Yes, you really need to be able to specify what's important to you. Their "traditional lifestyle" factor is definitely not on my list. Also, there can be great places in what would otherwise be dismal states. New Mexico is next to last on their list, and I understand why (it's one of the poorest states), but I'd move to Santa Fe in a heartbeat.
The "Where Should You Live?" quiz that the New York Times did [1] [2] is a much better design, IMO.
On the other hand, the New York Times quiz can end up giving a list of random suburbs that don't have much of an identity fo their own. I think either counties or metro areas are the right level of granularity here. (You'd have to come up with some way to partition the non-metropolitan places.)
(I live just outside Atlanta. That is more meaningful, for someone relocating here, than saying that I live in Georgia or that I live in the particular town I live in.)
I do wonder if there's any real demand for customizable versions of this - allowing you to choose which variables matter to you - or if it's just something that people play with.
States are especially meaningful here. I chose my state based on the pro worker laws it has (I benefited from being able to get more parental leave), less per taxpayer debt burden which result in lower taxes from things like underfunded pension debt which I do not benefit from, and pro women's right's laws (I have a wife and daughter who benefit from access to abortions and women's healthcare in general).
There is also Medicaid to think about which is also on a state level.
OK, those are all good points. But I think it's misleading to present an analysis that groups everything by state. I think what I want is an analysis that brings in state-level variables like you mentioned but doesn't just spit out a score for each state.
I had a startup idea around this. I'd like to make the home search much more personalized. I don't care about exact square footage, but I do care about parks, civic associations, etc.
Why can't we find a way to get neighborhoods and housing areas to compete for residents and help people find the home that best suits them? Companies like Zillow are just 1990s Real Estate with a UI and better search. That's great, but if you don't know the area I'm not sure how you're really learning anything from Zillow.
I feel like I can get much of that information just by searching maps and inferring qualities of communities by the proximity and quality of amenities nearby. At least I thought it was pretty accurate during my home search.
Yea but why do that search in the first place? What if you could just say "I want a brick house in a walkable neighborhood with coffee shops and parks nearby in the city of Des Moines at this price range"? Or just tick off some parameters? Personally I do the same as you do right now, and I keep thinking how is it that this is the best way to do this?
You should have gone for it! The VLA is in an amazingly beautiful region. I camped near there once and had the darkest skies I'd ever witnessed, and I saw a massive fireball meteor.
Socorro is the nearest proper town to the VLA, with about 9000 residents. It's home to New Mexico Tech. Albuquerque is about an hour's drive from Socorro.
I lived in Albuquerque for five years, and four of those years I lived about a mile away from the Breaking Bad car wash... by the time I left, the RV tours were finally starting to trickle off :) Frankly, I found it a pretty pleasant place to live and I'd pick it over the SF area any day. People joke about "the war zone" down by the fairgrounds, and yeah that's probably the roughest part of town, but it's a small region and it still feels less sketchy that many portions of the bay area (I sure as shit never saw anybody smoking fentanyl out on the sidewalks). Almost any part of town north of I-40 is a decent place to live, and big chunks of the city south of I-40 are quite nice too.
The natural beauty, and the accessibility of said beauty, is incredible. I lived in the middle of town and could be hiking up the Sandia mountains within 10 minutes. In California, if you want to even dream of camping somewhere, you better have 3 different permits applied for months in advance; in New Mexico, you just go, and maybe you have to drop $5 in the kiosk when you get there. Hunting was amazing; wildlife in general was amazing. One night I hiked up the side of a mountain, slung my hammock, and woke to elk bugling all around me.
I liked that one a lot! It lead me to some very interesting places that I had never heard of before. Particularly in Oregon I guess. I currently live in Ohio.
“New Mexico is next to last on their list…”. If this means NM won’t attract the sorts of people who make life decisions based on media like this, it should be more widely circulated. It is this decade’s “Breaking Bad” for NM. If you are the sort of person who makes life decisions based on where TV shows are shot, NM isn’t really for you. Someone might write a comic book about how great Arkansas is, and you’d be forced to move again.
A word to the wise: always poke around in how they measure attributes, how they weight the attributes, and how they combine them in a single score (or sub-score). In the 1970s, there was published a Places Rated Almanac for US cities, by a NYC-based publisher. NYC (in the era of the burning Bronx) was inexplicably rated in the top ten…maybe top five. I looked deeper and saw they took, say, the crime statistics and simply truncated them, uniquely, for NYC. NYC was actually, say, 13 for crime and they said, well that’s too high, we’ll count it as 5. No justification at all. The fix was in.
What happens if you remove "popularity"?