Best Cities In The Best States

In my last post I ranked the states by debt to gross state product ratio and homicide rate. Here I will use two filters, and then four criteria to rank the best cities to live in.
First, I calculated the percent parkland of the top 13 states from my previous list. I'm using a very broad definition of parkland here. I used the sum of state park properties and National Park Service Properties. This included the acreage of parks, recreation areas, natural areas, historical areas, environmental education areas, scientific areas, forests, fish and wildlife areas, and miscellaneous areas from the Statistical Report of State Park Operations. I added this to the acreage of national historical reserves, historical sites, historical parks, recreation areas, and parks. I had to use some approximation for the second category because it was difficult to find breakdowns of acreage for national parks that span multiple states. Trails were ignored. I doubt that fixing approximation errors would lead to any change in the overall rankings, however.

State	Parkland %
Massachusetts	5.93
Washington	4.32
New Hampshire	3.90
Utah	3.20
Idaho	2.40
Wyoming	2.02
Vermont	1.14
Minnesota	1.08
South Dakota	0.81
Maine	0.65
Wisconsin	0.62
Nebraska	0.38
Iowa	0.20

I decided to focus on just the eight states with more than 1% parkland. I then moved on to ranking the cities. The four criteria for cities were Transit Score (as published on www.walkscore.com), weather, natural disaster risk, and air pollution. Generally, a Transit Score is only published if a city has a 2010 population greater than 200,000. This limited my analysis to just six cities in the eight states I considered: Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Boston, Seattle, and Spokane. I excluded Salt Lake City and Seattle because they appear on the American Lung Association's list of most polluted cities. I used a natural disaster map published by The New York Times to assign each city a relative risk (1 being the lowest risk and 5 being the greatest). The final formula to rank the cities was Transit Score/(natural disaster risk(temperature variance + mean number of rain/snow days per year)). Temperature variance is the sum of the differences of the July mean high and the January mean low from 70 degrees F. The final rankings and there scores:

Rank	State	Score
1	Spokane	0.211
2	Minneapolis	0.111
3	Boston	0.100
4	Saint Paul	0.086

Although Spokane is the winner by a large margin, further investigation led me to conclude that I will not be moving there for now. Spokane has no public universities. I think the presence of a large university (especially public universities) can be important for the cultural and intellectual health of a city. For now, I will be staying in Minneapolis, unless the weather gets even worse, in which case I might be moving to Boston.

Best States To Live In

This is the first of a two-part series on the best place to live. Here I will rank the states according to just two criteria: the ratio of debt to gross state product, and homicide rate. Unlike some other ranking systems, I wanted to use criteria that is completely objective, and criteria that actually measures how moving to the place is likely to affect you. For comparison, the American Human Development Index ranks states by health, education, and income. I don't think this criteria is bad, but just because other people in a state are healthy and rich doesn't mean that you will become healthy and rich just by moving there. A states debt can be expected to impact the level of government services you will receive relative to the amount of taxes you will pay. I used 'total state debt', which includes unfunded pension liability. I obtained gross state product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Many people discuss crime rate, but I use homicide rate because it is a more reliable figure. Crime rate can be influenced by differences in reporting rates, and in differences in what is considered a crime from one location to another. Homicide has a nearly 100% reporting rate. While most people don't think of homicide as something they are seriously at risk of, it correlates with other crime that is more common. In the table the 2012 rate per 100,000 population is expressed.

Rank	State	GSP (millions)	Debt	Homicide Rate	GSP/(Debt*HR)
1	New Hampshire	64,697	18,425,567	1.1	3,192
2	Iowa	152,436	37,783,060	1.5	2,690
3	Vermont	27,296	7,866,666	1.3	2,669
4	Nebraska	99,557	13,139,045	2.9	2,613
5	Idaho	58,243	15,094,322	1.8	2,144
6	Utah	130,486	35,727,752	1.8	2,029
7	Wisconsin	261,548	45,026,643	3.0	1,936
8	Minnesota	294,729	85,879,526	1.8	1,907
9	South Dakota	42,464	7,707,458	3.0	1,836
10	Massachusetts	403,823	129,550,263	1.8	1,732
11	Maine	53,656	16,717,250	1.9	1,689
12	Wyoming	38,422	9,951,523	2.4	1,609
13	Washington	375,730	89,579,477	3.0	1,398
14	Indiana	298,625	46,377,635	4.7	1,370
15	Virginia	445,876	91,339,102	3.8	1,285
16	North Dakota	46,016	9,263,742	4.0	1,242
17	Kansas	138,953	39,025,693	2.9	1,228
18	Tennessee	277,036	41,049,738	6.0	1,125
19	Colorado	274,048	86,879,414	3.1	1,018
20	Oregon	198,702	86,678,268	2.4	955
21	Montana	40,422	15,769,183	2.7	949
22	Texas	1,397,369	340,944,239	4.4	931
23	New York	1,205,930	387,465,667	3.5	889
24	North Carolina	455,973	107,580,297	4.9	865
25	Rhode Island	50,956	18,863,153	3.2	844
26	Arizona	266,891	61,082,635	5.5	794
27	Florida	777,164	197,871,611	5.2	755
28	Hawaii	72,424	46,100,856	2.1	748
29	West Virginia	69,380	24,972,461	3.9	712
30	Delaware	65,984	15,991,093	6.2	666
31	Oklahoma	160,953	44,151,947	5.7	640
32	Georgia	433,569	115,193,862	5.9	638
33	Pennsylvania	600,897	184,903,767	5.4	602
34	Nevada	133,584	52,838,629	4.5	562
35	New Jersey	508,003	213,933,875	4.4	540
36	Maryland	317,678	94,211,004	6.3	535
37	Missouri	258,832	76,489,010	6.5	521
38	California	2,003,479	777,918,403	5.0	515
39	Connecticut	229,317	112,372,072	4.1	498
40	Arkansas	109,557	37,704,936	5.9	492
41	Kentucky	173,466	86,245,730	4.5	447
42	Alaska	51,859	29,780,396	4.1	425
43	Michigan	400,504	142,668,026	7.0	401
44	Alabama	183,547	68,343,597	7.1	378
45	Illinois	695,238	321,354,115	5.8	373
46	Ohio	509,393	321,340,764	4.3	369
47	South Carolina	176,217	71,105,557	6.9	359
48	New Mexico	80,600	50,137,504	5.6	287
49	Louisiana	243,264	83,280,815	10.8	270
50	Mississippi	101,490	54,686,815	7.4	251