Boulder and Raleigh-Durham ranked best places to live yet again

It's fine if you can afford it....

Let's see Boulder have plenty of creepy serial killers moved there for the easy access to forest burial. Raleigh is a Republican mess with limited infrastructure. Sounds like some realtor are padding the ranking for their unsold houses,

Raleigh is a very educated blue city

Raleigh and Boulder have had red hot real estate markets for many years

Boulder just had a mass shooting in a Kroger supermarket.

But it is a super rich enclave to the city of Denver.

I live like 40 mins from Boulder. It’s nice, but not all that.

I love Boulder. And Durham

Raleigh-Durham is the airport.

Zero confidence in a survey that ranks Huntsville, AL as #3, given the shockingly low vaccination rates in Alabama and overabundance of Trumpist Fascists and other MAGAts.

That would severely affect Quality of Life for me.

OTOH, I can see many of our DLers wanting to live there, if for no other reason than that they could refer to it as "Cuntsville" (behind closed doors) and think they were very clever for doing so.

I live about 20 minutes from Boulder. It used to be great ... in the 90s. Now it sucks.

Doesn't living in Raleigh or anywhere in N.C. mean that the moment you leave the city's borders, you're basically in Deliverance Country? In other words, you're trapped in the city unless you want to go to a Trump rally and squeal like a pig.

Yes! It's horrible!

I beg to differ. Johnston County is filling up with New Yorkers. New subdivisions springing up all over

I'm trying to keep them away!

Dataloungers hate everywhere and everything, no matter who, what or where is ranked.

San Francisco is #15??

[quote]Doesn't living in Raleigh or anywhere in N.C. mean that the moment you leave the city's borders, you're basically in Deliverance Country?

Most cities in America are like that.

Mrs. Patsy Ramsey didn’t waste any time moving out.

These studies are mostly bullshit. A couple of years back I read that Maryland was one of the happiest places in the U.S. I've never seen a more miserable and spiteful group of assholes than Marylanders. I've nothing against Raleigh or Boulder but the truth is that it's nearly impossible to know if an area is right for you without at least visiting. Too many people buy into hype, dubious studies like this, or impressions of places based on decades old stereotypes.

As we all know, a place automatically becomes better when it becomes filled with New Yorkers.

R10, that is true in almost all of the US.

Boulder is a beautiful setting. Raleigh-Durham is the kind of city that would score well on a test.

Like the blandly handsome man who, on a checklist, has everything going for him but in person has no spark, no sex appeal, the equivalent in cities tend to score well on these things. And, one half step above Yahoo News, U.S. News & World Report has a scores of these listings, always the same as last year but for a couple of changes. It's not a list of surprises, and it won't be next year either.

But it’s the most coveted best cities list that has been credited in driving domestic immigration. When Raleigh first was named best place decades ago, it saw an overnight sharp increase in immigration to the city

Largest Hindu community on the east coast.

Raleigh-Durham?

The Triangle would be a more appropriate name, but yes.

More towns than just Raleigh and Durham.

Again, Raleigh-Durham is the airport, not the name of the area. Use The Triangle unless you want it known you do not know anything about this place.

The Triangle is more than two cities, Raleigh and Durham. This is only about two cities, not the entire metro region

[quote] Boulder just had a mass shooting in a Kroger supermarket.

by a person who lived in Arvada, Colorado and there were over 25 King Soopers (not Kroger but owned by Kroger) closer to his home than the one in Boulder that he shot up.

Then the person needs to say Raleigh or Durham, never Raleigh-Durham, R27.

I lived in Boulder for less than 2 years in the early 90s. While it has the illusion of beauty, I never liked it or settled in there. Plus, at that time there was no gay male dating scene, never got any sex there. Been in the Bay Area since then and found “home” for me.

Boulder is also a fabulous place to die.

Boulder is a lovely place but wasn't built for the population that lives there now. It's a nightmare to get around or park anywhere.

