Money magazine has an interesting way to rate the best places in the US to live
Apparently, “diversity” ranks high, which makes Atlanta the best place to live in the US:
Money Magazine recently released its list of the best places to live in the U.S. It is riddled with pompous virtue-signaling and plagued by diversity-induced myopia that skews rankings to fit a progressive, multicultural agenda. Indeed, the magazine admits that it “gave preference toward places with populations that were less than 80% white.” Many places probably are, but why propagate such bias instead of applying the criteria (education, jobs, housing, quality of life, etc.) objectively?
Because we all know that way too many white people make a place less desirable live in.
More:
Constrained by its contrived diversity data, Money Magazine proclaims crime-infested Atlanta, Georgia as the best place to live in the U.S. in 2022. The reason: its booming jobs market and “eye on equality.” Unfortunately, the politicians in Atlanta, and other liberal enclaves, often conflate equality with equity, going beyond equal opportunity to ensure equal outcomes.
Pollsters may include crime and safety as one metric to measure voter concerns, but the perverted ranking methods used by Money Magazine use “health and safety” as a criterion, perhaps in an effort to dilute the weighting of crime. And yet, the magazine speciously claims that “we look at the things that matter most to people.”
It makes more sense that health — including access to clinics and hospitals — be considered separately from safety, which is more related to crime stats. And according to those numbers, Atlanta is a very unsafe place. “With a crime rate of 45 per one thousand residents, Atlanta has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes.”
And remember, this is in Money magazine, not the Social Justice Warror Weekly (yes, I made that second periodical up, but I think it has a certain euphonious ring). It’s also an interesting example of how “diversity” has been elevated as a transcendent good in and of itself, and how the word is now defined almost solely as being racial. Not even ethnic diversity matters – for example, if a city was over 80% white but those white groups were very ethnically diverse, that wouldn’t qualify for the label. And diversity of thought, as in political thought? Not desirable or perhaps even undesirable, I guess.
NOTE: Here’s a link to the Money article.
Here’s an idea, find a city that reflects the population of America as a whole then go on from there.
The incidence of street crime and general disorder is the most salient feature to assess. Following that would be the degree of dysfunction in the labor market, the housing market, and the market for medical services. Before or after, depending on your situation, would be school quality. Following that would be the aesthetics of the built environment. Following that a mild climate. Following that would be the prevalence of dining and entertainment options. Real income level is important, but it’s value is vitiated by poor public services and market dysfunction. The general level of the local manners is important.
In re Atlanta: the tapestry of tract development splays over 10 counties which have a total population of 4.88 million. In 2019, prior to the Floydopalooza, there were 261 homicides in these 10 counties, or 5.3 per 100,000. That’s almost precisely the national mean for that year. The worst county was DeKalb, with a rate of 13 per 100,000. In 1980 in the United States, a rate of 12 per 100,000 was about average for a metropolitan zone.
Note, those 10 counties in sum have a black population of 36% of the total, as opposed to 18% for the average metropolitan county and 13% for the average of the country as a whole. Were the perpetration rate of the black and non-black populations about the national mean for each segment, you’d have expected a homicide rate about 80% above the national mean for the whole. I’m guessing both the black and non-black population are tranquil in comparison with their counterparts elsewhere.
The nicer neighborhoods of Atlanta — in my experience those near Emory — are pretty nice.
I now live in Albuquerque, right off UNM, and it’s pretty nice.
Other neighborhoods are otherwise. There are some real “Breaking Bad” neighborhoods in Abq. I stay away from those.
I’m not sure how one adjusts the calculation.
It makes more sense that health — including access to clinics and hospitals — be considered separately from safety, which is more related to crime stats.
Apropos of health, the CDC is headquartered in Atlanta. It hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory in the last two years.
I use to have a subscription to Money Mag, but dropped it years ago when it just starting having more article that were really for the rich, not the Middle Class like me.
I haven’t had any interest in reading Money in oh, 20 years at least. Clearly I’m not missing anything.
When I was building a spreadsheet for places I’d want to live, one of my criteria was whether a state had been shanghai’d by a city. This ruled out places like Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, NYC, Baltimore, Atlanta, Little Rock, DC (which isn’t even in VA), Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, etc.
Interestingly, TN is immunized against this problem by being divided into three separate chunks — which just showed that the issue existed when TN became a state.
If one city in a state becomes dominant, both the city and the state rot.
Diversity, the virtuous sounding synonym of racial quotas. Racist ideology, thru and thru.
Progessives, always in search of euphemisms to disguise their intent. And if one doesn’t exist, they’ll simply change the definitions of commonly understood words, like man or woman.
I’d be much more interested in living where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
This is a great list … of urban hellscapes to avoid, based on the mentioned criteria.
I live outside Atlanta. Everyone knows the areas to avoid. However, the criminals don’t respect boundaries. Elite neighborhoods like Buckhead have been ravaged by crime. They want to secede from the City of Atlanta so they can hire their own police. Atlanta has been run by Dems for Decades. I would avoid the city at all costs.
