Cool News (Birmingham, Saks: pine, seafood, police)

[mcalumni01]

Once more...

https://smartasset.com/checking-acco...ege-grads-2020

[Guestposting]

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[bfmx1]

Originally Posted by mcalumni01

Once more...

https://smartasset.com/checking-acco...ege-grads-2020

Wow, just wow. That's one of the bunkest studies I've seen.

So Birmingham is a better job market for college grads than Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, etc.. Hahhaa give me a break.

SmartAsset is about like BhamNow.

[mcalumni01]

Originally Posted by bfmx1

Wow, just wow. That's one of the bunkest studies I've seen.

So Birmingham is a better job market for college grads than Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, etc.. Hahhaa give me a break.

SmartAsset is about like BhamNow.

Okay troll. Same troll that be in other city forum bashing birmingham. Like, for real. How much of a tool can you be. Or just check the profile. Been trolling since 2018.

Example. In the St. Louis city thread, it was a topic about dangerous cities and someone presented a list. This is what this troll posted. Remember now, this is in ST. LOUIS, MO. Nobody there giving a damn about birmingham anyway. You just can't make this up....

"The fact that Birmingham is not even listed as a metro area when Auburn, Anniston, Tuscaloosa, Mobile, Daphne, Fairhope, and Dothan are listed tell me this data might be either bunk or not truly inclusive."

"Birmingham is normally in the top 10 most dangerous. It's going to be similar to Memphis crime statistic wise."

"Not sure how much I would trust the way the article calculated... Also, Birmingham AL isn't even on the FBI list sited in the article? Something is amiss."




{crying laughing emoji}

[TimCity2000]

Originally Posted by bfmx1

Wow, just wow. That's one of the bunkest studies I've seen.

So Birmingham is a better job market for college grads than Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, etc.. Hahhaa give me a break.

SmartAsset is about like BhamNow.

i usually agree with you on stuff like this, and am always the first to say that these lists/rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. but to be fair, it didn't say birmingham was a better job market... it said better city for new college grads.

and to the author of the publication, he chose the 10 metrics below to determine that. honestly, i've seen much more laughable criteria:

"To find the best cities for new college grads, we analyzed data for the 115 largest U.S. cities, looking specifically at 10 metrics across three categories: jobs, affordability and fun. Our job score includes overall unemployment rate, unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders, average earnings for college graduates and number of job listings on Indeed. Our affordability score includes median monthly rent and cost of living. Our fun score includes dining and entertainment establishments as a percentage of all establishments, percentage of the population from the ages of 20 to 29, average Yelp rating for restaurants in the area and average Yelp rating for bars in the area. For details on our data sources and how we put all the information together to create our final rankings, check out the Data and Methodology section below."

so affordability is 3/10 of the score and fun (largely based on dining and drinking) is 4/10, which is why birmingham does pretty well here.

you can make a ranking / list say whatever you want it to say. while you may not agree with the ranking, it does base them on actual numbers.

most people know these lists are fairly meaningless, as the very next list will have us towards the bottom even though the articles may have nearly the same title. if people are using these lists to make up their minds, then that's on them.

i don't know where smart asset is based, but i clicked on the author's bio and he is from virginia, now living in brooklyn. i seriously doubt he set out to make sure he found 10 metrics that would place birmingham in his top 10.

[bfmx1]

Originally Posted by mcalumni01

There's been many of accolade lists mentioning birmingham on them throughout the past 10 years. We all posted those articles at one time or another on here or anywhere else. Why when it involves birmingham, people get in an uproar about it. Yet people believe the not so good list that birmingham be on more than than the good ones. It's just mind bogging the attitude of individuals these days to just be negative for the sake of being negative. I'm not going into another city forum and dismissing whatever someone posts in there. There's no point to that.

That's because birmingham makes the "not so good" lists much more often. The goal is not to bash or bring down Birmingham! But posting something like this is ludicrous. In no universe is Birmingham a top 10 city for college grads. Any list that says so is wrong and a mischaracterization at this point.

Let me tell you why this data is wrong. It fails to consider the low population of Birmingham city proper vs the metro. I.e. the number of restaurants (fun) is quite high given Birmingham's low population making it rank way higher than it should.

Low rent is also a product of them only looking at Birmingham city... Most college grads don't live downtown.

Number of jobs available is for the metro, comparing it to the 252k population of Bham proper, it looks like there's TONS of jobs available.

So, the article/list is just wrong. Yet I know it'll be used by people to say "heyy we're a top 10 city for college grads. "It's better for a college grad to move to bham than Austin, Atlanta, Dallas, etc." That's like me saying Samford could beat Bama. Would you listen to another word I said if I made that claim? No.

