Basing location on your career only?

Forbes has released a list of the best cities for business and careers.  Factors that influence this list are business and living costs, education, crime along with job and income growth.  Interestingly, there is some overlap with the list of best cities in   
Who's Your City which examines the best places based on a wider degree of factors.

What do you think?  Is your location of choice grounded on your business/career prospects exclusively?  Or do you consider other factors such as accessibility to cultural amenities, architecture, community openness?

Aside, in a sign that the mortgage mess is truly underway, Forbes also has a list of the best places to pick up a foreclosed home

Aleem Kanji

Comments

[Steven]

Launching my career in a call-center capital - Boise, ID - sounds like a terrible idea to me. This list is weak.

[Mike L.]

So, can we expect Forbes to be moving from NYC to Sioux Falls, SD?

[Campus Entrepreneurship]

I chose dc for carreer/family balance... lucky that my wife has family in a great market/economy... if they had been in pitts still, I woulda been in trouble!

also, I think the forbes article may be a signal that the mortgage mess has bottomed out. Obviously we won't know for months (but some of the recent fed actions support the 'bottom theory' -- at least in US)

[Alison]

This only works if other quality of life issues are equal.

What do the newcomers to Raleigh-Durham think when they can't get a glass of water at local restaurants?

What do gay couples who move to Lexington do when they encounter state-sponsored discrimination?

What about high tech engineers from South Asia who arrive in Utah to find the grocery sotres devoid of garam masala and their neighbor concerned about their loyalty to the US?

The Creative Class showed that Fobes doesn't measure all the variables that make economically attractive people migrate to a city. But they also don't measure all the variables that might make them stay away.

[MPS]

I definitely look at the bigger picture, and a sense of balance. If I purely wanted to pursue my career in the metro with the highest talent base for my field (airport planning), I would have moved to Cincinnati (that is where the first airport planning consulting firm was formed, and others have spun off of it like any talent cluster with founder effects). On the other hand, Cincinnati would be far down the list for me in terms of the best quality of life and opportunities for my family. Cincinnati does not have the broader factors I would look for in quality of life: culture, tolerance, talent outside my own field, forward-looking/economically progressive attitudes. And there is no climate or topographic factors to counter-balance those negatives.

On the other hand, I would not move to a place like Manhattan or San Francisco merely because of the lifestyle amenities it offers (even if I were single and footloose). Perhaps when I retire, but that's the other end of the spectrum: I'm not sure I could support myself enough to truly enjoy the quality-of-life those types of locations offer (I'm a somewhat shy engineer/planner type, not a Type-A investment banker or IT venture capitalist - in that sense a place like Raleigh or Austin would be more comfortable for me, plus I can still afford a home for my family in those places).

[Wendy]

I moved back to Vancouver after stints in Ft. Worth and Tucson because I missed the international "vibe" and the more cosmopolitan and urban feel (rather than suburban, drive everywhere feel, although Tucson was very "bikeable which I loved.")

It was not based on a detailed criteria list, but a feeling I missed of being a citizen of the larger planet and not just one city or state. Somehow I felt isolated and even bored in those cities (but didn't in Mexico City where I also spent a lot of time during those years). So, I knew that I had to find that feel again or I'd go nuts.

I'm not sure any of the criteria in Forbes would help identify that. But maybe what would work to identify cities I'd like would be a combination of walkability, the number of recent immigrants, and the newstand test that someone suggested in a comment on this blog last week. A job is what you make of it and I'm adaptable -- most busy cities would have something for me career wise.

[Charles Rostkowski]

Alison seems to have a typical bicoastal view of fly-over country. "If I'm flying over it, it must be hicksville!" Actually Utah has many restaurants and grocery stores that would provide that high tech engineer with South Asian treats. And it also has both mosques and a Hindu temple to make him feel spiritually at home. In fact I suspect that there are very few communities in America that contain non Philippinos who are fulent in Tagalog; Utah has hundreds, along with equal numbers fluent in many other languages. The reason is of course the Mormon Church which annually sends thousands of its young men and women into obscure reaches of the world for two years to live among the people and preach its gospel. One consequence of that activity is a large population of folks who are bi-lingual and not just in French and German but also is some of the world's most unusual (from an English speaking point of view) languages. I suspect there isn't a private institution in America further down the globalization learning curve than the Morman Church. So that South Asian high tech engineer would be very welcome in Utah and, as was said during the 2002 Olympics, so would the rest of the world. And btw, Boise is very much part of the same region.

[MPS]

I was going to comments about the Utah and other "flyover" comments but Charles beat me to it. Utah may be socially conservative in one sense, but there is a strong cosmopolitan streak due to the reasons Charles stated. There are actually very few cities in this country where you can't get garam masala or other ethnic food. Even the mainstream supermarkets carry it. Look, a working-class former co-worker of mine (an interesting fellow who's socially conservative but believes in natural foods -crunchy con if you will) purchased organic Indian palak paneer (spinach with cheese cubes) at a Super Wal-Mart in small-town Lancaster, South Carolina (about an hour from Charlotte and 90 minutes from Columbia, SC).

