Product Description

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
• Separate rankings and ratings for 27 Canadian cities
• 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 opportunities
• 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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236454 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 864 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

• Separate rankings and ratings for 27 Canadian cities

• 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 opportunities

• 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

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and indispensible, but use with care
This book is full of fascinating information about 375 metropolitan areas in the U.S., as well as 27 Canadian metropolitan areas. Each area is evaluated and described in terms of the demographic characteristics of its population, the climate, the economy, taxes and cost of living, educational factors, commuting, health care and other health-related factors, leisure activities, and art and culture. Each of those categories is subdivided into multiple, more specific measures.

Based on the listed raw data, the book ranks the metropolitan areas against each other, in each category and overall. The first part of the book has a short section describing the meaning of the data for each category, along with a list of the top 30 and bottom 30 cities for each statistic.

The bulk of the book (669 pages out of the total of 850) consists of a 1-to-2-page description of each U.S. metropolitan area. The description consists of a listing of all the statistics in each category for the given metropolitan area, preceded by an intelligently-written introduction which provides the kind of information that isn't directly reflected in the statistics. From my knowledge of the cities with which I am personally familiar, I would say the writers did an excellent and accurate job of portraying the flavor of each metropolitan area.

BUT:

If you are going to use this book to make important personal decisions, make sure you do your own research, and double-check the information that's most important to you. I found several errors in the book - and since I have no knowledge at all of most of the topics covered, there are most likely many other inaccuracies that I'm incapable of identifying myself. Examples:

The book says that the average metropolitan area has 6 snowfalls of at least 1.5 inches annually. It also says, however, that the average metropolitan area has an average TOTAL annual snowfall of only 7 inches. Of course, it is impossible for both of those numbers to be accurate.

One of the numbers given for each city is the number of major airports within 60 miles. It says that there is one major airport within 60 miles of Eugene, Oregon, but the nearest major airport (Portland) is more than 100 miles away. In the listing for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, they make the preposterous claim that there are FOUR major airports within sixty miles, where in reality the closest major airport (Baltimore) is ninety miles away. The discrepancy has nothing to do with the definition of "major," because they also give the daily number of flights at those airports, which makes it clear that their definition of "major" does not include the airports in Eugene or Harrisburg.

Furthermore, the data doesn't always mean what it appears to mean, so read the discussion of the data toward the beginning of the book before turning to the individual statistics for the cities you're interested in. One glaring example is the ranking for "water quality," which has nothing to do with the healthfulness of the drinking water. It is a measure of the "quality of runoff and groundwater," which is decidedly NOT what most people are interested in when they investigate water quality in a prospective place to live.

Finally, in their otherwise helpful and well-written introductions to the metropolitan areas, and even in their interpretation of the statistics, the writers occasionally allow their politically correct prejudices to influence their comments and rankings. One amusing example is the following sentence from their introduction for Portland, Oregon: "Although average commuter times are long, the area has good public transit with a light-rail system among the nation's best." In other words, the city is to be commended for following policies the authors approve of, even if the evidence shows that those policies don't help. (Just try reversing the order of the clauses in the quoted sentence above, and you'll see what I mean.)

Also, the book's ranking system assumes that people will always want maximum racial diversity, minimum taxes, and a mild climate. You might prefer a Normal Rockwell setting, you might want the kind of governmental services that are available only in high-tax jurisdictions, and you might enjoy long brisk winters or searing desert heat.

So the book is fascinating, helpful, and can drastically shorten the time and trouble it takes to research any metropolitan area. But you have to read it intelligently, and you should do your own verification of information that really matters to you.

INACCURATE!
If you analyze the ranking and ratings of this book, you will find very serious misrepresentations! Try to Compare two of your familiar cities one has low crime rate and the other much higher. What you will find is that they are about the same!! Try San Francisco and Oakland, San Jose and Richmond, CA. When you are looking for a safe place to live and raise your kids, you are likely ending up with a crime hovering place. I don't have any bias against rich or poor, but just the nature of the book--it is inaccurate and misleading!

Great data, but strong bias against large cities
Though my composite rating of this book would stand at 4 stars, I feel (just as with the first version) that it is necessary to subdivide my review into two areas: usefulness of the data, and usefulness of the rankings/ratings.

Usefulness of the data: 5 stars
The scope of the data, already excellent in the first version, has been expanded even more in this rendition, now including useful cultural indicators such as percent Democrat/Republican and religious observance %age, useful for people (like me) who give great weight to cultural/political allegiances in metro area choice. The 150 or so pages in the introductory section provide a great explanation of the statistics and the methodologies used in obtaining them, along with dozens of informative tables showing how the cities stack up against each other in everything from educational attainment to average tax burden to long-term population growth. Some "up-and-coming" cities newly in the 100,000-150,000 population range, such as Bowling Green, KY, have been added, expanding choices. The treatment of metropolitan areas remains problematic, though, as cities are often split off from their suburbs; for example, Wayne County, MI is treated as its own "urban area", while the suburban Detroit counties - Oakland, Macomb, etc. - are grouped in their own category. The same is true in Southern California, Dallas-Fort Worth, and South Florida, but not in other areas; this does give a more granular view of the cities, but it also greatly distorts some statistics because it is only counting one county out of a vast metro (i.e., number of top-ranked universities, physicians per capita, average commute time, etc.) Caution should be used in analyzing these "metro" areas.

Usefulness of rankings: 2 stars
I think that the ranking system in this series is utter garbage, but that is a fault common to most "ranked and rated" literature. It is highly, highly biased against large metro areas; of the top 15 metro areas on their scale, the only large city present is Portland, OR (interestingly enough, Atlanta was #7 in the first version.) Factors such as Transportation and Cost of Living were heavily weighted, automatically handicapping any large urban area; in both editions of the book, smaller-sized cities (Charlottesville, VA in the first and Gainesville, FL in this one) have taken the top spot. Though the details behind the ratings are absolute (i.e., average commute time), the importance assigned to each category is highly subjective; some people are not bothered by traffic, crowding, and $500,000 houses if they are in a culturally and economically thriving region (count me as one), whereas these factors would make other people miserable. Key point: take them with a grain (or an entire plate!) of salt.

Overall, Cities Ranked and Rated is an excellent statistical and data source for those researching various metros, but I would recommend relying much more on analyzing the actual numbers than on the arbitrary, subjective rating scheme.