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"Let me guess, this is where the poor people live."
Alistair, Dragon Age: Origins, upon entering Dust Town.

Most cities, wherever they are, gather together people across a large range of incomes and social status. But often, for various reasons, those of similar wealth come to live in the same parts of the city. This trope is about the poorer end of that scale. Crippling poverty is a day-to-day fact for people living in this type of neighborhood, often leading to both an increase in crime and the residents requiring aid from the government to meet their financial needs. The buildings are dilapidated and infrastructure is crumbling. The few businesses that are located here are pawnbrokers, liquor stores, bars, strip clubs and "happy ending" massage parlors. Police and ambulances may be slow to respond to calls here, and if this part of the city has gang-controlled, seedy alleys, police may not go there at all.

Many residents live in run-down tenements or grimy rooming houses, and many are homeless, and facing drug and alcohol addiction. People are living so precariously that they may lose their home if an illness or a car breakdown means they can't pay rent (due to having little in savings), and steady, legal work is difficult to find. Many residents may turn to less-than-legal methods of acquiring money by way of panhandling, petty theft or sale of illegal goods, or ones that may be legal but frowned upon.

The phrase originated in the early railroad era. Land is expensive, so the railroad would buy the cheapest land on the outskirts of towns, or would head for industrial areas since the most money is to be made in shipping goods. This would often lead to new homes being built near the train station as it allowed people to commute by train, but the residential properties are not in the industrial area, but on the other side of the tracks. So the wrong side is the industrial, cheap land area.

This development may be unintentional, as urban development can cause this area to become poverty-stricken; or intentional, as people are forced to live in these areas by ethnic Urban Segregation.

This trope can be seen in three major classes:

  • Industrial Slum: This area usually springs up around rapid industrialization of an urban area. Those who work in the factories usually live in this area, barely getting by on a meager living. Deaths from disease and poor working conditions are common, leaving many children without parental support forced to live on the streets or end up in an Orphanage of Fear with no government regulation. The poor here have the choice of either living on the street or working in workhouses. The area is polluted and dirty. This variant makes this entire trope Older Than Steam.
  • Modern Ghetto: This variant has similar origins to the Industrial Slum, but is usually promoted by businesses leaving the area and taking their business with them due to the already-existing conditions. Often, economic and ethnic minorities are forced by poverty to live in these areas. Individuals living here are often more likely to receive government aid. Crime often runs rampant, usually in the form of burglary, drug sale, robbery, prostitution, and gang-related violence. Often plays host to broken homes, runaway children, alcoholism and violence. Nearly always has an Inner City School.
  • Enforced Segregation: This variant is enforced by law or by government policies. Certain individuals, such as those of a certain social group (i.e. race, ethnicity, religion) or political and ideological dissidents may be forced to live in such conditions isolated from the rest of society, and punished if they leave.

Home of many Gangbangers, drug dealers and practitioners of The Oldest Profession. See also City Noir for a citywide mood, The City Narrows for a fully criminal subdistrict, and Wretched Hive for near-total lawlessness. If there's an inspirational underdog story about a Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits who want to go to a sports meet, they have to make do with Improvised Training. If this place is filled with Fantastic Races, it's a Fantastic Ghetto. It is possible that it is a Close-Knit Community, where the characters support each other against their problems. Rural versions of the trope may exist in the form of a Trashy Trailer Park or a Dying Town. Contrast (the American version of) Suburbia.

No Real Life Examples, Please!


