Things I Like - Chicago

Chicago has had a tough couple of months - first the Blagojevich embarrassment, then the circus named Roland Burris. Now Forbes has named Chicago the 3rd most miserable city in America. In its second annual report, Chicago moved ‘up’ from 6th place to 3rd. Interestingly enough, New York, Philadelphia and LA, the 4th, 5th and 7th most miserable cities in 2008, completely dropped out of the top 10.

What’s this you say, have things changed so much in one year? Of course not, what changed were the factors that Forbes decided to quantify in its ‘misery index’. In 2008, the index included

• Commute time
• Income tax rates
• Superfund sites
• Unemployment
• Violent crimes
• Weather

This year, they added 3 new factors: sales tax, sports teams and corruption. I’m not sure how sports teams fits in – does the fact that the Cubs (one of SIX professional teams in Chicago) haven’t made it to the World Series for 100 years make us more miserable than the folks in Flint Michigan (last year’s #3, dropping to #6 in 2009) who don’t have a professional sports team of any sort??

Let’s look at the corruption factor. I checked the source that Forbes cites – Federal Public Corruption Convictions by District from the US DOJ. Since there’s no detail provided, I’m assuming that Forbes attributed all 385 of the Federal public corruption convictions associated with the Illinois Northern District over the past decade to Chicago. That’s fine, even though Rockford is in the Northern District. I hope they were consistent in their methodology and also attributed the 565 convictions in the Florida Southern to Miami, the 370 convictions in the Ohio Northern to Cleveland, the 343 in the Pennsylvania Eastern to Philly and the 129 in the Michigan Eastern to Detroit. Given that Chicago is twice the size of Philly, the level of corruption on a per person basis there is significantly higher than ours. In fact, all of these cities, ranked less miserable than Chicago in 2009, have higher per person corruption rates than we do.

And I know that Chicago has the highest sales tax of any city in the country – but New York and LA are not all that far behind at 8.375% and 8.25% respectively. Did all the factors that made these places miserable in 2008 improve significantly?

I’m not saying we should be proud of our corrupt officials or happy to be paying the country’s highest sales tax, I’m just saying that it looks like Forbes might have messed around a little with the misery index in order to move Chicago up. Seriously, Chicago moves up 3 spots while Philadelphia, New York and LA disappear.

But my real problem with this “report” is that they completely ignore the positive factors that offset the misery index they’ve “calculated”. I agree that if Chicago did not have its museums, parks, lakefront, sports teams, restaurants, outdoor festivals, public sculpture, bars, music, theater and architecture, it might be a pretty miserable place. But please try to convince me that any one of the cities ranked 4 through 10, or Philadelphia or even New York, has the beauty of our city (regardless of the weather), the cultural and entertainment opportunities and the people that make it such a phenomenal place to live. I think Forbes might need to check its own corruption factor…