So the rankings: To make the top of the list, a place had to have good value, be a desirable place to live, have a strong job market and a high quality of life.

Good value? That depends. Desirable place to live? For whom? High quality of life? Another subjective ranking.

These are all bullshit rankings so smaller cities can slap themselves on their back for living in relative backwaters. It's for boring straight people to say - hey, we're the REAL America - we're ranked one of the best places to live! For boring-ass straight WHITE people.

Also in the top 25: #3 Huntsville, AL; #4 Fayetteville, Arkansas; #6 Colorado Springs; #9 Sarasota, FL; #13 Des Moines, IA; #17 Fort Collins, CO; #18 Melbourne, FL; #22 Jacksonville, FL; #24 Spartansburg, SC; #25 Omaha, NE.

That's fucking awful company. I'd rather shoot myself than live in any of these areas. And the Colorado and Florida bias in this survey is off the charts.

As usual, they are viewing Raleigh and Durham as a package city. So, Wow Durham and Raleigh often are rank high separately as best cities for this and that, this ranking just views them as a solitary unit similar to Twin Cities.

Likewise, Greensboro and Winston-Salem are ranked as one city, although that seems to be less done now.

I meant GSO and W-S are often ranked as one city, not always or even usually

We approve!

A failed news magazine that runs easily gamed college rankings isn't where I look for ideas about great places to live.

Somebody is bitter their college is low ranked

Actually, a lot of natives of Raleigh and Durham wish they would stop ranking us so high. Very few are happy when we see shit like this.

Yes, the rankings and media buzz Have only compounded the problems surrounding rapid population growth. Too many NY transplants

[quote]Again, Raleigh-Durham is the airport, not the name of the area.

Technically, the airport is called RDU.

That is the airport code, R42, and it is used a lot. The official name is the Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Dude, we know

Damn R43, calm the fuck down. How many times do you need to post that?

It isn't much an airport, airlines keep abandoning it as a hub.

If it's in a red state, you can have it.

Boulder is a great place to raise children. And it's not a bad place to lower one into the ground, either!

Especially when the child in question is an incorrigible pint-sized harlot.....

It seems like their list really value that sort of mid sized city, or what some might call a "cosmoburb."

It's the places that are large enough to have some varieties of housing (including rentals, condos, etc.) and has a downtown area with some restaurants, cafes and culture....but that AREN'T overwhelmingly huge cities with massive amounts of traffic, infrastructure problems, etc.

Boulder is often compared to Madison, WI and Ann Arbor, both also on the list (lower, one assumes, because of climate).

There are big cities on there, mind you, but they're lower on the list.

Those top cities all have one other thing in common.......

[quote] boring-ass straight WHITE people.

Bless her heart, R33 nailed it.

Somehow I doubt they're all that great if you're gay or a minority.

This list puts Pittsburgh lower than Buffalo or Rochester NY, two pits of humanity.

FAIL.

Richard Florida made one brilliant move R49-- when he wrote about the "creative classes" he included a whole lot of jobs that no one thinks of as "creative" -- lawyers, bankers, tech--and so basically the entire meritocratic upper middle class was able to think of itself as "creative" and talk about how places like Raleigh were full of "creative types" when in reality they're talking about a bunch of law firm associates.

Florida was a huckster who sold his gentrification idea to a lot of dumb city planners. People DID want to be around nice things, nice shops and nice, non-criminal people....who doesn't? But he packaged it well.

I will say that I met him and attended a reading he did, and while he's presentable enough in a photo, he has some intense magnetism that must be experienced in person to be understood. When he's on stage doing his thing all you notice is his body, his big hands and feet.....I wanted him inside me quite deeply, as we'd say here. He has *something* and knows how to turn it on.

R50, black and Latin people love Raleigh and Durham, and are moving there in droves. It seems every other Black or Latin person is planning to move to North Carolina

I don't think these rankings are based on anything Richard Florida wrote about - high concentrations of tech workers, artists, musicians, lesbians and gays, and 'bohemian' class. His main point was that attracting and retaining these types is better for the economy than building a big sports stadium, shopping mall, or iconic buildings. I agree with that.