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds takes place in Satellite, a blending of the Modern Ghetto type with the ghettos of Nazi Germany.
  • A very literal example in Code Geass, where Zero takes his minions-to-be on a train ride through Tokyo and asks Kallen what she sees out of the windows to her right: "A city of the Britannians. A city of robbers which stands because of our sacrifices." And to her left? "Our city. The husk of a city which was sucked dry by the Britannians." Areas like Saitama and Shinjuku deal with all the problems of any modern ghetto on top of the occasional genocidal purge when The Empire needs to find someone.
  • Fabiola Iglesias from Black Lagoon was born and raised in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela. In the 2nd episode of the 3rd season, we get an aerial view of Caracas that is very similar to the Code Geass example: a clean, modern city and an overcrowded massive slum are divided by a highway between them.
  • Kaze no Yojimbo take place in a town with an old red brick house side and a side with more modern white houses.
  • Area 88: In manga issues that didn't make it stateside, we learn that Gary "Mac" Macburn grew up in poverty and squalor in Harlem.
  • Rebuild World: Akira is from the slums, the result of a deliberate policy of Urban Segregation by One Nation Under Copyright. Kugamayama city has four sections separated by wealth: Upper, Middle, Lower, and Slums. The top two are the only ones with a legal system, and their inhabitants consider the lower two little more than extensions of the Death World wasteland. While the working-class lower district has Private Military Contractors made up of former hunters providing security, the slums have nothing but the local flavor of Gangbangers under slum lords. Besides those, there are only a few laws whatsoever there: Corpses must be disposed of or the government will enact The Purge in a firestorm, and anyone leading monsters into the city will pay. They mostly survive on the free food supplied by the government: Mystery Meat filled with harmful Nanomachines, and plant products grown in places that may be radioactive, to test if these are safe to sell. The slums are kept in place to serve as Cannon Fodder in two forms: To keep attacking monsters busy while the military responds, and to encourage people to become hunters that scavenge low grade Lost Technology relics to get by. Thanks to this, guns are more common than food there.

    Comic Books 
  • Downplayed with Bakerville in Astro City. While it's more industrial-oriented and its residents are definitely lower on the social strata, it's not a lawless hellhole filled with drugs and crime, and has its own supers to keep things under control.
  • The Dregs: The titular dregs are the six slummiest blocks in Vancouver, where the city's undesirables live. A businessman is trying to gentrify it and is resorting to less than ethical methods.
  • Taken to extremes in Give Me Liberty, where the Chicago housing project of Cabrini-Green is walled in and turned into a virtual prison for the residents.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Blind Side: The housing projects of Hurt Village, where Michael is from.
  • In the opening sequence of Caddyshack, Danny rides his bike from his working-class home to the ritzy neighborhood of the country club. The transition from lower-middle-class to mansions is marked by an overhead shot of him bicycling through a railroad crossing.
  • Akira Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den explores such a neighborhood in 1970s Tokyo.
  • Europe '51: Irene the rich socialite, with a new instinct for do-gooding, is shocked by seeing tenements where families sleep twelve to a room and riverside shacks without electricity or plumbing. She comes home and tells her husband "I've discovered a world I had no idea existed."
  • The 1926 silent film For Heaven's Sake opens with a title card that reads, "Every city has two districts — Uptown, where the people are cursed with money — and Downtown, where they are cursed without it." Harold Lloyd plays "The Uptown Boy," who falls in love with, "The Downtown Girl."
  • Deliberately invoked in Free Guy. The living area for the players, all violent criminals, is separated from the peaceful rest of Free City by literal train tracks. If any NPC, like cops, tries to cross the tracks a train will run them over automatically.
  • In one skit in The Kentucky Fried Movie, when Rex Kramer goes Seeking Danger (by yelling the N-word in the middle of a group of black men), he literally crosses over to the wrong side of the tracks.
  • Lady Bird has a literal case, as going to Christine's working-class home requires her wealthy classmates to cross the railway.
  • Manila in the Claws of Light: The film is set in the dirty urban sprawl of the Philippines' capital city. The Filipino urban poor are victims of a system that can't and won't help them, but there is a lot of solidarity among them. Julio is often shown caring and generosity from poor construction workers, people who live in slums, prostitutes, and other societal outcasts.
  • Metropolis takes it to extremes by sticking its working class on the wrong side of the ground. Their neighborhood is entirely underneath the city proper, as is the machinery they run. The rich live on the upper side and rarely even see the workers they depend upon.
  • The Outsiders: The main characters live in the poorer, "rough" side of town, which makes them targets for the richer kids.
  • Literally in Salt of the Earth, in which Esperanza notes that while all the Mexican miners' families live in shacks without running water, the white miners living on the other side of the railroad tracks live in better houses with plumbing.
  • Literally in Skippy, as the shantytown that Dr. Skinner regards as a public health menace is located on the far side of the railroad tracks. His mischievous son Skippy likes to go play there, much to Dr. Skinner's displeasure.
  • Sleepers: Hell's Kitchen, as a crime-ruled, immigrant neighborhood in The '60s, is of the Modern Ghetto flavor.
    Shakes: [narrating] Hell's Kitchen was populated by an uneasy blend of Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Eastern European laborers. Hard men living hard lives. [a married couple aggressively yelling in the background] Few women worked and all had trouble with the men they married.
  • They Cloned Tyrone: The Glen is a largely dirty and rundown neighborhood full of drug dealers and prostitution. This is by design. The conspiracy uses clones like the drug dealer Fontaine and the pimp Slick Charles to keep the streets full of violence and misery so that outsides don’t come poking around and uncover the mind control experiments.
  • Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018): Zombietown is where all zombies are forced to live. Zed uses the track metaphor during a song early in the movie.

