Well, at least Forbes Magazine thinks so!
Forbes Magazine: America's Most Livable Cities 2009
Salem News: Forbes: Peabody one of the country's 'most livable' cities
Now I have been reading some of the comments at the Salem News... and they are really quite ill informed.To start with, Forbes defines the Greater Peabody area as having 700,000+ people. This is explained in the article quite well. They were using US Census Metropolitan Statistical Areas which include a larger area than simply the named location. So, as the article states, this is more of an honor for the North Shore in total rather than just Peabody alone.
Here is the explanatory paragraph from the article which explains exactly what is included in the rankings...
Behind the NumbersAny way you wish to cut this, it is a big plus for our City. Of course the easy jokes have already been made (I guess the Forbes people didn't visit!) but a little fun never hurts.
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 (Moody's)
- Cost of living (Moody's)
- Crime data (Sperling's Best Places)
- Leisure index (Sperling's Best Places)
- Annual unemployment statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
I think most people are rather proud of Peabody and like the community feel of the City. I have been getting emails from several friends around the US saying "Congrats!" for living in such a good place! Of course, some of these same folks emailed me a few months back to laugh at our 9/11 police contract... but that is a different topic!
5 comments:
To those who have suggested that "Forbes must never have been to Peabody", Steve Forbes actually made stop in Peabody during his 1999 run for President. I guess our fair city made quite an impression on him.
Great comeback Anon! I will use it! Thanks!
OG says...
it would be very easy for a city that is crisscrossed by three major highways to lack a sense of community but yet there still is a sense of community here in Dark City...if you are around and about and if you still have younger kids you might be surprised as to how many people you really know here. We have our issues for sure(and don't think for a minute that other cities/towns don't have their own challenges) but there are a lot worse places that you could be living folks.
Anon April 7 5:40,
Whom was the mayor in 1999?
There is your answer!
We live in the Peabody that the majority of Peabody voters desire. Those that moved to Peabody or have decided to remain here did so, in large part, for the low taxes. It was just a matter of time before the decades of under-resourcing caught up with us. There have been a handful of candidates that have run over the years on a platform of investing in our community, but nobody will remember their names because they did not and never could get elected in this city. If you want to live in a community where the schools are good, reasonable services are available, the quality of life is valued and the future is bright then you need to put a for sale sign on your lawn and relocate. Good luck to all of those Peabody residents who would rather pretend that there's such a thing as "a free lunch", but as for me - I'm outa here as soon as I can.
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