America’s 1 most dangerous suburb you should avoid (new ranking)

Whenever I visit a big American city, I indulge in a dark and unnecessary habit.

Take my trip to Chicago this past summer.

Chicago is a big, beautiful, clean, well-organized city … assuming you don’t stray into the wrong areas.

And that’s fairly easy to avoid now in the age of GPS and Google Maps.

But when someone in our group jokingly referred to Chiraq — a term I hadn’t heard since the early-to-mid 2010s — it got me thinking.

Chicago has clearly made some improvements since the Chiraq days, but I wondered, what are the most dangerous neighborhoods to avoid here?

Wherever I’m in a big American city, I have to look it up.

Driving into any big city as a tourist, you never see the worst of it.

The freeway typically takes you straight to your reasonably nice hotel in some safe zone.

For us, that was Deerfield, Ill., a suburb so affluent we’d literally drive by an airfield for private jets every day.

It turns out the worst neighborhood in Chicago, according to some cursory Google searches, is Washington Park — home to a violent crime rate 701% higher than the national average.

Most of the worst neighborhoods in America are found in urban cores, of course, but what about the suburbs?