Diversity More Important Than Crime Rate, Education When Choosing A Place To Live?

Ken McCracken • July 24, 2007

Apparently Money Magazine thinks so. A reader emails this along:

Our local community made news this week when Lansing, KS showed up as 88th on Money Magazines list. Having just recently vacationed in North Dakota & South Dakota, I was very curious as to why none of the cities in the Northern Plains made the cut. Looking into it further, 9 cities from California were on the list, but none from ND, SD, WY, etc.
As it turns out, one of the filters used discriminated out the “homogeneous” states. You can’t pick up on this from the article or list itself, you have to examine the methodology used to build the list. This information was available on their website.
In the 2nd filter test, they rejected any cities that were more than 95% white. Apparently diversity itself is a significant criteria to be considered a best place to live. It must be, because Money and their consultants put diversity ABOVE other factors such as high education scores, low crime rates and employment statistics. They did not check for those criteria until they had already eliminated the non-diverse communities.

Here’s the details about the methodology. They’ve got a step-by-step rundown of how they narrow down the cities. Racial makeup isn’t the first criteria (population size is) but it is the second criteria:

Working with data provider OnBoard and consultant Bert Sperling of BestPlaces.net, we set out to find the best towns in America. Here’s how:
2,876
Start with places that have populations above 7,500 and under 50,000.
974
Screen out retirement-oriented communities, places where income is less than 90% or more than 180% of the state median and towns that are more than 95% white.

I’m not understanding why a town with 95%+ white people in it would disqualify it as a “best place to live.” What would the public’s reaction be if we were talking about excluding towns that were 95%+ black?
What’s more, this racial makeup wasn’t a feature of past “best places to live” rankings by Money Magazine. The methodology for the 2006 rankings certainly didn’t include it. On that 2006 list two of North Dakota’s cities, Bismarck and Fargo, made the list. This year not one single city from ND made it.
This is a bit frustrating for someone who comes from a pretty racially homogeneous state. We here in North Dakota are proud of our communities, and to exclude them from the “nicest places to live” list simply because our communities are predominantly of white descent is, well, pretty unfair.

Tags: Domestic Issues, North Dakota News, Politics

http://www.valleydeals.com/cgi-bin/board2/YaBB.pl Kevin

I don’t see tons of Jews living outside of the city.

How would anyone know?
Bob

A Harvard professor recently released some results on a diversity study. The study was so discongruent with his beliefs, he sat on them for a long tiem.

http://vdare.com/sailer/070701_diversity.htm

A couple of interesting quotes:

“His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone — from their next-door neighbour to the mayor. … ‘In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,’ he said. ‘We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.’” [Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity October 8, 2006]

Between his opening and closing “diversity happy-talk,” his quantitative middle section — “Immigration and Diversity Foster Social Isolation” — is a social science barnburner:

“… in terms of the effect on neighbourly trust, the difference between living in an area as homogeneous as Bismarck, North Dakota, and one as diverse as Los Angeles is roughly as great as the difference between an area with a poverty rate of 7 percent and one with a poverty rate of 23 percent, or between an area with 36 percent college graduates and one with none.”
Marty

Pretty insane. From where I sit, one of the reasons people move from where they are to a “better place” is when the place they are becomes “too diverse” (ahem). Not politically correct, but a simple fact of life than any honest person could not ignore.

One might even suspect that “the best places to live” would coincide with the places that the most people are choosing to move to. Likewise the worst places would be those that people are leaving in droves…

They don’t call it “white flight” for nothing…
http://www.ski-blog.com/ sayanything-24

lack of synsagogues.
http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/author/Anna/ Anna

Rob, I didn’t notice that it mention those were the criteria people go on. I read it as the criteria the magazine has decided to go on. It’s yet, just another ridiculous way of covering the truth. Obviously though, the magazine prefers to stifle any actuations of discrimination.
The survey is pointless as far as accuracy.
http://www.sayanythingblog.com/ electnixon

All I can say is wow.

This is like when a company states that they value diversity. The primary way to “value diversity” is to place a higher value on employees deemed more diverse, which thus places a lower value on those who are less diverse. Since race is the primary indication of diversity, many diversity programs appear to advocate racial discrimination.
http://sayanythingblog.com/ likwidshoe

White = “homogeneous”?

Huh.

Tell that to the Germans, French, Italians, and British. They fought all of those wars for hundreds of years for NOTHING. They’re all the “same”.

In the name of “diversity”, they miss that we’re all different. How freaking ironic.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ sayanything-24

I assume that the Turtle Mountain Reservation just barely missed the cut.

As a Montanan from Billings, we are pretty white bread. Lots of Natives, but not a lot of blacks and hispanics. It is not that we don’t want them in our communities, it is that they don’t want to be there. What drawing power is there to a state where your culture does not exist? Try to get good Mexican food in Billings. Or Soul Food. Find a Jazz club or a Cantina with Mariachi music. But if you want Brats, Beer, Rodeos, and steak, we are the place.

Note, that the midwest is not a haven for gays either. Why? Because they find it more hospitable to move from small towns to larger cities where they have more anonymity and more cultural and employment options. I don’t think these places are any more inherently “racist” or “homophobic” than anywhere else, but they certainly have a different culture that it happens some Americans actually prefer to the city and Political Correctness.

Now, short of Cross Burnings and savage gay beatings, what is wrong with that? Short of kicking diverse folks out, how is it our problem that Blacks, Gays, and so on don’t want to live in the midwest smaller communities? I don’t see tons of Jews living outside of the city. We don’t have a lot of Asians either.
http://kvnuforthepeople.com/?p=645 Craig

I noticed this, too, as well as Money’s preference for government spending on green space and downtown development. Click on my name to read my post.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

I think most people tend to like to live around other people like them, if they have a choice. Most larger communities have neighborhoods that tend toward one cultural demographic or another.

There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it happens by choice. It’s just human nature I guess.

But punishing ND cities just because we’re mostly of Scandanavian/German descent up here is pretty unfair.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

I was really surprised. North Dakota has usually always made this list with one or two cities. Since most people see ND as a pretty inhospitable place to live, we’ve always been sort of proud of it.

But now, this year, because of the racial-makeup part of it not one single ND city made the list.

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