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Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
- davidw 12y agoWhat's up with Wyoming? Some of those counties have median incomes above 70K.
- valar_m 12y agoOil.
- protomyth 12y agoand ranching combined with a low population I'm from North Dakota, and I've never felt so alone in the world as driving through Wyoming on my way to Denver.
- guyrt 12y agoI looked at the relationship between education and income when this data first appeared [0]. Counties with low income for their education level were college towns. Counties with high income for their education level were either near NYC or D.C. or were resource extraction areas. [0] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/guyrt.github.io/notebooks/CountyWellbeingData.ipynb http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/guyrt.github.io/notebooks/Co...
- rdl 12y ago0% state income tax, so if you are rich and have 5 homes, the Wyoming one is a good primary residence. Also, lots of ranches. These are usually run off someone's personal taxes, so high income and high deductions/expenses. $500k/yr income isn't that great when you need to spend millions every decade and high annual operating expenses too. A lot of ranching or timber is about early capex leading to income down the line. Ski stuff.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> the Wyoming one is a good primary residence. Something to note: Wyoming doesn't shield either traditional or Roth IRAs (although ERISA-protected assets like 401ks are) from creditors, unlike other no-income tax states such as Texas and Florida.
- rdl 12y agoInteresting, although probably largely irrelevant for the mega-rich. IIRC Wyoming does have a homestead exemption, so your house can't be taken.
- devMox 12y agoThe western counties are very wealthy with outside money and have a booming tourist industry with the ski resort and Grand Teton and Yellowstone NPs. Elsewhere coal, gas and uranium is booming. Add in the lack of income tax, Cheyenne and Laramie's proximity to the Denver area and the lowest population of any State equates to a 'good time.'
- davidw 12y agoIt's median income though, not mean, so that's not just a few hyper-wealthy individuals throwing the stats.
- Dewie 12y agoThere seems to be some stark contrasts in South Dakota.
- berelig 12y agoPossibly something to do with oil?
- w1ntermute 12y agoAlso, there are a lot of Native Americans.
- protomyth 12y agoYou'll note that many of the Native American reservations are doing quite well. Native American is not the overriding factor, but poorly run reservation in out of the way place seems to be.
- bombtrack 12y agoThe dakota oil boom you typically hear of is almost exclusively in North Dakota. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom
- protomyth 12y agoIt is likely to move into northwest South Dakota in time, but not in any significance now.
- throwaway344 12y agoI think the answer is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation
- yuliyp 12y agoSimilarly, Nebraska's outlier is Thurston County, home of the Omaha and Winnebago reservations.
- socialist_coder 12y agoKentucky truly is the worst state in the US.
- valar_m 12y agoI am from Bell County, Kentucky, ranked 3110 out of 3135 counties. I no longer live there, but my parents do. I was there just yesterday for Thanksgiving. It may be tempting to dismiss the problems plaguing this region as being self-inflicted, a mere product of backward ways and a collective refusal to catch up. These problems, however, are infinitely more complex than that. Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In the end, they all failed. It occurs to me as I type this that I don't have a precise thesis for my comment, other than to say this: It is not easy. If it were easy to fix, we would have. [0] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518
- gghootch 12y agoThis report reminds me of a passage in "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Prestigious foundations such as the Gates Foundation pumped millions (billions?) of dollars into smaller scale education because a report identified that the worst performing schools had large classrooms in poor, rural counties. Much later, a second review of the data revealed that the best primary schools had large classrooms in poor, rural counties. The results were merely statistical outliers caused by small sample data. It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live. The correlation might be dual, but the causation is near impossible to identify. Edit: long term memory fail.
- mjklin 12y agoThat book is by Kahneman, not Pinker
- crabasa 12y ago> It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live. I gather you haven't travelled much. The difference between poor scoring places (pick a town in Kentucky) and high scoring ones (Seattle for example) is absolutely huge. Almost to the point of feeling like being in a different country.