But trust, the large metro cities of the US are not losing any sleep over not being in these rankings - the majority of which are cities of white Republicans on the edge of Nowheresville.

Ask person in the top 10 cities of the US if they would live in these areas, 95% would say fuck that shit. The other 5% were looking to move and weren't from there anyway.

Florida has still hung on to the notion that people are flocking to dense big cities even as statistics showed suburbs and exurbs are the biggest population gainers and big dense cities are in serious population and even employer decline

[quote]Professor Florida's theories hold that metropolitan areas with high concentrations of high-tech workers, artists, musicians, lesbians and gay men, and a group he describes as " hip bohemians ," are associated with a high level of economic development. Florida postulates the theory that the creative class fosters an open and dynamic personal and professional environment. This environment, in turn, attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. It suggests that attracting and retaining high-quality talent, as opposed to focusing solely on infrastructure projects such as sports stadiums, iconic buildings and shopping centers, would be a prime harnessing of a city's regeneration resources for its long-term prosperity. .

[quote]It has designed its own ranking system that rates cities using a "Bohemian Index," a "Gay Index," a "Diversity Index" and similar criteria.

In theory Richard Florida's ideas has appeal, even if what sounds good from a distance doesn't look so good on closer examination. Still, I wouldn't move anywhere that didn't have artists, musicians, bohemians, and lesbians and gays. For me all of those things are positive indicators, but so is the physical beauty of a place, its history, the quality of its housing stock, its food, its connections to travel, etc. These are some of the things that make a place vibrant and interesting and attractive to me, and they are definitely central deciding factors if I were to move. The bullet points of Florida's ranking system matter more to me than the number of Fortune 500 companies that are expanding in the area, or growth lines of population, commercial office space, strip malls, chain restaurants, and other measures of a more corporate vibrancy.

I'm lucky that I can live most anywhere I would want to live, and being tied to a corporate headquarters or leased office space isn't an issue. I'm also old enough that that the things I like matter more than climbing in my profession to reach another tier or two. I've always loved cities where you can meet people who feel in love with the beauty of the place and figured out a way that they could live there. People wanting to be a part of a place not for what it has on paper but in some both stronger and less measurable way make a better contribution to a place than a place where people moved because the taxes in Connecticut, or the winters in Pittsburgh were killing them. They move not out of any passion but to save a few dollars or gain a few degrees in temperature.

It wasn't so much that his theory didn't have some value, but the "huckster" part of it is that he tried to expand economic ideas on top of it, and sold it to cities who based huge changes in managing their resources on those ideas, which weren't perfect for everywhere.

I mean "people like to be where cultural things are happening and where their neighbors are open minded" is not that complicated an idea to spell out. But then again, most of the Rust Belt refused to learn it for years. Towns filled with sour, unhappy people and horribly racist, sexist, homophobic people at that. I know some people here are "woke weary" but I'm not making a woke or non woke point, just this - who wants to be around sour, unhappy, negative people? No one. And no companies, either.

R58 - what huge changes were made? I don't know how you make massive structural changes besides encouraging tech development (good for any economy), art and public art programs (good for society, but hardly costly) and perhaps supporting the LGBT community in the Pride events and a handful of other gay/lesbian events throughout the year.

I'm curious - where were these large, expensive changes made that were failures? I'm genuinely interested.

LOL, you are all proving the point I made at R52

ONCE MORE:

Florida understood that having just having tech workers, artists, gays and other "bohemians" was not going to turn a city around.

So he expanded the term "creative class" to include lawyers, management consultants, finance types, doctors, medical researchers and pretty much any other type of white collar gig that required a college degree.

THAT is what turned cities around, but calling them the "creative class" made it sound hip and sexy, even though it was just a bunch of lawyers and bankers living in those downtown lofts, NOT artists and filmmakers.

