Today was an exciting day in the “My Town is Better Than Your Town” battle. First, we received our new copy of Hartford Magazine and it ranked the best towns to live in within Hartford County (note: I don’t know when they’ll update their website to show the current article). There are 29 towns in Hartford County, so it laid them all out for us, segregated by town size. They used 21 factors in the categories of education, economics, and quality of life to determine the towns’ scores.
What this now means for me when I show homes in East Granby (the small town winner), Avon (the medium town winner), and Glastonbury (the large town winner), is that agents and home owners will proudly display this magazine because, well, it reaffirms that their town is the best and you should just buy this house so you can be part of it.
If you live in one of the lower ranked towns you should probably burn the magazine. Surely don’t put it out on your coffee table for buyers to peruse- they might shift their search to a different town. I live in Hartford which is ranked 8 out of 9 for the large towns. Sigh. It seems like I should cancel my subscription to Hartford Magazine. Oh wait, they mail it to me for free…
Then later in the day I saw that Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine released a list of the 10 Best Cities for the Next Decade. One of our lowly Hartford County towns was on that list, West Hartford. That’s right, Hartford Magazine ranked West Hartford third out of the large towns within just Hartford County, but Kiplingers ranked it #9 out of all of the places to live in the entire United States. For the next 10 years! Huh, go figure.
I saw that Rick Green also posted about this. Most amusing were the comments on his blog post where you get the West Hartford haters and West Hartford supporters. As someone that lives in a city that’s always hated on, it was nice to see a neighboring town take some of the heat for the day.
So what does all of this mean in the grand scheme of things? Really, not much. People are smart enough to figure out what towns work best for their lifestyle, budget and needs. A town that may work for me may not work for you and vice versa. These types of “rankings” get people talking about the good and bad. At least with people talking hopefully folks will learn something new about their surroundings, which may even lead them to take a visit to another town to go exploring. And then, maybe, your rankings will change.
I think it’s somewhat stupid that Hartford Magazine thought it appropriate to separate and rank towns by population size, yet it dumped Hartford — a city with approximately 124,000 residents — in the 30,000+ category. If there’s some inherent basis to assume that towns with dissimilar populations shouldn’t be pitted against one another, then either the population categories should have been broader or there should have been another grouping. Suffice it to say, Hartford wins the “cities over 100,000 people” category.
And since when is average household income a metric of a “good” place to live? It merely shows that others think it’s a good place to live — whether it is or isn’t. By that logic, we don’t need surveys like this, we can just look at home prices. (And Hartford Magazine’s a quality publication, even if they give it away for free).