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Photo by Benzadrine.
New York City faced some stiff competition in the Forbes Top 10 “Misery Measure”, but ultimately moped away with a respectable fourth place, losing only to such perennial dystopias as Detroit (#1, forever); Flint, Michigan (#3) and… Stockton, California, in the #2 slot? Apparently, the Bay Area satellite has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country and a swelling population.
To compile the list, Forbes compared 150 of America’s largest metro areas based on data from Bert Sperling, a researcher from Portland whose city, conveniently, is not one of the ten most miserable. Here’s how New York fared compared to the other cities, with 150 being the lowest score:
- Commute times 150
- Income tax rates 150
- Superfund sites 78
- Unemployment 99
- Violent crimes 105
- Weather 86
- Total Misery Measure 668
Thanks, Forbes; we’d be high-fiving each other if this town wasn’t always sucking the will to live out of us. Perhaps the most disheartening part of the top ten list is that they declare Los Angeles (#7) to be somehow less miserable than us, with a Total Misery Measure of 632. Anyone who’s spent time in L.A. knows that people there are actually much more miserable; they’re just not aware of it unless the coke somehow runs out. (Which never happens.) Also: Andy Dick lives there.
The capitalist tool points out that while New York’s financial services, media, advertising and tourist industries provide job opportunities, the cost of living “can make all but the super-wealthy miserable.” You don’t say, Steve Forbes? Tell us other reasons why we're so miserable! Well, at 10.5%, income taxes are also more than twice the national average, while, inexplicably, our average commute of 36 minutes each way is the worst out of any major city.
Maybe we've lived here long enough to internalize the misery, but a 36 minute commute sounds like warp speed to us.
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Why do they mention rents when it is not factored in to the survey? And as for Chicago being #6 they wrote "And as for misery, nothing tops being a Cubs fan. The team has not won a World Series since 1908, the longest winless streak in baseball."
This list is hokum.
That picture is phenomenal. I'm making it my wallpaper. This city might be slowly killing me but as long as I get to stare at this picture I'll die happy.
It's stupid because it only measures the negatives without giving any offsets for the positives. Yeah, sure, the taxes here suck. But I can walk to over 50 good restaurants within ten blocks of my house. (And so on......)
NYC has more negatives and more positives than almost any other place. But if you only look at the negatives then of course you're going to put NYC at the bottom of the list. It's just dumb.
weird survey, b/c it does not attempt to take into account any of the positives of living in a given metro area. many of us perceive new york as having its problems, but being worth it. unlike, say, stockton.
It's terrible, every morning I have to chase Victor Hugo away from my apartment door with a broom handle I keep in the vestibule for that purpose.
I find this list to be so highly offensive, I will just wipe my a** with it. Any list that puts NYC in the same category as Flint, Detroit and Stockton is pure crap.
I'm sure real estate prices are high here because no one wants to live here.
If you get rid of the outer boros, four of the six negatives would be eliminated.
I get it. It's hard to "make it" here unless you are a hedge fund guy or a high-powered lawyer. Yes, there are a lot of great things to do here, but a lot of them cost a lot of money. It's not like I've eaten at Del Posto ever.
Yeah, this is a really bizarre study. They only use statistics and numbers, and they don't ask people "How does living in this city make you feel?" They don't take this into account at all -- which, to me, is one of the best reasons to live in New York: That ineffable fellow-feeling and proudness one gets from time to time.
It's like the other day, when I went to Time Warner on 23rd Street to exchange my cable box for an HD box. The line inside the place was like a Soviet-era bread line -- but, everyone managed to stay in a good mood, talking with one another, discussing the primary in South Carolina, and so on.
I've lived a lot of places, and that genuine good mood and "what're you gonna do?" are really, in my experience, if not unique to this city, specially cultivated here: It's one of our chief exports -- truly enjoying one's life and fellow man even in light of monstrous bureaucracy and difficulty.
It's weird but anyone who grew up in LA loves it but all new york Transplants hate it. Every time I go to LA, I'm like "fuck get me out of here!"
you'll have more fun in this city if you're rich,
and not many are rich.
there's a reason why so many of these free "cultural" events are packed and with lines blocks long.
