{ Category Archives }
The rugged adventurers at Outside magazine have named their “Best Towns in America,” and topping the predictably outdoorsy choices like Ithaca, New York and Crested Butte, Colorado, is, inexplicably, Washington, D.C. “The magazine said one of the things it was looking for is towns that have turned things around.”
Cities usually get a little excited about making it on to the latest best-places ranking, sure, but how often do you see one that’s thrilled to have almost placed on such a list? That would be Baltimore’s reaction to its not-quite-top-10 finish on the new “America’s Best Cities for Design” survey.
Also in best-cities news: why the Texas fixation on so many of these lists? Forbes ranks Houston, Dallas and Austin as the top three cities for recent college grads.
Hyde Park — the new Ann Arbor? In terms of being shorthand for “effete liberal intellectual enclave”, perhaps. Hyde Park is definitely an enclave of some sort; try driving into it from Lake Shore Drive without having memorized all the one-way streets and “Do Not Enter” signs, or taking public transportation there at off-peak hours. Although how effete can you be if you live in a neighborhood where things like this happen on a regular basis?
You don’t need to be a “prestigious business magazine” to get local newspapers and Chambers of Commerce talking about your city rankings. RelocateAmerica, an obscure site owned by a real estate broker in Michigan, has just released its list of the best cities to live, and towns like Aiken, Georgia (which made the top 100 but not the top 10) are just ecstatic about their placements. After all, if you can’t trust real estate brokers to value things correctly, whom can you trust? Says an Aiken county administrator, “That kind of verifies what those of us who already live here know … Aiken has a lot of big-city features with a lot of cultural activities without losing that small town feel that people love so much.” That sounds familiar.
As pointed out in the MSN story, top-ranked Charlotte also made Forbes’ list of “most miserable cities.”
What’s the difference between a “classic college town”, a “college friendly city” and a “college centered city”? You won’t get many clear answers from this befuddling Inside Higher Ed story. Madison and Boston are somehow both exemplars of the third category, while Ann Arbor fits into the first, a group characterized by “dive bars and bookstores and movie theaters that still charge less than a meal.” A movie ticket in Ann Arbor does indeed cost less than a meal in Ann Arbor.
There’s not a lot new here. Academics want to move to “your usual suspects of hot cities to live: New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Austin” (although, as pointed out in the comments, they often have very little choice.) This has been the case for a long time. Long enough, anyway, that if your job is compiling a best-cities list every year, you might almost be inclined to start touting Provo and Boise just to break up the monotony. Or at least to transfer the monotony to anyone credulous enough to take your rankings seriously.
The latest best-cities list is out! Kiplinger’s “Best Cities to Live, Work and Play” hasn’t hit newsstands yet, but local boosters are already gushing about their towns’ rankings, which depended heavily on “bohemian index” and “creative class” indicators. “What makes a city great? That’s obviously subjective, but according to the prestigious business magazine, it’s towns with strong economies, plenty of jobs, reasonable living costs and places with fun things to do,” Boise’s KTVB proclaims. Yes, Boise, which ranked fourth. “I’m not at all surprised by that because we’ve received so many accolades over time,” says the host of an entrepreneurship forum hilariously called Idavation. (And you Ann Arborites thought that “mitten envy” was bad.)
Not to be outdone, Utah’s Daily Herald cites Provo’s “burgeoning reputation as a computer software center with easy access to outdoor hotspots” as the reason for its tenth-place finish, using some definition of “burgeon” with which I’m not familiar. “It’s a pristine and good place,” explains a Kiplinger’s senior editor, echoing his magazine’s writer who described Provo as “a pristine software Mecca.” Nothing says creative and bohemian like “pristine.” If you read through the methodology, Kiplinger’s writers arrived at their ratings by going over the surface of each city with white gloves.
Says one Provo realtor, “Of all the people I’ve placed, only one couple told me they were unhappy. They wanted more nightlife.” Killjoys. Why don’t they just start a blog or something?