From a personal historical perspective, I can almost agree that diversity makes for a nice place to live. However, the diversity of which I speak, the one with which I have familiarity is the South Side of Bethlehem, PA in the 1950’s. This is where my paternal grandparents lived, right alongside the massive Bethlehem Steel plant where most of that side of my family worked, including my father and me (summer employment during college). The South Side is where most of the Eastern and Southern European immigrants lived, generally congregating together around the church they attended, which held services in the native tongues of their congregants. Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Italians, Irish and other assorted ethnicities generally kept to themselves socially and religiously, but worked, raised families and conducted commerce side-by-side without any friction. Nearly every block was anchored by an ethnic church, usually Roman Catholic, but also some Orthodox and other assorted denominations, and each one had its own school, where the second generation learned English and other assorted intellectual skills. As time passed, that generation achieved a modicum of financial success, and moved across the Lehigh River into more upscale environs. Then occurred an influx of what the oldtimers referred to as “portorikkans,” usually flowing outward from Philadelphia and its suburbs. Of course, many of the original generation became old and moved or died, leaving empty homes, which eventually became occupied by said portorikkans, followed by blacks as more formerly single family homes were bought by absentee landlords and turned into rentals. As Section 8 housing assistance expanded, the ethnic characteristics of the old neighborhoods changed, and by the time Bethlehem Steel finally gave up the ghost, the South Side was largely black and hispanic. The newly “diversified” South Side became a crime and drug-riddled shithole. This phenomenon has spread generally throughout the Lehigh Valley (Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, PA) and the last time I was there, some 5 or 6 years ago, every one of my surviving family members bemoaned the situation that had arisen, observing that almost everything that had once made the area a great place to live was gone, replaced by a culture that placed no value on traditional virtues and seemed happy to live in squalor and violence. So, say what you will about the equality of ethnic groups, my experience and that of my family belies all the rhetoric. Mere “diversity” is no guarantee of peace, prosperity or happiness; what matters is the quality of the people who comprise the diversity. If the people themselves are lacking intelligence, moral rectitude and ambition, their neighborhoods will reflect it. I daresay that my South Side experience has been replicated in nearly every American city and town and we are all the more miserable for it.
This is a goofy list, I have friends who live in a lot of those cities and they would not agree with their city being chosen as a ‘Best Place to Live’. Those fleeing California cities would be at the top of the list, my wife grew up in San Carlos close to San Francisco and we used to visit family members out there, those still living have moved out of the state, same with friends who used to live in Washington state.
As for Texas and Oklahoma, Hutto is 100 miles from me and it is a bedroom community for Austin, the growth of that town from a little over 1,000 20 years ago to 27,000 mean a lot tract homes and big box stores and rush hour traffic, not a bad place to live but kind of like all of the metro growth around large Texas cities, better than where the new folks used to live. Norman, Oklahoma is a nice town, I spent a lot of years there in the 60’s and 70’s undergrad and grad and have a number of friends who live there now. I would take the Tulsa area over Norman because of the fantastic lakes in that part of Oklahoma but Norman was a good choice, so there’s that.
The political overtones of the ‘best of’ lists should have a buyer beware caution statement under the title since they don’t make a lot of sense as a reference for a person making a major life change move.
Let’s flip the question, is there a magazine worth subscribing today?
The now defunct “Woodpile Report” recommended that you avoid cities and crowds. So any site that is not rural is off the table. The other recommendation, from Paul Kersey, is that you avoid blacks.
These lists have been politicized for a long time, they just do a good job of masking it with vague language like “health and safety.” It’s why they always come up with head scratchers. They always include criteria that you might not value nearly as much as they do and ignore those you do value, like crime stats and weather. How long until they start including abortion laws and the number of abortion clinics per capita?
JFM,
Here’s a better idea. Ignore race totally and completely.
Embrace the MLK ideal.
My idea of the best place to live unfortunately does not exist anymore: Orange County, CA circa 1970s. Mild climate, beaches, good public schools, beautiful women, low levels of crime, you name it. Sure, the cost of living was somewhat higher than other places, and So Cal gets a good, strong shake every 20 years or so, but back then nearly everyone spoke English and you actually knew your neighbors.
A writer much more clever than I opined that diversity is like seasoning a stew: a little bit makes the dish taste more interesting, but if you dump the whole box in you ruin the dish.
Where I live….is a terrible place. Nobody should come here!!!
We really do live in insane times. I would bet a months salary that the person(s) who wrote that crazy article are white people who live in lily white suburban neighborhoods. The key to how good a city is would be to look at the the areas where the Baseball team lives. All of the Dodgers live in the San Fernando Valley and not in Los Angeles.
The other recommendation, from Paul Kersey, is that you avoid blacks.
I live in a town that’s 20% black and has a homicide rate of 2 per 100,000. Mr. Kersey might consider three possibilities: (1) caricatures are not realities; (2) incentives matter; (3) culpability is personal. (Kersey is a pseudonym, by the way).