Well written John Del Signore. Especially on your description of Los Angeles. You are a true New Yorker.
as somebody who grew up in LA and spent the last two years in new york, that's always been my biggest complaint. new yorkers are miserable.
the weather, the prices, and being crammed in a subway car with 50 sweaty strangers after a ten hour work day and going home to your tiny apt. that half of your month's pay went to is bound to make you miserable.
people here are always on edge, and always paranoid. i really love it here, most of the time, but i understand where that comes from.
and john, you couldn't be more wrong about LA. people from New York are so shocked at the site of a happy (or nice) person that they immediately label them fake or phony. fact is, people there are for the most part pretty happy. and Puffy and Donald Trump run half of New York, so lets leave out the negative name dropping, ok?
Maybe we've lived here long enough to internalize the misery, but a 36 minute commute sounds like warp speed to us.
Yeah WTF? LA definitely has longer commute times. My friend's (and her friends') is like an hour each way out there in la-la land.
JDS reminds me of the South Park episode where the Smug took over and all the parents were getting high off of smelling their own farts... just saying...
I don't think they really took into account the thing I find most aggravating about the city -- the constant contact with monsters and idiots... true, they exist everywhere, but I'm really missing the ability to escape the unclean, insane, and the generally stupid. I'm losing the battle, kids... ;)
Seriously, when you're at a Broadway show, or even a movie, TURN OFF YOUR F*ING CELL PHONE. But I digress.
I get pissed at our weird system of waiting on lines. and, why one has to be ten feet back from the cashier counter.
of course, no one tells you where the line ends or what the line is for.
that's part of the misery that permeates this city.
I think the quintessential distillation of a New Yorker's problem with L.A. has to be when Woody Allen, as Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, goes to visit his friend Rob, who's moved to L.A. and loves it.
Alvy: You're an actor, Max. You should be doing Shakespeare in the Park.
Rob: Oh, I did Shakespeare in the Park, Max. I got mugged. I was playing Richard the Second and two guys with leather jackets stole my leotard.
I think the quintessential distillation of a New Yorker's problem with L.A. has to be when Woody Allen, as Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, goes to visit his friend Rob, who's moved to L.A. and loves it.
Alvy: You're an actor, Max. You should be doing Shakespeare in the Park.
Rob: Oh, I did Shakespeare in the Park, Max. I got mugged. I was playing Richard the Second and two guys with leather jackets stole my leotard.
Yay! Let's organize a Misery Parade!
These surveys and top ten lists are just ways for these publications to fill up space so they don't have to send anyone out to actually go do reporting.
It is the non-political version of a poll - absolute rubbish that is spun as something of value.
I'm wondering how JDS found that picture, as it is so perfect for this post. Miserable and depressing, yet intriguing and humorous at the same time.
Forbes Top 10 “Misery Measure”?
stupit
Positive Survey:
16,700 restaurants in Manhattan alone... A different one to eat in every day for 46 years...
Central Park
5 professional teams, plus a few farm teams
subway series!!!
Coney Island
Over 120 museums
The mass transit
Universities
Over 45 thousand police officers (civilian and uniformed)
Almost 13,000 yellow cabs
NYC Marathon
Our bars close at 4AM
Over 130 languages are spoken
the list goes on...
the expense? it's called convenience!
Doesn't bother me a bit... anything that encourages people to stay in the provinces works for me.
edEx... like your list. I'd add...
The Promenade
Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and knowing you're walking home.
Finding John Lennon's old house in the West Village.
Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Gabe Pressman
The West Side bikepath
Newstands that carry the three daily papers plus the Irish Echo, Oggi, the Advocate and the Forward while playing Haitian talk radio.
A thousand movie screens and a couple hundred theaters.
Norman Mailer once wanted to be mayor.
Knowing half your family and friends aren't tough enough to live here.
I live on Ave B & Houston and work on 21st & 5th ave. I used to take the F to 23rd st and that took me 30 minutes. One day I walked to work and it took me 30 minutes.
Um, ridiculous? Yes, yes it is.
But not many cities are walkable, so bonus points for us. And now I get exercise instead of being on the miserable train.
Pot delivery services. Put that in your pipe and smoke L.A.!
Forbes is as relevant as their namesake's failed presidential run.
I'd add
- good options for live music every night of the week.
- the raw adrenaline rush of so much person-to-person contact. Makes other cities look like ghost towns.
- Not being ever able to afford your own home in this city: priceless!
The scenery on a crowded subway car in July.
Aaaaahhhhhhhh........
16,700 restaurants in Manhattan alone... A different one to eat in every day for 46 years...
Which is good because about 99% are restaurants you would never go back to. This city is overpopulated with restaurants that are vastly overpriced relative to what they are serving. Eventually you get tired of $30 entrees that are worse than what you could do at home.
