Magazine Finds S.D. Has Sunk to 52nd-Finest City
All right, already: San Diego isn’t exactly the flawless paradise everyone would like to think it is.
Sure, sewage has been known to break through weakened underground pipes and run directly into Mission Bay. Interstate 8 turns into a parking lot during rush hour. Elementary-school kids are shoehorned into increasingly scarce schoolrooms throughout the city. The breakneck pace of urban growth has environmentally minded citizens clamoring for stringent government controls on how many new homes developers are allowed to build.
Rather Live in Buffalo
But have things gotten so bad that the nation’s upwardly mobile types would rather live in Buffalo, Cleveland, Gary, St. Louis--Lorain, Ohio, even--than in America’s Finest City?!
You bet, according to the August issue of Money magazine.
In its second annual listing of the 300 best places to live in the country, the magazine shows that San Diego has slipped from 22nd to 52nd place.
That drop in ranking, according to the Money poll, makes San Diego--host of Super Bowl XXII and now the America’s Cup races--a less desirable place to live than some cities that have long been the butt of jokes on the late-night talk show circuit.
Meanwhile, some California locations actually improved in the rankings and found spots solidly within the top 10.
San Francisco, rated 12th last year, is now fifth. The Los Angeles-Long Beach area, ranked 17th in 1987, shot up to seventh. And Orange County inched up to the eighth spot from its former position at No. 10.
No. 1? Danbury, Conn.
“They must have had a cartoonist or a comedy writer help with that list,” said Daniel O. Pegg, president of the Economic Development Corp., which entices major corporations to relocate or expand operations in San Diego.
“I’d be interested to see what Danbury, Conn., has to offer,” Pegg said. “I’ve never been there, heard of it or had any executive tell me they were considering a move there. But it must be nice, because Money magazine said so.”
Not Really That Bad
Richard Eisenberg, a senior editor at Money who worked on the survey, said San Diego shouldn’t be concerned about its dip in the poll.
“I don’t consider it a dramatic drop, because you’re looking at 300 places that we are comparing,” Eisenberg said. “If you’re looking at (a drop from) place 22 to 152, there would be reason for concern. But that is not the case.”
He said the magazine compiled its list after analyzing statistics for each city in a number of categories, such as weather, crime, arts, local economy, education, health care, housing costs, leisure activities and transportation.
The magazine then interviewed 251 subscribers to determine which of the categories are considered most crucial in judging the desirability of a city. Those queried included men and women with a median household income of $42,000 and an average age of 42, Eisenberg said.
The ranking was determined by matching the readers’ preferences with the statistics, he said.
Thus, Danbury was first and Atlantic City was dead last, coming in behind Battle Creek, Mich.; Yuba City, Calif.; Benton Harbor, Mich.; and Jackson, Mich.
Several cities made dramatic changes in their positions on the list. Chicago moved from 48 in 1987 to 16 this year; Joliet, Ill., went from 102 to 50; Salt Lake City from 205 to 82.
Green Bay, Wis., on the other hand, dropped from 51 to 160. Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., once 61st, is now ranked at 186.
Those kinds of dramatic shifts, said Eisenberg, can be attributed largely to the changing values of the readers. What they thought was important for a livable city in 1987 has changed for 1988, he said.
People are more worried about crime and housing prices than they were last year, Eisenberg said. They are less interested in weather and leisure.
Thus, San Diego’s high marks for climate and outdoor activities didn’t mean as much in the 1988 survey. Conversely, San Diego’s rising rate of crime counted heavily against it, Eisenberg said.
“I think that, probably more than anything else, is the reason why San Diego slipped a little bit, but not substantially,” he said.
Pegg agreed that San Diego’s climate is no longer enough to put it at the top of the line of places to live.
“The weather has not been able to buy for San Diego what it used to buy,” he said. “People are looking beyond that for cultural amenities, academic resources, labor pools, a whole variety of more sophisticated criteria. And the competition in terms of other communities has gotten very aggressive, especially those communities that have economic problems.”
To another expert trend spotter, however, San Diego’s fall in the Money magazine list represents another movement in America: the baby-boom generation’s return to the heartland.
“There are a lot of people who moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt and are now looking to move back because the jobs are coming back there,” said Roger Selbert, editor of FutureScan, a weekly newsletter that tracks social, cultural and economic trends.
Despite those observations, Selbert is quick to agree that San Diego is far from finished. He and Pegg said that a number of other surveys comparable to Money’s show San Diego is undisputably one of the top cities in the country.
For instance, a poll of chief executive officers commissioned by Cushman & Wakefield, a business real estate firm, showed that San Diego is second only to Atlanta as a place to locate a business. San Diego’s “quality of life” was rated by CEOs as the best out of 31 major American cities, according to the poll’s results, which were released earlier this month.
And another recent survey of 83 urban affairs experts across the country listed San Diego as one of the 50 American cities with the brightest future.