[quote]I mean "people like to be where cultural things are happening and where their neighbors are open minded" is not that complicated an idea to spell out. But then again, most of the Rust Belt refused to learn it for years. Towns filled with sour, unhappy people and horribly racist, sexist, homophobic people at that.

Well put, R58. Sourness, indeed. The only thing that makes them more sour than newcomers are locals who move away and must be hated forever.

Here's an interesting article on Richard Florida. Btw, I feel like a supreme idiot but I can't disconnect his last name from the state of Florida when I read it sometimes.

It's like someone have the last name America. It's weird.

Why does Richard "Florida" live in Toronto?

The real question.

I only posted it again because I had some jackass trying to correct me, R45.

These city ranking stories are all clickbait/filler shit. There are different results from each survey.

R59 I knew I would be asked for receipts! I'll see if I can find them. I remember this discussion as part of an urban planning symposium I attended. I know there's been a few articles critical of Florida that talked about cities where they spent the money trying to implement his ideas and didn't get much for it. (For some reason Bowling Green pops into mind.)

Maybe saying "huge changes" wasn't quite accurate - but they were updating from a 1970's mindset to something relatively unproven for them. And of course some of the fault is at the hands of a lot of city councils who weren't really interested in change, or thought a wave of a wand would fix things, and threw money at his ideas when they didn't really fit their city or town.

He felt, or thought, that it was a one size fits all implementation. But some of those ideas didn't fit well in every city.

He was selling it to the money men as something that would make things more like The Old Days, but as we've seen in years since, what it did was bring a lot of a particular kind of resident/investor, while still leaving huge gaps in income and accessibility to housing/jobs/etc.

And often, when an area does revitalize, it is then priced out of reach for the artists, et al that made it attractive.

I'm not a person who automatically hates gentrification, either. I spent years in a Rust Belt town, where we were all patiently waiting for something to happen. You can't wring hands on one hand as to how awful it is and then cry on the other when something positive happens that it wasn't the exact positive you wanted.

But we all keep learning the lesson that an action in one place will cause a reaction in another, and that's part of what's happening now.

PS "Expensive" is relative but in a scarcity mindset as so many councils/towns/cities are in, it was notable that they'd spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not several million, to invest in his ideas.

R65 - actually, a lot of them are similar but they are ALWAYS mid to small cities with not a ton to do and not much diversity.

And who is doing the ranking?

Again, it's just red meat for boring white straight people to say they live in "one of the best cities in America" - even though hardly any of these are in the top 25 metros.

When Fayetteville, AR (#4), a town of 75,000 people in the middle of nowhere, is within shooting distance of becoming the #1 city, then this whole list is just a bunch of fucking garbage.

Good Value and a Desirable Place to Live? Good value means that other people don't want to live there and that's why the housing is cheap.

Desirable place to live is based on this: Using SurveyMonkey, we polled approximately 3,600 people across the country to find out in which of the ranked metro areas they would most like to live. The metro areas were then ranked according to the percentage of the total votes they received. This survey was conducted in May 2021.

So basically, they took the other factors and created a list, then asked people to rank the cities already on the list. It's desirability AMONG the cities already chosen.

[quote] Why does Richard "Florida" live in Toronto?

He was not well liked or appreciated in some of the places in the US.

Pittsburgh, a city that's legendary for its resistance to change, was at odds with Florida to the point where some members of city government urged CMU to let him go. I'm pretty sure he had tenure but he eventually went to Toronto, where his ideas were more openly received.

A PS to my comment at R66- Wikipedia, of all places, actually has a decent summary of some of the criticisms of his work.

That's a joke, professor.

I knew that, but it had an answer, so I shared it. LOL

[quote]These city ranking stories are all clickbait/filler shit. There are different results from each survey.

Very true on the first point, and yet I don't think I'm alone in reading most of them I see, if only for the pleasure of a laugh or a grumble or both. And on the second point, of course; every survey has its own criteria and focus for its outcome. CountryLiving magazine is going aiming for a different sort of set of results in mind than Conde Nast Traveler.

