The Ups and Downs of Livability Rankings

The felonious Goldilocks, who broke into an unoccupied home and ranked the temperature of porridges and the comfort level of mattresses, might have avoided a lot of trouble by consulting livability lists, the popular rankings meant to help people decide where to take up residence. Such lists stoke ire, excitement, and debate on social media, inspiring impassioned articles in response. They also provide a boosterism bonanza by bestowing metropolitan areas with lofty titles (like The Best City for Singles) that amp up local economies and real estate markets.

Of the many—many—lists claiming which American cities reign supreme, the most anticipated may well be from U.S. News & World Report (overseer of the alluring yet elitist annual colleges and universities lists). The publication looks at 150 of the most populated metro areas, focusing on job availability and pay, housing affordability, and various indicators of quality of life, then weights each metric per a nationwide survey of what people believe is the most important factor to consider when choosing where to live. With the pandemic upending life everywhere (but in some places more than others), this year’s list differs markedly from previous ones, though Boulder, Colorado, remains number one. (Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and Huntsville, Alabama, zoomed up the list to numbers two and three, respectively.)

Boulder has a rather high cost of living—housing runs at roughly 150 percent of the national average—but won the top spot partially for its "quality of life." But what does that really mean? The phrase often gives us pause, bandied about as it is by pot-stirring politicians and NIMBY users on Nextdoor, who sometimes employ it as doublespeak for "white picket fence." The multisource factors that U.S. News & World Report uses to determine the quantity of this quality include crime rates, the availability and quality of health care and education, commute times, and data from Sharecare’s Community Well-Being Index—which considers residents’ satisfaction with their social, financial, community, and physical health, as well as their sense of purpose. Still, is it anywhere close to science?

"These rankings have a lot of subjective bias injected into them—even the ones that draw on a ton of different data sets," says Jeff Andrews, a data journalist who’s written for Curbed and New York magazine. "The way they weight metrics can range from logical to arbitrary, and this has a huge impact on the result. That’s why you get such different answers from list to list."

Indeed, often you’ll find a city that ranks high on one list but lower on another. Honolulu, for example, is the top U.S. city on the Economist’s Global Liveability Index for 2021 at No. 14, but U.S. News & World Report ranks it No. 113—in the U.S. alone.

In other instances, you’ll find glaring omissions, like the absence of Oakland, California—the city with the second-largest Black population in California and one of the most diverse major cities in the country—from U.S. News & World Report’s list, which includes nearby San Francisco (No. 15), San Jose (No. 36), Sacramento (No. 98), and even the Vallejo-Fairfield metro area (No. 135). Similarly, sometimes you’ll see a suburb ranking No. 1 when it’s basically indistinguishable from other suburbs surrounding it. 

As Andrews asks, "Why did one get the top spot and the ones next to it not even rank?"