There are two things about all those “best of” lists that newspapers, magazines and websites love to publish: 1) they’re mostly bullshit, and 2) they’re irresistible.
The main objective of all these lists — the skinniest city in America, the most business-friendly, the best place to raise a family, the best outdoor city, etc. — is to sell more newspapers or magazines or steer readers to your website. The criteria are often questionable and the question of how to assign value once you’ve established criteria is more questionable still.
And yet they are irresistible. Case in point: Livabilty.com’s latest ranking of the Top 100 Cities with populations of 20,000 to 350,000. I knew it would be mostly bullshit and probably not worth the trouble of reading through the list, much less trying to figure out how the rankings were made, but still…
Would Billings make the cut? Would Missoula and Bozeman make the cut and be way higher on the list? Would some obvious hell hole outrank us?
Assailed by these and a dozen other related questions, I wandered from the press release to the website to the criteria and so on deeper into the site. And yep, Billings made the list, just barely, coming in at 98 out of 100. Still, we made the list, and hundreds of other communities were left to gnash their teeth in envy.
And yes, Missoula and Bozeman were on the list, Nos. 8 and 11, respectively, and even Helena surprised me by coming in at No. 52. For Billings, our highest scores came in housing, “amenities” and economy. Amenties include things like the town’s physical setting, parks, views, arts and culture, all that good stuff.
Surprisingly, our lowest ranking was in “infrastructure.” But if you drill down into the criteria, “infrastructure” isn’t even listed, but appears to be subsumed under “transportation.” And the transportation ranking seems to be based mostly on commute times. I would have guessed we’d do well in that regard, but I suppose all those people in the far reaches of the Heights commuting to work in the far reaches of the West End skewed the stats. Oh, well.
The larger question, as always, is what does it all mean? Not much. Montana had four cities on the list while Iowa had five, including Des Moines and West Des Moines. I don’t know how East Des Moines feels about that, but I know I couldn’t live in Iowa under any circumstances.
My rough look at the rankings showed that only a few other states had more “livable” cities than Montana. California had a whopping 22, which I guess isn’t too surprising, since California, in terms of size, diversity of terrain and economy is more of a nation than a state. Washington and Oregon each had six cities on the list and Colorado had four. Poor old Wyoming had zero.
On a per-capita basis, I don’t think any other state came close. Four cities in a state with just about 1 million people. Not bad. Even if it is bullshit, it’s not bad.