There is nothing that prevents Democratic politicians, judges, lawyers, higher ed administrators, school administrators, guild bosses, teachers, journalists, and HR hags from ignoring Ibram X. Kendi and Al Sharpton. They ignore the evangelical leadership completely, even though there are more evangelicals in this country than there are black people who’d pay attention to the likes of Kendi and Sharpton. Our odious gatekeeper class do not ignore Kendi and Sharpton because They.Just.Do.Not.Feel.Like.It.
I daresay that my South Side experience has been replicated in nearly every American city and town and we are all the more miserable for it.
Incentives matter.
There’s a road map to suppressing street crime, suppressing school disorder, improving the circulation of the labor market and housing markets, ending the retreat from the labor market on the part of the able-bodied working age population, and reducing the observable decay in the built environment of poor neighborhoods. Your problem is that your decision-making class has no interest in implementing it and most people do not care because the problems do not affect them in a way they can perceive.
“Diversity” is now taken to mean “the number of black people involved”. Therefore, maximum diversity equals “100% black” (which, of course, is the definition of the lack of diversity). On paper, the department I work in is technically diverse: around a third are white, a third are Indian/East Asian, and a third are Hispanic (with a smattering of at least 6 different religions between us and more than half of the total being women to boot). However, according to management, we are in trouble because our department supposedly exhibits ZERO diversity because of the current (unspoken) definition of the word.
Given that “diversity” in all settings always and ever is a euphemism for “more blacks”. it’s easy to see why Atlanta came in first.
The only benefits that I have personally experienced from the diversity of peoples that has moved into California in the last 30-40 years are food and friends.
On food – the choices, both grocery store and restaurant, are so much greater than when I was a kid. I like that.
On friends – I’m white and have my ‘old’ mostly, but not all, white friends from childhood, and have picked up all manner of people as I’ve worked and lived. I do enjoy that diversity.
But as to the supposed benefits of diversity in the workplace, I don’t see it. Smart hardworking people are in all cultures. Not having a culture represented doesn’t mean what you have is inferior. It boils down to diversity for diversity’s sake as far as I can tell.
The whole notion of rating “livability” is a slap at the free market. If you want to find out what cities and states are considered best — using the criteria that people actually use in making a decision of where to live — simply look at where they are moving.
Yes, there are enormous transaction costs and the time to clear the market may be decades or even centuries. But the behavior of customers will tell you quite clearly what they value and where it is located.
Another point — everyone has a different algorithm of what matters and how much. Available jobs, cost of living, weather, crime, schools, recreation, sports, politics, entertainment, culture, lifestyle and attitudes, religion, family, friends …..
The notion that there should be a single calculation that applies to everyone with a particular weighting for each factor is ridiculous.
I always have to stifle a laugh when someone who lives in NYC tells me why. They are always quick to mention the museums and Broadway. I tell them that I can fly into NYC and see both over a weekend without having to put up with all the awfulness the other 363 days of the year. And sometimes I ask when they last went to a theater or one of those museums. Often, it’s been years. Some magazine writers may think they are an important part of “livability”, but the actual behavior of the vast majority of those who live there says otherwise.
Leland:
I rather like Quillette, City Journal, and sometimes The Federalist. One can find them online, though.
Embrace the MLK ideal.
Didn’t exist except for gauzy lines in speeches. IIRC, Ralph David Abernathy and James Farmer had some criticisms of the direction taken by black politics after 1968. AFAIK, Bayard Rustin was the only person of consequence in King’s circle who forthrightly rejected the use of race patronage in the labor market, higher education, and other venues. The only (black) public officials who’ve rejected it have been Republicans, AFAIK. As far as the professoriate and the like, there are a number of figures, but all are considered dissidents to a degree and have taken a pounding from purveyors of the Official Idea in academe.
I’d refer you to a conversation Ed Koch had with Joseph Rauh in 1971, where Rauh was indignant that Koch should even suggest we eschew racial preference schemes. Spinning the roulette wheel, I’m putting my money on the idea that for Rauh, Stanley Levison, and Jack Greenberg, the goal all along was a system of race patronage administered by the courts and administrative agencies.
In reply to Mr. Deco’s response to my earlier comment, I agree that there are certainly available means to control the problem population, er, I mean to deal with all the contemporary issues of urban life that you point out. However, the point of mu comment was that in the “old” South Side, THERE WAS NO NEED TO IMPLEMENT ANY OF THOSE MEANS. THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES CREATED A HIGHLY LIVABLE SPACE WITHOUT RESORTING TO POLITICAL/SOCIAL/LEGAL ENFORCEMENT MECHANISMS. Quality people make for quality environments, irrespective of mere “diversity.” Sorry to shout, but I feel you did not take my meaning. (Now I feel like Garrett Morris announcing News For The Hard of Hearing.)
From 1997, Jared Taylor’s classic “The Myth of Diversity”: https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/july-august-1997/#cover
Leland: “Let’s flip the question, is there a magazine worth subscribing today?”
Neo mentioned Quillette, City Journal, and The Federalist. The first and third are online online. City Journal has a strong online presence, but it’s also a quarterly physical magazine that’s the handsomest publication I’ve ever seen.
Another quarterly that I rate even higher for content is the Claremont Review of Books.