    Literature 
  • Both Peaches and Mickey live in such in Gene Stratton-Porter's Michael O'Halloran, though Mickey concedes when Peaches lives with him:
    "If this is slum kids, I like it!" protested Peaches.
    "Well, Sunrise Alley ain't so slummy as where you was, Lily," explained the boy.
  • Self-Made Man Gail Wynand of The Fountainhead was born in Hell's Kitchen.
  • In Discworld, the city of Ankh-Morpork is actually a double one, consisting of "Proud Ankh and pestilent Morpork", separated by the River Ankh. Even within Morpork, there is the Shades, where it is said that even the criminals are afraid to walk the streets. As the series progresses and the setting slowly transitions from Medieval European Fantasy to Gaslamp Fantasy this becomes a bit less true; Ankh is still a very expensive residential district dominated by Old Money, but Morpork is home to a growing middle class and most of the city's manufacturing sector, not to mention the seat of government and Unseen University. The crime rate also starts dropping considerably in the aftermath of Men at Arms once the City Watch get more manpower and a real budget.
  • The Tenderloin of San Francisco is treated this way in Little Brother.
  • The Rookeries are the poorest, but also the largest and most important district of the Colony in Tunnels.
  • The Barnaby Grimes series has the Wasp's Nest, an impoverished, crime-ridden district of the city that all Tick-Tock Lads try to avoid as much as possible. The East Bank is even worse.
  • In the Beka Cooper trilogy, the capital city, Corus, has the Lower City, where the lower classes live. Within it is the Cesspool, where the poorest people live.
  • Daughter of Fortune: Jacob Todd follows Joaquín Andieta home. He is surprised to see the impoverished neighborhood where Joaquín lives (the streets are so filthy that Joaquín changes into a pair of slippers so that he can keep clean his only pair of shoes for his job).
  • Annie from Annie on My Mind lives near one of these in 1980s New York, in contrast with her more affluent suburban girlfriend.
  • Tell Me How You Really Feel: Rachel and her father live in a poor section of LA. She's embarrassed to bring Sana over because of their house being dirty inside, making a point of cleaning before she comes in.
  • Star Wars: Lost Stars: Ciena was born to the poorer valley kindred, as First Wavers on Jelucan are often known from living in its valleys.
  • The Constant Gardener by John le Carré has a section set in Regina, Saskatchewan, where the Indians and East Europeans huddle in wretched slums while the wealthy Anglos lord it over them in stately mansions. Anyone who's been to Regina knows how ridiculous this is (about the East Europeans, anyway.)
  • Pale has this in the form of Kennet Below, a magically created version of the sleepy tourist town populated entirely with various characters. These characters vary from somewhat friendly to actively murderous.
  • Years of Grace: Literally. Jane, youngest daughter of a very rich upper-class Chicago family, has a friend named Agnes from a middle-class family, who lives on the other side of the railroad tracks. Jane's snobby, elitist mother disapproves of Jane seeing Agnes.
    Jane...crossed the Clark Street car-tracks and wondered, as she did so, why they formed such a social Rubicon. Her other friend Isabel never had any opinion of any one who lived west of Clark Street. It was the worst thing they had to say of Agnes.
  • Merletta from The Vazula Chronicles grew up in a charity home in Tilssted, the poorest of the triple kingdoms, where any mermaid who swims around at night risks being robbed. She's looked down on by the wealthier mermaids in the Center of Culture.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Lincoln Heights is supposed to the bad neighborhood; in fact, the show spends an entire season telling the viewers how bad it is. But when you look at the neighborhoods it turns out that it's not as bad as we're led to believe. The 2-story, 3-bedroom house that the Suttons live in is HUGE and perfectly suitable for a middle-class family living in Los Angeles, CA. The main problem is the inner-city gangs, which could be controlled by better policing by the Lincoln Heights police as opposed to their lackadaisical approach to policing in that area.
  • The Wire's main setting is the slums of Baltimore, where crime gangs like the Barksdales and the Stanfield Organization reign supreme.
    • The trope is alluded to by name during the mayoral race in season 4 when Carcetti, who has heard from Rawls that Delegate Watkins is having a falling out with the incumbent Mayor Royce, jumps at the opportunity to get Watkins' backing.
  • The Dropout: To save costs, Elizabeth opens the office for Theranos in a questionable neighborhood. Sure enough, when parking her car, a stray bullet shatters her window and misses her head by inches. She is so spooked that she calls Sunny despite having broken up with him.
  • Santana from Glee claims to be from Lima Heights Adjacent, which apparently is this trope (she even uses the term "on the wrong side of the tracks"), although she also claims that her father is a doctor...
    • It doesn't help that Lima Heights Adjacent does not exist in real life when other Ohio towns — even those that were only mentioned once — have real-world counterparts.
  • A frequently recurring theme in Boy Meets World, to the point where there is an episode literally entitled "Wrong Side of the Tracks." Cory comes from a stable, middle-class two-parent household in a good neighborhood, whereas his best friend Shawn comes from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family living in a trailer park. While this is at times played for laughs, it also comes up frequently in much more serious contexts — the class differences between Cory and Shawn are the subject of multiple disagreements, Shawn struggles with his self-esteem due to the way he believes others view him because of his background, and Shawn at one point has to move in with his teacher because he is suddenly abandoned by both of his parents.
  • Named-dropped in Scrubs to describe the Chicago neighborhood Carla grew up in.
  • Both the British and American versions of Shameless use these places as the setting. The British version takes place in the fictional neighborhood of Chatsworth Estate, a deprived council estate in Stretford, Greater Manchester. The American version takes place in the South Side of Chicago.
  • Downbelow in Babylon 5 - the place where everyone without somewhere nicer to go, goes. It mostly exists because they didn't have time to finish the station before they had need of it. Played for a mixture of horror and comedy in one episode, where Ivanova has to negotiate with an unusually assholish alien from a race that believes in segregating the genetically unworthy...and thinks Downbelow is a brilliant solution to the problem, going so far as to suggest it officially become part of his own race's law. Ivanova is troubled by this turn of events, to say the least.
  • Rural (or semi-rural) version on My Name Is Earl in the form of Camden. Although it has a downtown area, it also has trailer parks, such as the Pimmit Hills Trailer Park where Earl once lived.
  • Daredevil (2015): "The Incident" undid a lot of the gentrification in Hell's Kitchen. Matt and Foggy are able to acquire office space for Nelson & Murdock on the cheap due to it being one of only a few buildings on its block to have escaped major damage in the Incident. Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk has made his rise to power as a crime lord due to skimming on Incident reconstruction contracts.
  • Batwoman (2019): The area where Ryan grew up is a very poor part of Gotham, which we see in the flashbacks to her past.
  • Zero (2021): Omar and his family live in a very poor section of Milan called the Barrio. There are criminal gangs that prey on people, and the poor residents are in danger from eviction if gentrification happens (it turns out they're linked-the developer has hired some criminals to mess the place up so property prices will go down).
  • Riverdale: The Northside of Riverdale is where the upper and class and rich live, and the Southside is the poor, filled with drugs and dangerous side of the city, full of violent gangs like the Serpents and the Ghoulies.

