Environment: Ranking the Cities

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Many an American will gladly argue deep into the night that his home town is the cleanest, liveliest, fastest-growing or simply just the best place to live. The talk is part of the national pastime of comparing anything from batting averages to the busts of beauty contestants. Now along comes the Midwest Research Institute, a Kansas City, Mo., think tank with an avalanche of facts, figures and judgments. Funded by a grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, MRI set out last year to measure the "quality of life" in the U.S.'s 243 official metropolitan areas, which range in size from New York (pop. 11.5 million) to Meriden, Conn, (pop. 56,000). Last weekend the results were published.

In taking on such an enormous and prickly task, the think tank's researchers knew they were rushing in where only local boosters would not fear to tread. Ah, but they had a computer. Into the electronic maw went 123 quantifiable variables in five broad areas: 1) environment, including indexes for air, water and noise pollution, climate and availability of recreation; 2) politics, which embraces the turnout of voters, number of newspapers and TV stations, and the performance of local government in fighting crime and getting federal aid; 3) economics, meaning everything from personal income per capita to unemployment rate to differences in income between center cities and suburbs; 4) health and education, including hospital occupancy and infant mortality rates, the percent of population enrolled in schools, the number of non-high school graduates; and 5) a grab bag of 54 "social components" that included racial equality, housing conditions and cultural facilities. All these data together, the MRI team decided, "show both the concerns of the individual and the well-being of the community." Then the researchers pushed a button, sat back and waited for the printouts.

Fascinating Findings. Below are the final returns on U.S. metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants. The rankings (there are others for middle-sized and small cities) clearly reinforce the study's overall conclusion that those nice, comfortable Southern cities fare poorly in competition with their frenetic counterparts in the West, the North Central States and the Northeast. Indeed, only Birmingham, Ala., was rated "substandard" in all categories, while only Portland, Ore., came off with "outstanding" honors on all counts.

Because the box score is a weighted average of the 123 variables, it does not reflect some of the researchers' more fascinating findings. Some of the nation's most highly touted cities scored well in some categories, only to be dragged down by low marks in others. Proud Boston (No. 23) flunks its economic rating, for instance, while booming Atlanta ranks No. 45 because of poor ratings in every area but economics. Then there are a group of cities that are saved from much lower rankings by one strong point. For Washington (No. 20), it is health and education; for Miami (No. 47), a top-rated environment; for Omaha (No. 17), an "outstanding" social rating. As for Gerald Ford's home town of Grand Rapids, Mich. (No. 11), it gets its boost from a top political score.