The days of immigrants living in smaller cities having to travel hours by car to their regional ethnic hub (like Chicago, NY, SF, etc.) are long gone (this was prevalent in the 1970s through the mid-1980s). Places like Jackson, Mississippi have had ethnic food stores for years.

And the whole "neighbor concerned about loyalty to US"? A former Pakistani co-worker of mine had his in-laws move from urban Brooklyn to exurban Northern Virginia because they felt they were being less questioned about there loyalty. Sometimes class/ethnic divisions aren't the most cordial dense urban environments (indeed I'd argue they are often worse).

Other points:

Raleigh-Durham's water shortage is not a function of any lack of "creative class"-ness. You can argue they poorly planned water infrastructure (Atlanta is definitely in this boat), but they can't control the severe drought they're experiencing. Even uber-creative Charlottesville, VA experienced the exact same drought conditions and severe water shortages a few years ago, and I don't think anyone used that to show it's a less desirable place to live (yes, they did ban restaurants from serving water).

While it's sad that states have passed discriminatory partnership laws, that has not prevented many gays/lesbians from settling in creative places in those states. Places like Lexington, KY, Columbia and Charleston, SC, Nashville, Atlanta, Houston, Columbus, OH etc. have actually quite large gay populations.

[bri]

This is also a Utah-related comment. Having spent 5 years n Salt Lake City, I can say I can comment on it. It's a kind of space that allows an intellectual to do their work, enjoy the outdoors, have great food, and find all sorts of ingredients at the local grocery store. Utah is an amazing place to live in and if I were not an academic, I would definitely live there permanently. I find it frustrating and completely uninformed when supposedly well-traveled folk make unsubstantiated comments about Utah or Idaho for that matter.
Just setting the record straight.

[Cheryl]

Looking at the Forbes list by Job Growth Rank, the educational attainment for the top ten places for job growth is surprising. What kinds of jobs are expected to be created in these cities?

[Zoe B]

I am a native Cincinnatian, and my family still lives there though I haven't since the 1970s. My folks moved there for education, never thought the town felt 'like them', and never expected to stay. But life happened and now they have such a deep network of relationships that they will never leave.

Cincinnati has Culture. It's got the second-oldest zoo, art museum, and (I believe) symphony orchestra in America. All are top-notch. And there is the Taft - one of the best small museums in the world. The first generation of gorillas born in captivity all were born at the Cincinnati Zoo, which was and is a leader in getting endangered wild animals to reproduce in captivity. Thanks to the failed European revolution of 1848, the city became home to top-notch German craftsmen who felt it reminded them of the Rhineland. Because of them, and because in 1848 Cincinnati was the big city of the west (before railroads moved the action to Chicago), Cincinnati has some of the best domestic architecture in the USA. It has shockingly steep hills and a winding wide river. The University of Cincinnati is tops in architecture, design and music, among other fields. I could go on... Cincinnati also is a deeply conservative place. It thoroughly bored me, and I couldn't wait to leave.

When I finished college I wanted to 'go east, young woman'. I moved to Philadelphia, the one big eastern city that I could afford, (I still love the place). Later I moved to this college town for the sake of education. As with my folks in Cincinnati I never expected to stay here, but life happened. It's a good place to live. The streets are safe, the public schools are excellent, the university attracts creative types and imports performing arts. People mostly treat each other with respect in daily life. But this town does feel like a suburb with no urb, so we visit cities as much as we can manage. And most of this town was built by people who didn't 'waste money on beauty'. I work hard to preserve and create local beauty, because I grew up in CIncinnati and miss the daily beauty that I took for granted when I had it.

[MPS]

Zoe - I appreciate your comments. I do agree that Cincinnati DOES have culture. My college roommate is from Cincinnati and I have visited downtown, walked across the Roebling Bridge (BEAUTIFUL!), seen the wonderful Labor Day fireworks, and seen some of the neighborhoods. I'm sure young professionals working for Chiquita, P&G, 5th/3rd Bank, etc. contribute at least a little to a creative environment. Unfortunately, when I consider the big picture - including factors like economic growth, tolerance, opportunities for my family, etc., Cincinnati falls a bit short. It is similar to Pittsburgh, in that respect, and the critique Richard has made of similar old-line industrial cities that have had some success with the creative class, but continue to have structural socioeconomic difficulties. I think Cincinnati is also prone to stadiumism and convention centerism-type "booster" projects. I would rather live in Columbus - sure, it's a bit more bland and suburban, but it has genuine, healthy growth and it does have its charms in certain in-town neighborhoods. It's a city that seem more connected to the future than Cincinnati (or Cleveland, Dayton, or Toledo, for that matter, regardless of their genuine urban cultural amenities).