Reviews & Comments
Baton Rouge, LA
re: Is Baton Rouge a good place to live? - 1/5/201 -
12/3/2015I have lived in Baton Rouge for two years now and am ready to leave as soon as I find a job elsewhere. I don't know where people get the idea that Baton Rouge people welcome outsiders with open arms. Whoever came up with that idea is living in a dream world! People in Baton Rouge are extremely cliquish and do not want to take anyone into their closed cliques from outside. If you took a job here and you're from outside Louisiana, just be aware that if someone comes along with your credentials who is from Louisiana, you just must find yourself suddenly replaced - I kid you not, that's how bad the "Louisiana for Louisianan's" attitude is. The population has a large number of transplants from Northern US cities who brought with them their Northern-US-city nasty attitudes. The white natives here have a definite problem relating to black people and vice versa, i.e. racism, and it works in BOTH directions. I live in a very nice 1950s neighborhood where the neighbors have barking dogs that never, and I mean NEVER, hush. You can't go in the back yard for some peace and quiet without listening to the dog choir. To make it worse, one of them is a beagle hound that strolls through the yard day and night sniffing the ground and howling! And what makes it especially super is the neighbors won't speak to anyone around them and don't care if their dogs are annoying everyone else. Now, if you like sitting in extremely long traffic jams from 5 am to 10 pm, then Baton Rouge is your place to be. The transportation system here is so antiquated that you can't go anywhere without sitting in long lines of traffic. In addition, the below ground infrastructure here is also antiquated as well. Good points here are: no snow, stifling hot summers for 5 months, New Orleans to run away to for fun (you won't find much fun in Baton Rouge) and maybe some good food. Baton Rouge is a government city so once 5 pm comes and the outbound traffic jams start and finish, downtown is a ghost town. If it hadn't been for the City government sprucing up the downtown core, downtown would be a dangerous place to be, just like the north side of the City above Florida Boulevard which is sort of a dividing line between white populations and black populations. It's even so bad that my partner, sitting at a traffic light here, had someone brandish a pistol at him for absolutely no reason. Don't mistake Baton Rouge's southern location for southern courtesy and hospitality. It is not a friendly place to be. If this sounds like paradise to you, you must be from someplace like Detroit.