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This is an annual WalletHub study that measures the quality of city services based upon operating efficiency. Financial services, health, safety, education, economy and infrastructure and pollution are the categories. Albuquerque fared similarly well, ranking at #23. Almost all cities at the bottom are midwestern and southern.
I agree. As usual, these ratings were likely bought and paid for. El Paso and Las Cruces ranked above Colorado Springs? Eugene, Oregon? Long Beach, California? etc.
I agree. As usual, these ratings were likely bought and paid for. El Paso and Las Cruces ranked above Colorado Springs? Eugene, Oregon? Long Beach, California? etc.
Do you have evidence for your claim? Did you look at the details of the metrics they used, and city rankings within each? They seem to make sense to me.
I learned a few things from their rankings: Phoenix and Mesa AZ have the worst air pollution. Denver is near the bottom of the list for high school graduation rate. San Francisco has the worst roads (funny, I was there recently and thought they were fine). Rapid City, SD has the highest infant mortality rate.
Do you have evidence for your claim? Did you look at the details of the metrics they used, and city rankings within each? They seem to make sense to me.
Complete nonsense article. This youtube video breaks it down quite neatly. I actually saw this video breaking the article down last night on youtube, then caught someone posted about the article here!
1. Take note of the "experts". None are urban planners, three are poli sci professors. None are at major universities.
2. The problem, as the video points out, is the weighting of the categories. The data they are pulling from is solid, but it is what they do with that data that is the trick. I can see why you learned interesting info on Rapid City and San Francisco, for example, as the rankings within categories are probably accurate. However, the weighting of the categories is just ridiculous.
4. They also are ranking cities based on several things that cities have very little to do with! Which would make sense if this was just a quality of living article, but it is about "best-run" which to me implies city government.
4. I make no claims that this was a "pay to play" article by various chambers of commerce. However, it is certainly poorly analyzed data. The video above breaks down much of the ridiculousness of the rankings, but here are some of the funnier things I found in the list.
note- This wasn't meant to be an all-inclusive list of cities. So if you are thinking "where's my city?", it's because they didn't analyze it. They just picked 150 towns and cities, seemingly at random. These vary from mega-cities to relatively small places like Cheyenne, WY. It makes no sense to make a list like this in the first place. Also, just want to make it clear, I don't even care about the LC ranking! I honestly like LC a lot more than many of the cities on this list. I doubt it's accurate at 7, but I would personally rather live there than the vast majority of those on the list.
-They have Gary, IN ranked at 74, ranked above Fremont, CA, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and dozens of other places that are far nicer than Gary. I have traveled most of the country in recent years, and Gary has to be near the bottom of places I would want to live. This is not some blanket endorsement of Houston, for example, which has massive problems like every city in America. It is just to say that there is at least more positives to Houston than Gary.
-They have Bakersfield, CA ranked above San Jose, 4 spots above St. Paul, MN and 26 spots above Minneapolis. Anyone who has been to all four of those places knows that is laughable.
-Jackson, MS sits at 65! Are you kidding me? Like Gary, that town should be in the bottom 10-20 on this list, easily. Same with Stockton sitting at 102. OK, professors, whatever you say. Guarantee you none of these guys have spent a minute in Stockton.
-Sacramento and Fresno virtually tied? Sacramento is a far nicer place.
I could go on all day, the whole list is like this and thoroughly messed up. Watch the video, the guy explains it much better than I could.
This and similar articles are simply clickbait to sell advertising and get their numbers up. Have you noticed that in many of them (not this one) you have to keep scrolling to go from one place to another? Those add up. ca-ching.
Another random clickbait listed based on absolutely nothing. I've seen "best of" and "worst of" lists that are nearly identical. One man's meat is another man's poison. That's why we have this forum.
But it's not a ranking of which cities you happen to like best. You can make that list yourself. I always take these lists with a grain of salt, since they can weight different metrics any way they feel like it, and maybe some of those things aren't as important to you as others. They could add or remove one or two data sets and get a completely different ranking. But when you dive deeper into some of the data it can be interesting. I found out things I didn't know before that contradicted my assumptions.
The guy in the video is a geographer, so I'm not sure how his review is relevant.
But it's not a ranking of which cities you happen to like best. You can make that list yourself. I always take these lists with a grain of salt, since they can weight different metrics any way they feel like it, and maybe some of those things aren't as important to you as others. They could add or remove one or two data sets and get a completely different ranking. But when you dive deeper into some of the data it can be interesting. I found out things I didn't know before that contradicted my assumptions.
The guy in the video is a geographer, so I'm not sure how his review is relevant.
Yeah, I'm well aware that it isn't a "most-liked city" article. However, having been to many of the cities and towns on this list, it can be rather obvious and visible which ones are well-run and which are poorly run. Jackson, MS at 65 is just hilarious and almost single-handledly invalidates the entire data analysis. Also, the very top of the list, with Nampa and Boise, shows how absurd the entire study is. Nampa is a bedroom community suburb of Boise. It is a significantly different place than Boise with a different set of issues. Not arguing with the quality of those cities, I like Boise just fine, but they shouldn't be in the same study. Nor should Cheyenne be in the same study as San Francisco.
"I always take these lists with a grain of salt"
As you should! They are clickbait that should be ignored like fake articles like "You'll never believe what Julie from Love Boat looks like now!" (spoiler: she looks great!) or "how to cure your wrinkled old man hands". However, people don't just ignore them. This one caused quite a stir. SF is a ****hole these days, I'm not going to argue that it isn't, but the author of this piece was too dumb to even realize that this was a cherry-picked list, not a full list of American cities. Does she think there are only 150 cities in America? I don't know enough about Wallethub to understand why they have any credibility, but it is weird how these articles get picked up and taken seriously. Journalism these days...
"San Francisco came in at No. 149, making it the second-worst-run city in the country, according to WalletHub's metrics"
"since they can weight different metrics any way they feel like it, and maybe some of those things aren't as important to you as others."
Yeah, that's my point. This is presented as an objective, scientific study when it clearly isn't. It's not presented as "various polisci professors have different opinions on what the best-run cities are".
"The guy in the video is a geographer, so I'm not sure how his review is relevant."
Not all geographers just look at maps, some parts of the field specialize in human geography and how terrain, maps, etc. affect economies, health, traffic, and other factors. I don't know this guy's academic background but his videos are generally facts-based and well-documented. Also, he wouldn't claim that a geography-only team is what is needed. A study like this could use input from urban planners, sociologists, health experts, tax experts, rather than just three polisci professors.
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