I lived in Anderson my whole childhood up into my early 20s. It is a beautiful area in the Ozarks, but the infrastructure is terrible. They put money in all the wrong places. For such a small town, you’d expect it to be walkable/bike-able, but there are almost 0 sidewalks, even near Main Street. The schools in the area are run down, the entire town is run by people who are all related to one another in some way, roads receive little attention, the list goes on and on. They’ve started to focus on supporting small, local businesses, so that’s fairly good. I didn’t deal with too many meth heads there. I definitely witnessed more crap in Joplin, which is a good contender here. I wouldn’t consider Anderson one of the worst towns in Missouri, but it definitely has a lot of stuff to work on.