Do you feel miserable? Another perspective

I wrote a post detailing the problems with measures Forbes used to call Cleveland the most miserable city. In most respects, we aren't that bad. I thought about the reasons I came back to Cleveland from Baltimore. Of these, housing was foremost.

The median house in the Cleveland area, as of March, 2009, sold for $134,680, as compared with $202,300 nationally. At the same time, the median income in the Cleveland area was $47,501, compared with $44,684 nationally.

Housing is usually the biggest portion of any family budget. Here, we have incomes slightly higher than the national average, yet our houses only cost 2/3 as much. This leaves more money for us to spend on other things - and isn't that what makes the real difference between misery and happiness? Would you rather live someplace with better weather, have a smaller house, and worry more about making the mortgage payments?

Below is the post I wrote originally.

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When I saw that Forbes called Cleveland the most miserable metro area in the United States, I was surprised. I don't feel miserable. In fact, I feel a lot less miserable than I did in the last city I lived in, Baltimore, Maryland, which didn't even make the list. This puzzled me.

My first thought was to wonder what criteria were used to create the list.

Unemployment
Unemployment is a problem in Cleveland, as in the rest of the United States. As of December, the unemployment for Cleveland, 8.9%, was actually less than the U.S. average, 10.6%.

Taxes (both sales and income)
Our taxes are high. This isn't necessarily bad. Taxes pay for public services - if we want to spend more money on these things, that's our choice. It's why Ohio has the best public libraries in the country.

Commute times
According to the American Community Survey, as of 2008, the Cleveland Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had an average commute time of 23.8 minutes, slightly less than the national average of 25.3 minutes.

Violent crime
According to this table, as of 2007, the city of Cleveland had the 13th highest rate of violent crime among the large cities selected. According to Sperling's Best Places, violent crime in the Cleveland MSA as a whole is below the national average.

Professional sports teams
This metric was based on the records of these teams over the past two years, not on ticket sales or amount of enjoyment received from watching the games. If the sports teams made us miserable, we'd stop buying tickets, right?

Weather
The weather here does leave quite a bit to be desired. It's worth noting that the average January and July temperatures are, according to Sperling's Best Places, relatively close to the national average. The big differences are that we get more precipitation and have more cloudy days.

Superfund sites
The word can strike fear in some hearts. There's a good side to Superfund program - it gets the most polluted sites cleaned up and forces the polluters to pay for it. This is better than the sites either remaining polluted or having to spend local taxes to clean them up.

Corruption
Forbes based this on the number of convictions of public officials for corruption. Thus, this isn't so much a measure of corruption as either getting caught or of the strength of the local criminal justice system.

Why the Forbes Rating Shouldn't Bother You

I’ve been known to suggest that the best way to deal with a broken heart is to read the love poetry of the ancients. You will quickly find that your misery is not unique, not new -- in fact, it’s so old and so universal that it’s almost blasé.

And that is surprisingly comforting.

So let’s just say that Cleveland is the most miserable city in America in 2010. So what? We've undergone at least a generation of job and population loss. We’ve got legitimate reasons to be miserable! I imagine that Troy and Carthage could have been voted the most miserable cities of the ancient world after they were sacked. (Hey, at least we’re still here!) The port city of Alexandria was probably pretty miserable after the greatest library in the ancient world was destroyed. Rome? Not so festive after it burned. Medieval Edinburgh was a squalid, disease-ridden place where people attended public executions for fun. New York in the 1970s? Fuhggedaboudit. Are Rome, Edinburgh, and New York popular tourist destinations today? I don’t really need to answer that, do I?

The point is that if you’re looking at things through the long lens of history, one moment in time doesn’t mean much. Triumphs -- and miseries -- come and go.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider this. You know who’s not bothered by the Forbes rating? Dick Feagler. On last Friday’s episode of Feagler and Friends, he and his colleagues laughed it off. Journalist Mike Roberts said we should have a sense of humor about it -- and then he suggested sending Shaquille O'Neal up to Mr. Forbes's office to straighten him out.

Now you might think Feagler is just an old dinosaur, you might not agree with him politically, but you can’t dispute one thing: that Feagler has seen a lot of Cleveland history.

Dick Feagler has seen those tides of misery and triumph ebb and flow, and if he doesn’t think the Forbes rating means we’re going to hell in a handbasket, then we shouldn’t either.