Same with the music scene. Someone said there are plenty of live options every night of the week. True but most of them suck. Plenty of other cities have a much better music scene than New York.
Universities
Oh right. We have two. Columbia and NYU. That alone is an embarrassment for the self-proclaimed greatest city in the world. And the self-righteous NIMBYs in this town do everything possible to stop the expansion of the two schools we do have.
Don't forget St. John's, Fordham and all the other smaller ones throughout the city.
And there aren't 16,700 restaurants in Manhattan. That's a citywide figure.
Um, Eastriver, your math is woefully off, unless you don't count St. Johns, Fordam, Pace, Baruch, Cooper Union, FIT, Hostra, et al...
Hunter, City College, Brooklyn College...
Absolutely agree. I've never lived in a city in which people were so quick to complain, or so desperate to get out of, if only for a weekend. The longer people live here the more they seem ok with it, but that's because most of us have forgotten how good it feels to live in a nice city.
"new york city always reminds you of how much better or worse things could be".
idk who said it but it stuck with me wherever i read/heard it and i think it's a pretty accurate observation.
I'll give you Fordham and St. John's but the rest are not that impressive or world class - which is where I was going with my comment. Take Boston. It has far better schools than New York if you include the immediate suburbs and is a fraction of the size. What great schools do we have in our suburbs? Philly and DC have as many decent schools and they are also much small cities.
ER, I think you're selling Manhattan and Cooper Union waaaaay short. And if we're going to head out to the 'burbs (which I'd rather not), then you have to add Sarah Lawrence, Iona, Hofstra, and, oh, yeah, what was it? Right... Princeton.
Why you so down on the hometown?
we are the capital of the World.
the best Jerry, the best.
No, there's no MIT here. But I'll counter that with........ohh.......the United Nations?
Boston is nothing but a College Town, That is all Boston has going for it. It's a bunch of shit hole schools that because Harvard is there a lot of dumb fuck parents think it's a great place to go to school. Asshole's buying into a situation that makes their child appear better than your child. The weather sucks and all the Kennedy's suck as well as the Irish and all those dumb fucks that live there.If the Kennedy's are so great, why isn't Teddy running for president? He's a piece of crap. The spokesman for failed Oldsmobile brakes.
MIT isn't bad, but for all the brains there I really don't see a lot of solutions coming out of there.
Stanford is better.
Tim N., while I agree with your general idea, Princeton is as close to Philly as it is to here.
i didn;t mean just universities... sorry... should have been more clear... colleges too
pratt
parsons
fit
new school
cooper union
fordam
baruch
hunter
etc etc etc
broolklyn law
cardozo
@ snoopy
stfu about boston, you silly ass.
also @ snoopy: assuming you are a new yorker, you are letting your blind hatred for all things boston shine through. total ignorance. as a bostonian, i ask, cant we all just get along? the ny-boston feud is so TIRED. they are each different and each to be respected for different reasons.
also your an idiot because Boston and NY have pretty much the same weather.
i'm preparing for a storm of bitter comments on what a TOTAL IDIOT I AM OMFG HOW COULD I SAY SUCH THINGS ON THE GOTHAMIST WEBSITE.
chill people.
The Boston/New York thing is totally lame now. I'm as Boston as they come, and I love NY, live here now, and don't really care.
Why you so down on the hometown
I wouldn't go so far as to say down on it but I am trying to be objective. I disagree with the poster that touted education as one of New York's great selling points. And when you throw in the populists rants against any expansion of NYU and Columbia and it gets frustrating. And really, Princeton is about an hour by train. I threw in suburbs because I didn't want some other smart ass saying that Harvard and MIT are not in Boston. But if that's the standard then San Francisco has Berkeley and Stanford within the same distance and in a much smaller population base.
Boston is nothing but a College Town
Right. They certainly don't have a tech industry or anything, finance, medicine, venture capital, etc. The finance scene might be small but the city is far more diverse economically than New York.
No, there's no MIT here. But I'll counter that with........ohh.......the United Nations?
And that has what to do with education exactly? I would take MIT every day of the week over the impotent, useless waste of prime waterfront real estate that is the United Nations. Does having the UN here make your day less miserable? Hardly a day goes by when I even think of the UN being here.
edEx,
Great compendium of schools that think outside the box of asshole lawyers and MBA's. BOSTON SUCKS creatively speaking! Let them name two schools that have a creative thought between them. They are a bunch of " How can we fuck the USA and retire with a multi million dollar pension?" They are why this country is fucked up economically and politically.
