More on happiness in, and with cities, a topic I touched on
in “Land
of mope and worry.” Wages and housing alone don’t predict where people want
to live very well. Cities like San
Francisco, which have hideously high housing costs and awful traffic, nonetheless
are always ranked toward the top on most lists of places people want to live
in, and also rank high with the people who already live in such places.
It’s pretty much accepted that people will accept lower
wages or pay higher costs of-living to live in a city with desirable amenities
(climate, safety, clean air) that are measured by various quality of life indices. David Albouy, now an associate
professor of economics at the University of Illinois in Chambana, recently
wrote a paper describing
his attempts to better measure quality of life factors. He found that mild
seasons and sunshine, hills to liven the scenery and nearness to large bodies
of water (“California, here I come!”) account for most of the quality-of-life
differences between metropolitan areas, and that his adjusted quality-of-life measures better explain the otherwise puzzling “livability” rankings.
The author ranked states by livability according to his
revised measures. Western and New
England states had the highest qualify of life; Illinois stands 26th among the states. As for metro areas, Decatur ranked third – from the bottom, ahead of
only Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas
and Kokomo, Indiana. Unhappy news in every way.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2014.
