Anybody else notice a commonality between most of these cities?

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mli45...able-cities-2/

 

The morons at Forbes cannot make up their mind about if a city is miserable or best ?

Look at the America's Miserable Cities list and then check the next article on America's Best Downtowns.

Truth in advertising, the items used to pick best downtowns were not part of the miserable list; so what makes a downtown best has nothing to do with it being miserable....

 

True but a downtown area is not the entire city, which the miserable cities list is rating. I interpret it as a city has nice areas and bad areas and the miserable cities list averages everything together and rates the whole package, but the best downtowns rates just one area of the city. Also interesting is that a downtown area making the best list can not overcome the negatives of the city to keep it from beign on the worst cities list.

 

This was my exact thought.
The reasons for Chicago making it to the miserable city list were kind of weak.
Weather ( it is not Aruba, what a shock )
Commute time ( 31 min avg is bad ?? )
- If you are in Chicago proper and driving to work, you need your head examined. I rank NYC's public transit as the only one better than Chicago's.
High Prop taxes
- Cook County passed a law that the prop vales could not decrease any lower than the time of the passing of the law. Oddly enough, it was only 1 year into the slide on the 3 yr averaging. They did this so they would not have to raise the rate. 5 years on, they are trying to raise the prop tax rate... So this is valid.

Back to the question, if I had to guess I would say the city is run by Democratic mayors ?

 

None of the forbes worst/best is true. It's all mindset. Plus this isn't 1972, theres something called the internet and anyone can have a business online and be able to get their income world wide.

 

The problem with Chicago's system is it's totally Loop-centric. It's GREAT if you are going to and from downtown, but to get from one part of the city to the other, or even from one burb to another, you are pretty much SOL unless both locations are on the same "spoke". You pretty much have to go downtown then back out. Chicago is not the only large city with this issue.

 

I was talking Chicago proper.
Getting around in the burbs is for crap on public transit. It is a bus that sits in the same traffic as cars.

Getting around in the city works just fine taking a bus to a train through downtown and back out another line. It is not like the city is 100 miles wide by 100 miles long.

 

I didn't go as far as checking who was currently running the cities, but your pretty close. Just about all of the cities are notoriously liberal and have been for a long time. This gets me wondering and thinking. If the liberal way is so good, then why are so many of the liberal cities miserable? You don't see too many cities that are notoriously conservative on the list. In fact when I look at the list the few cities I saw that I didn't immediately think were liberal I thought were middle of the road leaning left. I couldn't say wow they are conservative to any of the cities. Could it be that people are happier when they are allowed to succeed or fail based on their own merits? Could it be that the liberal agenda is so flawed that, like many conservatives have said, it guarantees equality of outcome and angers the rich because they have to pay so much, while the poor are angry that they don't have more? I just found it interesting that most of the cities were liberal.

 

My city of Bakersfield, California, is on the list, and we are pretty conservative.

It looks like our main strike is air quality. Basically, we are ringed on 3 sides by mountains, and the smog from urban areas to the north (like San Francsico) is swept our way.

We do have a weak economy, high unemployment, a devastated housing market, an extremely high teen pregnancy rate, etc...There have also been some rather dramatic demographic shifts over the last 20 years.

 

Anyone who has had to do business in a downtown metro area knows that it's miserable.

Where people have lower rights and higher taxes, misery abounds.

 

I have traveled this country extensively and would be hard-pressed to include Chicago on a "Worst Cities" list -- unless your criteria was "annoying blue-collar guys who can't grasp that no one cares about the '85 Bears anymore".......

Plus, how can you compile such a list and not include either Newark or New Orleans -- both of which I have been to on numerous occasions and are easily the biggest dumps I have ever seen in my life.......