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!
