CBC News:
Vancouver is the best place to live in North America, according to Mercer’s latest Quality of Living Rankings.
The top ranking for 2015 went to Vienna, followed by Zurich, Auckland and Munich.
Vancouver was followed by Toronto at 15, and Ottawa at 16. The highest ranking U.S. cities trail behind with San Francisco at 27, Boston at 34 and Honolulu coming in at 36.
Vancouver, like most “world class” cities, is insanely expensive to live in, has its own host of big city problems and has difficulties resolving “what it wants to be” but there’s no doubt it deserves inclusion on lists like these. What I found interesting, when you look at the entire list, is how high many European cities rank and how low many other world class cities, like New York and Tokyo are – they didn’t make the top 35.
There were many on the list that I balked at. But when I got to 230, Baghdad Iraq, I just laughed and closed the browser window. I will not be using this list to pick where to live anytime soon.
As a former New Yorker, I am not at all surprised the poor showing of my Home Town. Like Vancouver, it has become an insanely expensive place – where even in the first ring of suburbs, my Mortgage for my 9 room home was lower than most Manhattan Dweller’s RENTS for one bedroom flyspeck apartments. But over the years, the city is not-so-slowly becoming a tax-haven for the über-wealthy, and squeezing out all the charm and color of the old city I grew up in, along with a lot of the formerly middle class.
The urban amenities of places like Vancouver and Vienna are fading from the concrete canyons and condos that now dominate the City. And the last few mayors, have been so corporate-focused, that “The City” and NYers understand that to mean Manhattan Island, have sucked the life, investment, services and attention away from the Outer Buroughs. Post Megastorm Sandy, Manhatttan was spit-shined and polished in a month, but destroyed neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island are still waiting for relief, recovery and rebuilding years later.
New York City in her 21st Century persona has become a showcase for income inequality and corporate excesses, and painfully inhospitable to the 99% that can’t afford her luxuries.
Precisely. If only lists like these were also based on affordability for the majority of the people who actually keep a city functioning.
Not if you have to go all the way down to #230.
only rich chinese can afford to live these places.
Now that they have filled Vancouver to the max.
same people are driving up prices in Puget Sound Area.
There are approximately 4,400 cities in the world. I am thinking at least one of the approximately 4,200 cities left would be much better than any place in Iraq, don’t you think?
Ha, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in San Diego for 17 years. I’ve never visited Baghdad, but I’m going to go ahead and say that my city is more livable than it is, even though it didn’t make the list.
Also for purposes of mockery, Detroit comes in at a very respectable #70. I guess it must score really high on the “affordability” factor, like Baghdad must. Heck, I hear you can buy a large house for $5,000 there these days. Not that anyone would want to live in it.
Vancouver’s a nice city all right, but this ranking is even more worthless than these lists usually are.
No city whose primary sports team name begins with Can and ends with ucks can possibly be considered an attractive place to live, despite its other attractions…
Mercer’s ratings are for a very specific purpose – compensating your employees when you send them to a godawful place; from their website: Mercer offers two ways to compensate mobile employees fairly for going to a host site with a lower quality of living than that in their home location. The qualitative and quantitative methods involved in Mercer’s products […] result in a financial incentive that not only helps motivate your employees to accept a challenging foreign assignment, but also compensates them for adverse conditions in the host location.
Vancouver as #1 means “no, we’re not giving you a bonus for having to work in Vancouver for a week”.
(Note that 230 is Baghdad because they only rank 230 destinations for mobile employees.
Because of the oil industry, military contracting, and the like, people get sent to Baghdad to work.
It’s not a list of “the best 230 cities in the world” and Baghdad happened to be #230.)