Forbes’ America’s Most Miserable Cities List Is Miserable

 

Sentient listicle generator Forbes has birthed-forth from its quivering link-baiting thorax yet another glistening slideshow hatchling purporting to quantify city-wide character traits. Unlike previous, funner efforts, such as America’s Drunkest Cities, this time they’ve cobbled together a list called America’s Most Miserable Cities through sheer internet data-crunching moxie, and juuust a little bit of folksy methodology charm. I’d like to think they probably just called up all of America’s Drunkest Cities the next morning and asked them how they were feeling to find the answers.

The real method was a little more complex:

This year we examined nine factors for the 200 largest metro areas in the U.S. The metrics include the serious: violent crime, unemployment, foreclosures, taxes (income and property) and home prices. We also include less weighty, but still important quality-of-life issues like commute times and weather.

Anyone who doesn’t think commute time is the single more pressing issue regarding anyone’s misery clearly has never had a very bad one. It’s a fairly predictable list of all the usual shithole suspects, with Detroit coming in at #1, although I sort of think Whatever City I Happen to Be In At Any Given Time got short shrift this year. Michigan also nabbed the #2 honor, with Flint, coming in close second. Next up is Rockford, Illinois, which I haven’t even heard of, so there has to be some sort of self-esteem issues going on there contributing to their overall misery. Or maybe it’s the 11.2% unemployment rate?  Read the rest.

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