An article over the weekend discussed the recent ranking of Pittsburgh as the “second unhappiest large city in America” behind the Big Apple. Technically the analysis looked at metro areas of 1 million people or more, not just cities proper. The article notes “In recent years, we’ve been named the most livable city. One of the most romantic. A world-wide travel destination. And more”.
The “more” included a ranking in 2009—not long after the Places Rated Almanac rating, a Forbes ranking of top hiring cities, and prior to the G-20 conference—by Business Week which named Pittsburgh the 14th most unhappy city (again, this was based on metro area analysis). That ranking took measurements of rates of depression, suicide, unemployment, and crime.
The 2014 unhappiness ranking was complied by the National Bureau of Economic Research and came from responses to a survey (“in general, how satisfied are you with your life?”) and they found statistical significance between “…happiness and population growth…cities with declining populations or slow growth were less happy than cities with higher levels of population growth.”
Again, since the analysis takes in metro-level data where some places can grow while other decline it is hard to see how the ranking was given, but it makes sense that Detroit (the city lost 61% of its population from 1950-2010) but a head scratcher would be Louisville since the city and county merged in the middle part of the previous decade due in large part to want to be seen as a “big city” and higher on the population charts. A 2005 Institute report noted that “Via merger, Louisville would vault from the sixty-fifth largest city in the country to the sixteenth. Their slogan was ‘America’s Newest Top Twenty City’”. If the NBER ranking is true perhaps some of the good feelings of the Louisville merger have worn off as it ranked third behind Pittsburgh on the unhappy meter.