    Music 
  • Hip-hop and rap originally got their start in poorer inner-city areas. Many artists themselves if we are to believe their music as truth.
  • Similarly, punk originated in the poorer areas of London and New York during The '70s.
  • Brazilian Baile Funk is contemporary music from the ghettos. Many musicians perform free gigs in the Barrio, and the next night, at a club on the other side of the tracks, now charging for tickets.
  • "Rag Doll" by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. The girl is from the wrong side of the tracks. The boy loves her anyway.
  • "Dawn" by Frankie Valli and The Four seasons: The boy is from the wrong side of the tracks; he tells the girl to stay with the other boy. Frankly, the song is drowning in Wangst bordering on brain-bleeding territory — the hottest/nicest/most generally awesome girl in town wants him and he's turning her down because she's rich? Or maybe he's just a Jerkass with self-esteem issues.
  • "Leader Of The Pack" by The Shangri-Las ("My parents said he came from the wrong side of town...")
  • "Substitute" by The Who ("I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth - The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south...")
  • Parodied by Steel Panther with "Wrong Side of the Tracks (Out in Beverly Hills)". The singer has a mansion the size of a city block, lavish statues, and his name on the side of a plane. But he's considered on the "wrong side of the tracks" because his Trophy Wife threw away his Dokken CDs, he can't figure how to set up Bluetooth to his mansion, and he can't afford a hangar for his plane yet.
  • The Tracks in question are specifically referred to in "Train" by Neo-Progressive Rock band Ark, with the narrator eventually making his way along the tracks rather than across them:
    I was raised surrounded by
    The smell of oil and industry
    Across the tracks houses stood,
    Gardens mocking poverty...
  • In "Bigger Windows" by Terri Clark, the narrator reminisces about where she grew up:
    Little clapboard house
    Rent always due
    Railroad tracks and factory smokestacks for a view
    No easy street in our neighborhood
    Yeah, it was hard to tell the bad times from the good

