This Must Be the Place : An impressionist travelogue rates some U.S. cities based on livability--including the Cheers Factor : A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE: America’s Last Migration, <i> By Terry Pindell (Henry Holt; $27.50, 413 pp.)</i>

Thousands of seemingly settled people yearn for a good place to live, according to Terry Pindell, whose book by the same title sends him crisscrossing America and Canada in a quest that goes beyond the typical concerns about low taxes, low crime and hot real estate prospects. Seeking, instead, a set of elusive, intangible qualities such as a sense of place, history and community (items that often go unnoticed by chambers of commerce), this travel writer, author of two books celebrating rail travel, “Making Tracks: An American Rail Odyssey,” and “Last Train to Toronto: A Canadian Rail Odyssey,” tells the story of those who have found it--and where.

For 20 years, Pindell, a former teacher, lived in what he describes as a picture-postcard New England town with a “huge old white church at the head of the square” (many people’s idea of heaven). Yet despite the beauty of its lakes in summer, maples in autumn and picturesque snowfalls, Keene, N.H., he finds, can be as stultifying as the average suburb: “There was a dumb malaise behind the Potemkin facade of our cute downtown, where our teenagers hung out on Central Square scheming illicit parties in the woods because there was nothing else to do. A great quietness hung over our public life,” he writes.

So he sets out with a notebook to scour America for more livable places. Sixteen cities and three years later, he turns up a host of interesting ideas about why some places are magnets for people and others aren’t.

Pindell presents in this travelogue impressionistic sketches of a dozen small cities and a few large ones he considers good places. His methodology for picking them is based on neither polls nor demographic data but on word-of-mouth advice from people he meets in his travels. Many might appear on the conventional short lists of “best places” according to other scales, like natural beauty, but are chosen here for a mix of reasons. In Santa Fe, N.M., for example, the author interviews a mother who touts the city as a great place to raise children because communal values instill respect for “the mountains, the desert and Spanish cultures” and offer stimulating alternatives to distractions like drugs, drinking and peer pressures. Like many good places beleaguered by tourism, Santa Fe stands out as one that, he feels, shows “the power of roots to hold a sense of place against the winds of change, profit and exploitation.”

The author’s most original contribution to the literature of good places may be his way of rating them, designed to counter the conventional, statistics-based rating systems of many published guides that measure such hard data as crime rates, jobs and housing prices. A brainstorming session in a hot tub in New Mexico produced six criteria for livability (and a sliding scale from 1 to 5). The Cheers Factor measures the place’s sense of communal openness, the Foot Factor its pedestrian friendliness. The Cake Factor measures the extent to which natural beauty can coexist with cultural aliveness, answering the desire to have one’s cake and eat it too, while the Someplace Factor rates its uniqueness and rootedness. A Comfort Factor and Fudge Factor are added for good measure.

Pindell points to a void often felt in many communities, i.e. “the lack of community gathering places where you can walk in at almost any time and be assured of either encountering old friends or making new ones.” Pindell advances this cause by profiling such “third places” in these “renaissance towns,” often started by newcomers with creative and often countercultural lifestyles and mind-sets. In Asheville, N.C., for example, he finds Pickett Huffines, half of a lesbian couple who opened Malaprop’s Bookstore and Cafe as what she calls “a mom-and-mom’s place for books,” never expecting it to become a community hangout and countercultural haven for teenagers, “like a family room away from home where they can be weird if they have to.”

An excellent feature of the book is the author’s analysis of the necessary preconditions for cities to undergo “renaissance.” Other preconditions include a good natural setting that has been preserved with parks and open space and the presence of far-sighted industries with a vested interest in a place (Napa’s vintners, Portland’s Nike, or Ithaca’s Cornell University).

A former council member in his hometown, Pindell has a sharp eye out for progressive reforms of the kind happening in places as different as San Luis Obispo (where city managers “invested in free public bus transit” and “extensive greenbelts and parks”) and Burlington, Vt., (where a “tenure ladder” helps homeless people move from life on the streets to shelters to rooms to owning their own homes). But he mentions such innovations only in passing. Meanwhile, a short, eight-page treatment on “lessons” for communities only very superficially touches on solving the problems plaguing communities across America, with their auto-centered environments, sprawl, loss of countryside, traffic, crime, etc.

Admittedly, Pindell writes, his itinerary is “dreadfully incomplete. “There are dozens of renaissance towns either established or in the making that I have not written about, often because, like celestial novas, they have exploded onto the scene overnight.” But surprise: Many walkable, talkable, livable and likable neighborhoods are in the old cities like New York, Chicago--and yes, even Los Angeles--that he, in knee-jerk fashion, so vilifies. A more serious flaw may lie in his premise that there is a mass exodus of like-minded people to good places, hence the subtitle “America’s Last Migration.” Yet the book presents no figures to support this assumption and, moreover, the latest demographic studies are now showing Americans to be settling down for the first time in 50 years.

Still, even with these flaws, Pindell’s upbeat success stories make a compelling case for why city planners and average citizens ought to be resurrecting North America’s good places.