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Listomania

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Staff

This is a reminder that not all best-of lists are created equal and few of them do much more than offer a cursory look at the communities they tout.

Yes, Chapel Hill made it relatively high up – No. 40 – on another best-place-to-live list, this one by CNNMoney.com, which offered this inciteful (pun intended) comment on our area:

“With more than 700 acres of parks and additional protected natural areas, locals say it’s sometimes easy to forget that you’re in an urban area and not in the middle of a forest.”

Magical. Cary, by the way, ranked 23rd.

All tolled in the past year, we are officially a great place to live if you’re rich, single, want to raise some kids, have a short commute and so on.

That’s all well and good, but we have a few other goals in this community. Like trying to find ways for teachers, police officers, firefighters and lower-paid university employees to afford to live here. Like ending chronic homelessness in 10 years. Like having a decent regional public transit system. Like not sprawling every which way.

You also have to drill a little deeper into what is driving some of these honors. The Most Livable City award the town received last year was not in fact because Chapel Hill is the most livable city in America; it’s because the organizations that sponsor the award – The U.S. Conference of Mayors – were impressed with the leadership it took to convert to fare-free transit.

It’s fine, of course, to tout these lists and celebrate our successes, but let’s not confuse them with the real measures we use for the health and vitality of the community.

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