Livability

Forbes just released its annual "America's Most Livable Cities" list. Here's the criteria:

To form our list, we looked at quality of life measures in the nation's largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We eliminated areas with populations smaller than 500,000 and assigned points to the remaining metro regions across five data sets: Five-year income growth per household and cost of living from Moody's Economy.com, crime data and leisure index from Sperling's Best Places, and annual unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Top 15:

15. Little Rock, AR
14. Peabody, MA
13. Madison, WI
12. Harrisburg, PA
11. Denver, CO
10. Pittsburgh, PA
9. Worcester, MA
8. Baltimore, MD
7. Cambridge, MA
6. Oklahoma City, OK
5. Tulsa, OK
4. Stamford, CT
3. DES MOINES, IA
2. Bethesda, MD
1. Portland, OR


Nice to see Des Moines getting some love. I must admit, even after enduring five months of winter (and a bunch of snow yesterday - April 5), I really like living here.


(ht: Generation Iowa)