Actually you could probably develope a college which would be on the same level if not better than the MIT's, the Stanford's and Cal Tech's if some individual supported and gave full scholarships for the top students coming out of Stuy and Bronx Science.
Can you imagine if the talent and intellecual potential coming out of NYC's top schools was channeled into a local post grad school?
NYC is a lot better environment than that town up north that is still living in the glory of Bunker Hill.
The Kennedy's and their extended family suck!
Thanks for the backup JMH, but isn't Philly a suburb, too? :>)
How is it Newark doesn't make it into the top 5?
John was surprised at Stockton? He apparently isn't a viewer of World News Tonight. They did a story on Stockton just a few days ago. Some neighborhoods look like ghost towns. The houses may be in good shape, but there's nobody around, lawns are brown and a car on the street may have flat tires from being parked there so long.
And obviously, despite Snoopy trumpeting the specialized high schools and putting down MIT, he couldn't get into any of them to save his life, as evidenced by his numerous spelling and grammatical errors and misuse of apostrophes in plurals. Let's not even get into his logic and debating skills.
apparently nobody had any arguments with my comment above?
also, if you're going to talk about universities and/or education, you can't skip LA either. UCLA is consistantly rated in the top 2 or 3 public schools in the country. USC offers everything that NYU offers and more, Cal Tech is continually the most difficult school in the country to get into.
i'm with edex. yes there are cheaper places to live. in the middle of freaking NOWHERE, with NOTHING walking distance, no public transportation, no ethnic diversity, no many thousands of AWESOME restaurants. best move i ever made. i freaking LOVE this place.
i'm with edex. yes there are cheaper places to live. in the middle of freaking NOWHERE, with NOTHING walking distance, no public transportation, no ethnic diversity, no many thousands of AWESOME restaurants. best move i ever made. i freaking LOVE this place.
Spirit of 76 I have a personal flute that you might like playing since you are so good at it.
Cal Tech sucks as well as MIT. Have you ever seen their campus? It's a walled fortress in Pasadena and the people that go there don't know realism from reality.
MIT with all their government money still doesn't do shit for solving serious problems. Who gives a shit about putting a man on the sun. They apparently do and they get funding for same.
NYU is also getting much harder get into...and the schools in New York are pretty well funded. As for UCLA being the top...yeah...maybe for public schools. But seriously, it depends on the program.
But my commute time is ridiculous...it ranges anywhere from 45 minutes to 20 minutes from the Upper East to NYU. Everytime I think I'm early, I'm always late.
I Escaped from NY at age 18 and can only say that in the many years since then.... yeah right on hooray way to go boy zip flash teeeeerific wow
But I will say I do Miss the Bway shows, the museums, the vast cultural exposure, the energy, how "nice" people can be.....TOP OF THE SIXES The Village etc.
AH yes..then there's the other side of that GRIMEY coin
no one from Boston thinks that Bunker Hill is glorious, you idiot.
Are you just sore because Harvard/MIT/Northeastern/BU/BC/Wentworth etc rejected your application.
Haters.
It's a rotten place to be old or lonely other
than that ,I still love this city at least the
parts that are not looking like the generic city
this is rapidly becoming. I remember Greenwich
Village before NYU took over that's how old I
am.Wow!
I was shocked to find out Newark did not make the list. Oh, I forgot I think the goverment took its charter back.
That guy who said he moved from "Happy" LA to NY must be on medication. I'm the last of my friends to get the hell out of here, I'm just waiting for my job transfer to come through next month so I can never again visit this hellhole. The traffic is a nightmare, and I'm just talking about going 3 miles on the street. The weather is absurdly hot all the time, makes it impossible to even go for a decent walk - today it's 80!! The people are the worst, spoiled brat children of spoiled brat rich morons, mainly in the entertainment industry. Then there's the insane number of illegals from all over the world who speak zero English, don't know how to drive and cram 10 people into a 1 bedroom apt so there's no parking, no quiet and the smells coming out of those places are disgusting. I live just 3 blocks outside Beverly Hills and it's like being in a slum. Crime is about 200% worse than just 10 years ago.
People are NOT happy here, they act like a**holes - in stores, on the freeway. I moved her 17 years ago and it WAS a nice place to live. People WERE friendly and happy. But when it became impossible to afford a decent place to live in a safe area, when it became a 1 hour drive to go anywhere, when getting a new job meant taking a pay cut because so many people are willing to come here and work for peanuts - there is ZERO to recommend about LA. It's a cesspool.