    Professional Wrestling 

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the Hudson City setting for Champions, the Southside in general is the Wrong Side of the Tracks, but this is especially true of the violence-ridden neighborhoods known as Lafayette ("'Fayettenam"), Forsyth and Freetown ... and double-true of the section of Freetown known as "The Numbers" which is a Wretched Hive even by Freetown standards.
  • Shadowrun's Seattle, already a Wretched Hive, has a Wrong Side Of The Tracks called The Barrens. It is divided into Puyallup and Redmond, both of them hellholes.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons's Planescape setting (and by extension, Planescape: Torment), the Hive in Sigil definitely counts. It is poor, run-down, covered in dirt and refuse, and ruled by violent crimie lords.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, urban Bone Gnawers inhabit the poor, squalid parts of their cities.

    Theatre 
  • RENT takes place in Alphabet City, a neighbourhood in New York's Lower East Side. A noteworthy depiction, since it portrays people existing in poverty due to economic and social conditions living alongside those who live in poverty due to their unconventional and unprosperous lifestyle choice, with a certain amount of antagonism between the two.

    Video Games 
  • Afterlife (1996): "The Wrong Side of the Tracks" is an actual punishment for Avaricious souls, explicitly stated to be a bad part of town where even the demons avoid after sundown. The inhabitants will inevitably turn to brutal crime to try and buy their way out, but the "big score" they seek never, ever arrives.
  • The town of Freejia from Illusion of Gaia is like this. On the rich side, there's flowers and beauty as far as the eye can see. In the back alleys, the poor are kept out of sight, it's dark and dirty, and slavery is commonplace.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The slums of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII. The slums are located at the ground level of the city while the towns containing the more well off and wealthy citizens live on plates that are above the slums. The train system is the only thing that allows travel between the two.
    • Final Fantasy XII:
      • The folks of Rabanastre who were driven to poverty by the Archadian invasion live beneath the city in an area called the Lowtown. Movement is freely allowed between the two halves of the city, though, which is how Vaan (a poor orphan who lives in Lowtown) manages to pickpocket from time to time.
      • Archades itself has a more complex system of stratification in its city planning. The city consists of several levels, and a special residential permit is required if you want to access the higher ones. Across the river is the poorest sector of the city, Old Archades, which is inhabited by Archadians who could not afford to live in the new city after the empire experienced an economic boom.
  • The Wrong Side of the Tracks on Kingdom of Loathing. It's immediately across the tracks (Which have no trains and don't lead anywhere) from the Right Side of the Tracks.
  • In Ragnarok Online, in Lighthaltzen, there is a literally wrong side of the tracks, with crappy slums, corporate guards, and other suspicious things.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dust Town, the home of the casteless dwarves, in the dwarven city of Orzammar. Practically enforced by Orzammar's rigid caste system. Most residents resort to crime to survive, and if you pick the Origin that starts there, that's exactly what you're doing.
    • In human cities, elves are forced to live in alienages: walled-off ghettos full of run-down buildings. Even in the beautiful Orlais capital Val Royeaux, its alienage lies in abject squalor. Interestingly, the games note that elves are not legally required to live in the alienage, but those who buy homes elsewhere are often met with virulent racism from the humans.
    • In Dragon Age II, Lowtown qualifies as the Wrong Side Of The Tracks for the city of Kirkwall, being the former slave quarter of the city. As a refugee from Ferelden, this is where the main character is living at the start of Act 1. Darktown — the city's labyrinthine sewer system — might also qualify, but it's closer to being a Wretched Hive. And, of course, Kirkwall has its own alienage as well.
  • In the BioShock franchise, Rapture has at least two: Apollo Square, in the first game, is notable for having housed Fontaine's Home for the Poor, which became Atlas's base of operations later on. Pauper's Drop, in Bioshock 2, was never even meant to be a part of the city; it was a series of flophouses built underneath the proposed railway for its work crew. It started falling apart even faster than the rest of the city, and by the time you arrive is home to, among other fun places of interest, a train car that apparently fell in through the roof. As Augustus Sinclair observes, "There ain't a side of the tracks more wrong than under 'em." Bonus points for featuring a literal "Skid Row" as one of its sections, though it's hard to say how that part is more of a Skid Row than the rest of it.
  • The city of Rogueport in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door would qualify. The place is filled with thieves and bandits and is considered the lowest of the low in terms of living conditions. Of course, the west side of town is noticeably cleaner and less run-down, but that's probably due to the fact that the west side is run by a wealthy mafia and the east side of Rogueport is run by a not-so-wealthy gang.
    • Flopside in Super Paper Mario could fall under this category too. It's supposed to be the "dark" counterpart of Flipside, so while Flipside is bright and clean with happy residents, Flopside has a darker color scheme and dilapidated buildings, and morbidly depressing locals.
