Someday I will make my own list of the ten dumbest "Best Cities" lists. This Economist ranking of the "most liveable" cities will make the cut. (I'll put it on my list even though I haven't read the full report and don't intend to -- the Economist is asking $250 for it.)
From the summary:
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability rating quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual's lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. The categories are compiled and weighted to provide an overall rating of 1–100, where 1 is considered intolerable and 100 is considered ideal.
The top cities are Vancouver, Vienna, Melbourne, Toronto, Perth, Calgary, Helsinki, Geneva, Sydney and Zurich. According to Richard Florida (whom I sure was sent a copy gratis), Pittsburgh is the top U.S. city, at 29th.
This kind of list is silly because we already have a much more accurate method of gauging "liveability": just compare prices.
Home prices in a metropolitan area are determined by area wages and amenities. All else being equal, residents must pay more for home prices when a city offers higher wages. Ditto with amenities. If City A is a lot nicer place to live than City B but they offer the same wages, then City A has to be more expensive than City B; otherwise, residents of B would migrate to A until they bid up the home prices there.
We can't measure the value of amenities directly, but we can infer it from wages and home prices. When a city's home prices are low relative to wages, we know there are disamenities lurking about. When home prices are high relative to wages, we know the city must be, all things considered, a very pleasant place to live. (That is, unless home prices are bubbly. Irrationally high home prices can suggest that a place is more pleasant than it really is.)
The ratio of median home prices to median household incomes (see, too, the linked report) tells us quickly whether a city is cheap or expensive relative to wages. It is thus a pretty good indicator of city amenities.
In 2007, the median home in Pittsburgh was priced at 2.6 times the median household income. By comparison, the ratio for Honolulu was 9.1; San Francisco, 8.0; Los Angeles, 7.2; New York, 7.0; Seattle, 5.2; Milwaukee, 4.0; Austin, 3.3; Houston, 2.9. The cheapest was Youngstown at 1.8. Pittsburgh's companions include Rochester, Buffalo, Vincent, St. Louis and Atlanta (the traffic really, really sucks in Atlanta).
Pittsburgh is cheap relative to wages. That tells us a lot about how pleasant it is to live there. Perhaps the Economist ignored weather.
Some of these ratios have doubtless been inflated by the housing bubble. I otherwise would have a hard time understanding why Providence's ratio is 4.4 while Denver's is 3.7. But the bubble would not have artificially deflated home prices in places like Pittsburgh and Youngstown. On the contrary, the easy credit of the mid-2000s likely propped up home prices there like everywhere else.
If we look at consumer preferences as revealed by price, Pittsburgh is not the most attractive or pleasant city in the United States. It's not even close to the top. And if "liveability" does not mean "attractive," then what do we care? Otherwise, the Economist is just quantifying a random combination of factors that it thinks are important but which do not necessarily matter much to city residents.
I do not question that Vancouver and Perth are highly desirable cities. (This is hearsay; I haven't been to either). But if the Economist's methodology doesn't get things right in the U.S., I have no reason to believe that it gets things right anywhere else.
