stolen cars that had been dumped. Hookers worked the corner from time to time. Our neighbors across the street got robbed four times in eight months.
I could go on and on about the crime, but I don't have the time today. Our neighbors were just as horrible. We had a drug dealer living in the duplex behind us and there was constant traffic on the dead-end street. Two of our cats got hit by cars and no one bothered to stop. Another neighbor called the cops on my husband for setting off fireworks on the 4th of July. This was the same lady that called another neighbor's son a "half-breed" when she was uspet at him for bouncing his basketball during the day while she was trying to sleep. A neighbor walking her dog took it upon herself to make repeated ignorant comments to my husband about the state of our yard and how the neighborhood was going to hell because of people like us. At the time, cutting the grass wasn't a big priority. I was extremely ill and undergoing cancer treatment. Thanks for asking!
In summary, Tacoma sucks. I was up there a couple of weeks ago for a wedding, and I swear I will never go back. I didn't even get to the traffic, the horrible sense of entitlement that people have, or the soul-sucking strip mall landscape and endless suburban tract home communities that infest the I-5 corridor. Thanks for this forum, I love to read what other people have to say about this pit.