Are the Best Places to Live in America the Best for You?
Rodolpho Carraso
January 1, 2000
Soon after the birth of my first child, I picked up two books and a magazine touting "The Best Places to Live in America." Having just spent nine months wondering how to raise my child and cringing at the ways I might mess him up, I thought that these guides could at least help me pick the right place to mess him up in.
The heftier of the two books, Places Rated Almanac, is the quality-of-life equivalent to the Guinness Book of World Records. It's packed with arcane details. The average commute in Bellingham, Washington, is 36.1 minutes. Tulsa, Oklahoma, suffers 818 auto thefts per year. Virginia Beach, Virginia, is bulging with 588 general doctors, 470 specialists, and 428 surgeons. Fifty Fabulous Place To Raise Your Family, meanwhile, contains interesting profiles of selected cities, glossing over the sort of stats that Places Rated revels in.
But piles of information and opinionated editors do little to answer the question of the best place for my family to live. "We don't see cities as they are; we see them as we are," postmodernizes Money magazine's Jon Gertner, introducing their "Best Places to Live 2000 Guide": "We know a culture hound delighted by New York City might find a small town limiting, and that a sun devil at ease in Phoenix could find a Minnesota winter rough. Great places to live? Sure. It just depends on what you want." Indeed. A single female friend of mine has lived in a refurbished skid row apartment building, yards from downtown L.A.'s overflow of homeless people, for five years. That's the best place for her to live. I, personally, spent my junior high and high school years in a quiet, prosperous suburb, and felt displaced the entire time. Neighbors rarely spoke across fences and shrubbery, making ...
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