None of these asks the questions discussed in the thread ask the questions that are most important to me. I would start instead with something less chamber-of-commerce and more flat out subjective, like this:

R71 - that list is good, but some odd choices - Hanoi? New York City? Most of them are correct, but it feels like they threw in some others just for diversity. Saigon or Hue is much more beautiful than Hanoi. And NYC is great, but beautiful it isn't.

There's also a similar trend when they have the best cities to live in the world. Invariably, there are many Aus/NZ cities, Swiss cities, and then Vancouver or some other.

This list has Adelaide and Perth ranking above Melbourne and Sydney doesn't make the list.

Yes, there are countless such rankings, but US News and World Reports’ get the most publicity and hype

US News & World Report is a poor news source, and it's city rankings are effortless fluff as well.

There are definitely more considered sources of ranking places. Places Rated Almanac, Niche, BestCities...a few obvious ones make a business if this and compose lists to respond to very different ranking criteria, not just a simple comparison of 63 check points on an Excel.woksheet: number of domestic and international flights daily; number of higher education institutions; number of Fortune 500 companies operating in city...

The Top 19, Top 25, Top 50 (one from each state!) are always bad. Hell, the Top 100 lists are almost always bad.

So I clicked on your niche link out of curiosity R74 and checked out their "Best Suburbs"

Los Alamos, NM is #4

Now I have a good friend from college who is a scientist (researcher) who lives there and he and his wife love it, I've seen photos, it sounds great

BUT... Los Alamos is not suburb of anything

In fact, if you recall, it was chosen specifically because it is nowhere near any other town or city and thus we could develop The Bomb there without anyone noticing.

In fact the only thing my friend does not like about living there is that any time he wants to get on an airplane, they need to drive 2+ hours to Albuquerque to get to the airport.

#6. not #4

Niche is also very hot on the suburbs of St. Louis-- three of them are in its top 20

I wonder what happened to Chapel Hill. The triangle used to be Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill (home of UNC).

The Golden Triad used to be Winston-Salem/Greensboro/High Point. all forming a triangle about 15 to 20 miles apart and considered one metropolitan area, sharing an airport.

[quote]It isn't much an airport, airlines keep abandoning it as a hub.

It has pretty decent service. Delta still considers RDU to be a Focus City. Southwest has a sizable operation there. And so does American, which operates a nonstop to London Heathrow… and they were operating something like 20 mainline flights a day between RDU and their Charlotte hub pre-COVID.

My father worked for Western Electric for decades in Winston-Salem but near the end of his career they transferred his entire division to Durham and he detested the over an hour long commute each way.

But he told me he loved the Christmas parties.

Chapel Hill is/was the best part of that trio, R77. Though the cluster of cities has the problem that most NC cities have. They are very Sixties Suburban Red Brick looking, excepting some good university architecture it's dull and a bit downscale. There's not a lot of historic core yo the larger NC cities. Winston-Salem and Asheville are the exceptions, the other cities just have a small disjointed cluster of something scattered about.

Asheville already is what it is. It's not going to change but incrementally. To my eye the other attractive city with potential is Winston-Salem. It has elements of a real city, not just a Charlotte Skyline in a Box of Glassy Generic Bank Towers. There are problems and huge gaps that could be filled and enhance the whole. It could be the one city that combines the sense of a genuine city with a past with one that could have a future that appeals to people other than than transplants who want a big ass, cheap ass house for $260K and a Panera Bread just down the road - discarding the modern suburbs within city model of modern NC for something of some more depth.

WS has some great housing stock, and it seems significantly cheaper than other cities. I would rather buy promise and some history there than a boring future in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill or the others.

Chapel Hill is still part of the Triangle, it’s just eclipsed and dwarfed by big brothers Durban, Raleigh, Cary, even Apex.