  • Bully has a literal example: in Bullworth, the inner city ghetto New Coventry and the rough blue collar industrial neighborhood Blue Skies Industrial Park are separated from the rich suburb Old Bullworth Vale and the downtown political and commercial district of the town by a railway bridge.
  • The lower sections of the Hierarchical Cities in BlazBlue albeit it has a minor justification — seithr, a poisonous gas/Mana is denser the lower you are to sea level so the richer citizens live in the higher, cleaner sectors while the poor live in the areas closer to pollution. The NOL who run the world have their bases at the peaks of mountains the Hierarchical Cities are established on.
  • London's district of Whitechapel in Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper is portrayed as such, full of low lives, drunkards, and disease-infected.
  • The district of Sunrise was this in the Laurentia story arc of Nexus Clash. A world-spanning war and resulting refugee crisis combined with a need for cheap labor led the government of Laurentia to reconsider their previous immigration policy and admit refugees...who found themselves herded into Sunrise with little to no aid and barred from entering most of the rest of the city. The native Laurentian residents of Sunrise were already this trope and were not consulted on this decision.
    • That's only in the backstory. Now that its world is over and Laurentia has been pulled into the titular apocalyptic Nexus, all districts of Laurentia are now equally crammed with human or supernatural enemies who are actively trying to kill you.
  • Cuphead:
    • As mentioned in the beginning, Cuphead and Mugman get to the Devil's Casino, which is apparently in Hell itself, by wandering to the wrong side of the tracks. We later learn that the entrance to the casino is literally on the opposite side of the Phantom Express' tracks.
    • Ribby and Croaks say that they're from "the wrong side of the lily pad."
  • The Saints Row series has the eponymous neighborhood of Stilwaternote : in the original game, it is a dilapidated slum overrun by gangs and homeless squatters, and it also features the Projects 'hoods (Shivington and Sunnyvale Gardens), which are just as poor and crime-infested. Both 'hoods produce their vigilantes-turned-crime-empires: Vice Kings came out of Sunnyvale in the Back Story, while the first game chronicles the rise the Third Street Saints out of the Row. In Saints Row 2, by contrast, only the Projects still qualify for this trope, since the Saints Row is bought wholesale and rebuilt from the ground up into an ultramodern capitalist utopia by the Ultor MegaCorp (who turn their attention to the Projects next, as it turns out).
  • Deconstructed in Clam Man. Clam Man lives in a very poor part of the city. The buildings are all broken and run down, crime is frequent, and it's implied that many inhabitants of the area are homeless. As it turns out, many people in other parts of the city have complained about how that one area makes the rest of the city look bad, so Mayor King is plotting to demolish the whole area to maintain his PR.
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Night City has two wrong sides of the tracks, conveniently located to the north and to the south of the city center, with both being former corporate pet districts. The Watson district to the north is an Industrial Ghetto, with most of its factories shut down and overrun by gangs since the latest economic downturn, — this is also where the Player Character V lives as a merc, as well as where all of Act I takes place, thanks to the NCPD routinely cordoning the whole district off from the rest of the city. The Pacifica district, meanwhile, is so bad that even the NCPD refused to patrol it, so the mayor eventually declared it an independent town, reducing crime in Night City (on paper) by 3%.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
    • Website Reddit is portrayed as a Not-So-Safe Harbor. At first, the place appears to be a classic Port Town, then you discover that those who lacks upvotes are forced to live in the downtrodden, crime-ridden Downvoting Lane located in the back alleys of the city.
    • YouTube is modeled after Rogueport from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and displays a very similar layout: The West Side features an open air market and the Arena and is in much better shape than the dirty, rundown East Side where a stripper club (only accesible at night) and the entrance to the Absurdly-Spacious Sewer that represent the site's comment section can be found.
  • The city of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is divided by a railroad that intersects through the city. The western side of the tracks is the downtown area which has more high end stores that sells a large variety of products, the homes are better maintained and have higher property value, and there's a large beach with a boardwalk. The eastern side has more run down homes and ghettos that are rife with gang violence, the businesses are far fewer and sell cheaper goods, and there's industrial areas like warehouses and docks. It's also very notable that only the eastern side of Los Santos is affected by the riots caused by the people that are upset at Tenpenny effectively getting a not guilty verdict for a "lack of evidence" for his crimes. The richer neighborhoods aren't affected by the riots.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • In Worm, prior to the Extermination arc, the city was relatively evenly divided between the prosperous and tourist-friendly Boardwalk and the ghettos of the Docks.
  • RWBY has the Kingdom of Atlas, which is vertically divided. The kingdom's original city of Mantle lies literally in the shadow of its sister city Atlas, which is built on an artificial Floating Continent. Atlas is a beautiful, shining city, home to the Kingdom's Huntsman Academy, military command and the wealthy and elite. Mantle is grubby and neglected, with a sizeable industrial ghetto in the Crater, and decaying defenses against the Grimm.