[mcalumni01]

A nice UAB athletics promo video....

https://www.facebook.com/UAB.Blazers...9293065830726/

[mcalumni01]

A few agenda items from the city council lately...

https://ironcity.ink/neck-of-the-woo...eeded-for-brt/

[investorscooter]

Y'all's reputation outside your bubble is better than you think:

Had a couple over for social distancing cocktails in our front lawn. She's originally from Tupelo, MS but had her nursing career in Memphis. When I mentioned BHam was our last pre-Covid vacation, she just expressed her enthusiastic surprise over how much the place had going on. Something about "a much cooler place than she had expected". IOW, thumbs up.

I looked at the methodology of the article, and it's generally sound. And they exposed the rankings in the three categories of consideration, so that looks about right.

Anecdotally, my son just graduated UAB nursing, and after having lived in SoCal, Washington DC and Miami, I can tell you that BHam has a better balance of job opportunity (yes! I understand that healthcare careers take up 6 or 7 of the top slots nationally), cost of living (very low) and activities (indoor & outdoor) than most places.

Most American jobs are service jobs. When the service is medical, especially in our aging and unhealthy population, teaching hospitals (attached to university systems) are gifts that keep on giving to a community. That is the simple reason why BHam is on this list, IMHO.

I wish everyone well in the greater metro BHam area and hope that you will bounce back in a big way after this contagion passes.

[MinivanDriver]

Originally Posted by investorscooter

Y'all's reputation outside your bubble is better than you think:

Had a couple over for social distancing cocktails in our front lawn. She's originally from Tupelo, MS but had her nursing career in Memphis. When I mentioned BHam was our last pre-Covid vacation, she just expressed her enthusiastic surprise over how much the place had going on. Something about "a much cooler place than she had expected". IOW, thumbs up.

I looked at the methodology of the article, and it's generally sound. And they exposed the rankings in the three categories of consideration, so that looks about right.

Anecdotally, my son just graduated UAB nursing, and after having lived in SoCal, Washington DC and Miami, I can tell you that BHam has a better balance of job opportunity (yes! I understand that healthcare careers take up 6 or 7 of the top slots nationally), cost of living (very low) and activities (indoor & outdoor) than most places.

Most American jobs are service jobs. When the service is medical, especially in our aging and unhealthy population, teaching hospitals (attached to university systems) are gifts that keep on giving to a community. That is the simple reason why BHam is on this list, IMHO.

I wish everyone well in the greater metro BHam area and hope that you will bounce back in a big way after this contagion passes.

Thanks for the kind words. There's a breed of poster who moves away from Birmingham in body, but can't move away in their heads. So they like to take potshots. Kind of weird if you ask me. Almost as if they need to take swipes at the place in order to validate their decision to move away.

The past decade has been very good for Birmingham in terms of doing the necessary foundational work for future growth. The downtown area has been remade dramatically. We're working hard to diversify the economy to avoid catastrophic effects of being a one-industry town (i.e., US Steel in the late 70s and banking in 2008).

And in ways large and small the larger community seems to be knitting together in ways I haven't seen in 57 years. The simple fact that all the metro mayors are now getting together to agree in principle to abandon poaching business and cooperate in a host of ways constitutes enormous progress. Anybody who scoffs at that is little more than an idiot who doesn't truly understand the history of this burg. I couldn't have been more surprised if I saw a unicorn galloping down 20th Street. I think that kind of community spirit that's taken root will fuel our continued growth once this coronavirus passes.

So, yes, I'm awfully appreciative of what's going on. I travel on business A LOT. And I'm a good listener, too. I devote a lot of time to simply talking to people about their lives. With that in mind, I was out in California back in November for a seminar. The people there were almost all West Coasters, ages 40 and up. Half had been to Birmingham on business in the past several years. One guy, upon hearing I was from here simply said, "Lucky" and the others nodded.

What? He then spent a lot of time talking about our restaurants, our lifestyle, et al. The others weighed in, too. By the time the conversation was over, one woman was looking at local house prices on Zillow, chiefly because she was so exhausted by LA. This is a respected professional with a 90-minute commute and a two-bedroom house. One of the things people don't realize is that while, in raw salary figures, the per capita income of California is far higher than Alabama, the poverty rate is twice as high once you factor in the cost of living.

Hey, I'm not going to say it's the freaking Elysian Fields here. We have big problems to solve. No question about it. But, unlike our past, a lot of the problems to be solved are the ones every metro has to solve. For example, there's one poster who complains about paving on streets. Ummm, have you been to other cities? I've spent some time driving on streets in states such as New York or California or Illinois lately. You want to talk about government letting things slide, those are pretty good examples. Spend time in Chicago, and just about everyone I know is looking for the escape hatch, chiefly because the city and state government is in this fiscal death spiral. And my wife and I have taken note of all the New York tags in Birmingham of late. Mind you, that will go on hiatus for a while while we deal with this pandemic, but that's everywhere.

I think one of the national trends today is the growing realization that while the largest cities might have a host of amenities, they are not exactly easy places to live. Going to a world class museum or a MLB game is one thing. Raising your kids is something entirely different. And having a good quality of life and having something left over in your bank account after paying the mortgage is something that's hard to beat.