Durham

Austin's down to 5th - not surprising given how house prices have gone through the roof. Naples Florida at 7th? WTF? It's nothing but rich 80 year old Republican golfers.

The Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem was built by the same architectural firm that a year later built the Empire State Building. They tested a lot of their design concepts with The Reynolds Building and it is known as the Empire State Building's little brother. For a long time, the buildings' management firms sent birthday cards to each other on their anniversaries. I don't know whether they still do.

When the glass covered rectangular structure known as The Wachovia Building went up next to it in the 1960s, we called it the box The Reynolds Building came in.

Is the only gay in Winston trying to get more guys to move there?

I escaped Winston in for Manhattan in 1974, r85, and have never regretted it. Got everything I could into a large suitcase and got the Hell out on a Greyhound bus, kind of like Ruth in My Sister Eileen.

Meanwhile, here is The Reynolds Building next to Winston Tower, formerly The Wachovia Building. You can see why we said The Wachovia Building looked like the box The Reynolds Building came in.

The Winston RJR Building is now a Kimpton Hotel

As WRAL has reported, New York City ranks third among places people left to come to the Triangle. About 30% of those who moved to Raleigh and Cary came from Rocky Mount, while Los Angeles (26.5%), Durham-Chapel Hill (21.4%) and Philadelphia (20%) round out the top five.

With big companies like Apple and Google announcing expansions that will have new people moving to the Triangle for years to come, it’s unlikely the market will see a significant downturn anytime soon.

Home prices up 20 percent today reported on WRAL.

I didn’t realize LA was a big source of immigration to Raleigh

Another big tech announcement in Raleigh

DURHAM Smart Wires, a power technology startup from San Francisco, said Tuesday it is moving its headquarters to Durham and bringing 250 jobs to the city.

The decision comes after the company was approved for a Job Development Investment Grant worth $2.8 million over the next 12 years. The payments will only be given to the company if it meets hiring and investment goals set by the state.

I moved to Raleigh from the Northeast almost 15 years ago. No regrets at all. The people are friendly and I’ve never had such good neighbors. The migration from areas like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and California are significant. Raleigh is what I would call urban suburban. It’s a big town with a small downtown and lots of discreet neighborhoods. The county is very blue.

That said, please don’t move here. We don’t want your nasty traffic or your pollution. I like that I can get almost anywhere in 20 minutes. And friends who recently relocated here who are native Californian‘s after a stent in Boston feel like they’ve died and gone to heaven.

The city where I live ranked #13 (Des Moines), second highest in the Midwest only to Ann Arbor at #12. Makes sense as it is fast growing and has a lot of good jobs and cost of living is reasonable.

That picture of Boulder looks like a cow town. No thanks.

And Raleigh-Durham is in North Carolina. Again, no fucking thanks.

Doesn't living in Raleigh or anywhere in N.C. mean that the moment you leave the city's borders, you're basically in Deliverance Country?

Sounds like Austin. I plan to move eventually, hopefully to another state.. There isn’t anything here I could live without. Would much rather live in a small affordable city now. It’s just too hard to keep up.

Wow! Huntsville is #3? Sure if you love autistic engineering and military type guys. And strip malls and chain restaurants.

R97, that’s true of almost all of the country

R98, I love military dudes

R100 They're engineering/administrative military guys. They aren't hot and gay like the ones in San Diego or elsewhere. IDK, its just I know a couple of gay military kids and their dads are not the heart of gold nice type. They're the cold conservative religious Nazi dads who torment their kids for having a boner or for wearing colors.

I like the hot mostly straight and bi military dudes. The gym bro ones I vibe with at Ft Bragg and Camp LeJeune

With Meta planning a Durham office, the triangle is rapidly becoming one of the absolute top tech spots in the US. The region sits at a crossroads — will it leverage new insights in city planning and build build build, or will it follow the SF path and price out all but the rich?

Racists love these kinds of places.

Why? It’s a very liberal and educated area

Because there are not racists in the "liberal" NE.