    Western Animation 
  • Arcane revolves around the trope with the city of Piltover, which is a case of Wrong Side of the Strait. On one end of the bridges lie gleaming buildings, wealth and innovation. On the other side is poverty, pollution, and rampant crime.
  • A number of The Simpsons episodes have featured the Wrong Side Of The Tracks district in Springfield. In one episode, Bart literally walks past Mr Burns' opulent mansion, across a set of railroad tracks, and into a dilapidated slum. The Simpsons Hit & Run even has a song called "Wrong Side of the Tracks".
  • In the infamous episode "The Mask" from Courage the Cowardly Dog, Kitty and Bunny are explicitly said to come from "the wrong side of the tracks." Sure enough, Mad Dog's apartment is just on the other side of the titular tracks.
  • Played for laughs in South Park; the town is so small that Kenny is able to live on the wrong side of the tracks and still be next-door neighbors with the other boys.
    • Seen in the episode "Chickenpox", where the boys literally cross train tracks to get to Kenny's house, complete with Cartman singing "In the Ghetto".
  • The Fairly OddParents!: In "The Big Scoop", a literal set of tracks serves as a boundary line between the trailer park where Chester McBadbat resides and the land where Chester's well-off friend A.J.'s home is located.
  • Griffonstone, the homeland of the griffons in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic became this after the Idol of Boreas was lost. Once a powerful and rich kingdom, now a rundown place with poorly-constructed houses and nests, unfriendly, surly citizens, and where businesses rip-off customers with impunity. Gilda admits the only reason she stays there is because she needs to make enough money to get out.
  • The Powerpuff Girls: While riding a bicycle from school to home, Mitch crosses a set of tracks and the other side has a trailer park.
  • Green Eggs and Ham (2019): Train tracks separate the cheerful suburbs of South Shvizelton and the gloomy industrial town of North Shvizelton. The residents' attitudes even change based on what side they're on—when Gluntz pushes a South local across the tracks, he turns from a neighborly fellow who doesn't like to gossip into a shifty, mad-eyed gossiper.


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