Product Description

Cities Ranked & Rated: Your Guide to the Best Places to Live in the U.S. & Canada provides timely facts and unbiased information on over 400 U.S. and 30 Canadian cities in an easy-to-access format. Whether you're mulling over the idea of relocating, trying to decide where to start out, or just curious about how your hometown stacks up, you’ll be intrigued by Cities Ranked & Rated. In addition to providing population statistics, each city is ranked on a number of essential factors, many of which are of vital interest in today's economy. Categories include: economy and jobs, cost of living, climate, education, health and health care, crime, transportation, leisure, and arts and culture. Easy-to-use tables help you put this wealth of information to work to find the city that best suits your special needs and interests.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #622517 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03
• Released on: 2004-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 832 pages

From the Back Cover
The Latest Facts & Figures on the Best Places to Live in North America!

For anyone thinking about relocating--;or interested in the demographics of American life--;Cities Ranked & Rated offers unbeatable insights into more than 400 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada. Data is provided by Bert Sperling, creator of Money magazine’s original "Best Places to Live" list.

This unique guide combines honest opinions and objective facts to help readers compare cities quickly and comprehensively.

• Data on the 45 fastest growing U.S. cities
• Seperate rankings for Canadian cities--;and comparisons to their U.S. equivalents
• Easy-to-read charts showing the best and worst U.S. cities in over 50 categories
• State-level comparisons of population densities, taxes, government expenditures, educational testing, and more
• Details on how to find more information at Bestplaces.net/CRAR

Highlights Include:

• The strongest job outlook
• The lowest cost of living
• The most days of sunshine
• The best educational opportunites
• The best air and water quality
• The lowest healthcare costs
• The lowest crime rate
• The shortest daily commute
• The lowest automobile costs
• The most leisure amenities

About the Author
Peter Sander is a professional author, researcher, and consultant in the fields of business and personal finance. He has written eight books including Value Investing For Dummies, The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Living on a Budget, Everything Personal Finance, and Niche and Grow Rich. His educational background includes an MBA in Logistics Management from Indiana University and a BA in Urban Affairs and Administration from Miami University of Ohio, and professional training and examination as a Certified Financial Planner (CFP™). His career includes 20 years as a marketing and logistics specialist for a major high-tech firm. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and now living in Granite Bay, California, he has traveled in all 50 U.S. states.

Bert Sperling has been choosing our country’s Best Places for 20 years. He created Money magazine’s original “Best Places to Live” list, and his work continues to appear in the media on a monthly basis. His studies have become part of our national culture, appearing in The Simpsons, Jay Leno jokes, and questions on Jeopardy. His website, Sperling’s BestPlaces (bestplaces.net), has become a popular Internet resource, and provides content to other sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and the Wall Street Journal.
Annually, his “Healthiest Cities for Women” study is featured in SELF magazine. Other recent projects include “Best Places to Retire” (MSN), “Best Cities for Women” (Ladies’ Home Journal), “Great College Towns” (Newsweek), “This Town Rocks! Best Cities for Teens” (Seventeen), “Best Places to Buy a Second Home” (Smart Money), “Best Places to Raise an Outdoor Family” (Outdoor Explorer), “Hot Dating in Small Towns (MTV), “America’s Best City to Live” and “Most Energetic City” (USA Weekend) and features in Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, and Kiplinger’s.
Bert currently makes his home in Portland and Depoe Bay, Oregon, after living in Kodiak (Alaska), Carmel Valley (California), Key West (Florida), San Diego (California), Brooklyn, Hempstead, and East Meadow (New York), Norfolk (Virginia), and Oslo, Norway.

Customer Reviews

The authors may have meant well . . . but this is a disaster.
This book is a knockoff of PLACES RATED ALMANAC, a superior book that has gone through several editions since 1981. The authors obviously weren't speaking to each other when they wrote this turkey. There are too many incredible mistakes and contradictions. Previous reviewers here have had a good time pointing out many. Let me weigh in with more.

Rochester, Minnesota feels like a small town, "although the population exceeds 1 million." Huh? Rochester's metro population is 130,000 according to the book. Could they have meant Rochester, New York? For Rochester, New York, we do see that its metro population is 1.1 million and that one of its big negatives is cost of living. Yet the book rates cost of living there at 90 percent of the US average of 100. How is that a negative? Could they have meant Rochester, Minnesota? They also say Rochester, New York is the "fourth rainiest place in the country," yet the book's data show annual precipitation there to be well under the US average.

You want rain? Let's travel to the Gulf South. Houston's annual rainfall is well above the national average, which the book notes. But it also notes that greater Houston "covers 900 miles, more than twice the size of Rhode Island." Could they have meant "more than half the size of Rhode Island?" Look it up: Rhode Island covers 1,545 square miles. Further east on the Gulf, New Orleans has annual rainfalls well above the national average, too, and the book notes the area's flood-prone conditions and hurricane risk. Yet the New Orleans's "inland water" is just 10 sq. miles, according to the book. New Orleans was just drowned by 600 sq. mile Lake Pontchartrain, an inland body of water that is completely surrounded by New Orleans's parishes. Still further east, Gainesville, Florida, "does not have serious problems with hurricanes." On the next page, however, the college town is rated much worse for "hurricane risk" than New Orleans. Whoa!

Nitpicking? Not at all. I'm just casually paging through this book, getting pretty uncomfortable with the multitude of mistakes.

One of Wilmington, Delaware's negatives is a lackluster forecast for "future job growth." But the book says the area, "led by the chemical industry, became a prosperous industrial center and remains so today with a healthy future job outlook." See what I mean? The book is totally unreliable.

A Publisher's Huge Embarassment
This book rates cities by several livability factors, then adds the ratings to determine who's #1 (it's Charlottesville, VA), who's #2 (Santa Fe, NM) . . . all the way down to who's #331 (Laredo, TX), dead last.

In doing so, the authors have inadvertently switched the ratings of cities with the same name: Columbia (Missouri and South Carolina), Columbus (Georgia and Ohio), Decatur (Alabama and Illinois), Florence (Alabama and South Carolina) Jackson (Michigan and Mississippi), Lafayette (Indiana and Louisiana) and Springfield (Illinois and Massachusetts).

For example: Florence (Alabama) gets Florence (South Carolina's) rosey score for employment, while the latter is saddled with the former's rather grim employment score. Or, Jackson (Michigan) receives Jackson (Mississippi's) milder weather rating, while the latter is stuck with the former's rotten climate rating.

Since a city's ranking depends on the rankings of other cities, these astounding errors affect the final results of every other city listed in the book. You can verify this yourself by comparing ratings summarized in the beginning of the book with ratings in each city's profile.

This book is a fraud. If this had happened in health care or financial services, the authors would have been fired and their study withdrawn.

What were they thinking? Caveat emptor!
Filled with inaccuracies and a mind-boggling rankings methodology that somehow places small, destitute towns higher on the desirability meter than thriving, edge communities with job machines in their infrastructures, this book did at least provide one thing: comic relief.

If you need a book of city stats with reliable data and by authors who understand their core audience, find a copy of the 2000 Edition of Places Rated or get Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class."

Would LOVE to have my $$$ back from this purchase -- next time I'll know better and review the book in person (or at least take to heart the reviews of fellow purchasers on Amazon.com) before turning over hard-earned cash.