CNN/Money Magazine ranks Newton the 4th best in the nation, but some folks you’ve never heard of in Worcester think Newton is the 21st best community in Massachusetts?
Somebody in Worcester thinks Newton is the 21st best community in the state
by Greg Reibman | Jun 21, 2013 | Newton | 5 comments
The criteria, of course, are totally different. But even ignoring that, most of the places on the Worcester list were not included in the Money Magazine survey because they have fewer than 100,000 residents.
Newton also has fewer than 100,000 residents. What am I missing here?
Newton has 86K right now. All of Money Magazine’s Top 100 places to live are cities and towns with 50,000 plus residents.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/best-places/2012/top100/
Newton’s population peaked in 1970 at 92K, declined to 82K in 1990 and crept up to 86K recently.
A lot of the criteria in the Worcester Report looks pretty specious. Is really expensive housing necessarily a sign of health and vitality. I’m not really sure. What I also want to know is why Cheshire in the Berkshires wound up dead last??? The town center looks totally bucolic and the Ashuwillticoot Rails to Trails Park in Cheshire runs through some beautiful scenery that looks more than a bit like Ireland. Rivers, small mountains, wooded hills and some crystal clear lakes. At 11 miles in length, the trail is 10 times as long as the Upper Falls Greenway. Tonight there’s a Saturday Evening Potluck Supper at the Congregational Church and the Town library has a number of weekly events for kids and older folks. Granted there is nothing there like tomorrow’s Feast in the Falls, but where else but Newton would something like this ever emerge to fruition.
As proud as I am that Newton is ranked 4th in the CNN/Money article, I really do have to vent a moment on how much these “rankings” frustrate me.
A good portion of my career has been spent helping companies figure out where to locate and also helping communities figure out how to attract appropriate investment. We constantly review pertinent location data and weigh, rank, and examine the results.
No one ranking is ever meaningful, except for one set of values at one moment in time. The reader should always be asking for whom and under what set of circumstances the ranking is relevant. What is a good location for one set of assumptions may be absolutely wrong for another.
Sometimes I wonder if the entire ranking thing is engineered to drive new subscriptions from the top ranked communities.