- weeksie 12y agoUrbanization. The trend is continuing and is going to continue and as it does the rural areas of the country are going to see more and more resources drain to urban centers. Eventually the rural population will be entirely composed of maniac bandits driving burnt out plymouth dusters with mounted machine gun turrets and terrified hill people raising rabbits for food in their back yards. But for serious, as we see urbanization pick up, the rural areas are going to continue their downward slide. And as the trend toward suburbanization has reversed we're going to see the suburbs become the new "burnt out inner city"—because inner city is no longer synonymous with poverty and crime.
- briandear 12y agoDepends on the inner city you're talking about..
- amatxn 12y agoWholeheartedly agree about the urbanization trend, but if you look at that data, that whole section of the Plains states and central US that is 'Doing Better' is in large part rural. My county is 'Randall' in the Texas panhandle, we rank 133 on the list. The metropolitan area (if you call it that) is > 250K. My wife and I are highly educated and we live well above the county and national median income level. Quality of life is good and cost of living is low. I'd say some rural areas are doing things right, the oil boom has a lot to do with that.
- ghaff 12y agoI assume you realize that even your second paragraph is a gross exaggeration. Desirable cities also have desirable suburbs and exurbs and there's little in property price trends to suggest that's changing. Lots of people seem to assume that anyone who could afford to would live in San Francisco or New York given the choice but that's simply not true. There has been a broader migration away from rural areas but I also know lots of people who work remotely from more or less rural locales and, at least in principle, that should become more practical rather than less. It's just not economically rational, in the US at least, for everyone who is upwardly mobile to pack themselves into a handful of desirable cities.
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- cellis 12y agoWhy is Loudoun County, Virginia so prosperous? It has a median household income of $122,000, but I don't see any meaningful employers in the area, and it's a large population of around 350,000 people.
- rjbwork 12y agoIt's right outside of DC/Baltimore. Lots of money to be had. I'd expect there's lots of lawyers, lobbyists, policy makers, etc with homes there.
- colinbartlett 12y agoThat's Northern VA where tons of tech companies are and was the veritable center of the internet before Silicon Valley. (AOL is or was headquartered in Dulles which is in Loudoun County). It still houses a massive amount of technology companies, data centers, etc.
- mjklin 12y agoIt was noted in this interview that most of the highest income ZIP codes in the country surround areas with large federal infrastructure: http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-america-created-after-9-11 http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-ameri...
- rayiner 12y agoIt's a DC suburb. The usual DC set plus the Dulles tech corridor set. Also, northern VA suburbs are really aggressive about keeping out lower-income people (poor social services, poor transportation), which keeps the average high. The suburbs here don't have really rich people the way you see around other major cities, just very homogenous upper middle class ones.
- loudoun_native 12y agoI grew up in the county. The reason it's so well off is the proximity to dc and large tech/defense corridor. The county attracts the rich because you can buy a McMansion with land, and still get to work. It's built up heavily in the last thirty years (I passed cow pastures and corn fields on the way to school), but they're mostly gone now.
- EliRivers 12y agoInside some of those prisons looks extraordinarily harsh. The ones where there is no law and brutal crimes go unpunished every day.
- DLWormwood 12y agoWhere’s cost of living in the metrics? Without that, unemployment and median income paint a very incomplete picture.
- crabasa 12y agoAgreed in regards to median income, but COL wouldn't impact life expectancy, obesity, unemployment or education.
- clairity 12y agoi was in arkansas last week for my father's passing. i've been writing about his life as a way to cope, and my trip was a stark reminder of the marginal lives of the working poor in this country. mind you, these are not people asking for a handout or who see themselves as poor. but their 40 hours of work (if they can get it) certainly provides much less for their families. they have jobs implicated in all sorts of health problems that are barely being managed by a mediocre health system. they worry about foreclosure and repossession and deal with payday lenders and pawn shops. phones and other utilities get cut off for non-payment and they're charged fees they can't afford to reinstate service. they're not unhappy so much as they have much harder lives than those of us in the professional ranks. it's simply not fair.
- lisper 12y agoThese results need to be taken with a big ol' hunk o' salt. The outliers are all teeny tiny counties. #1 ranked Los Alamos county has only 17,000 residents, and last-place Clay county has 21,000. The bigger the county, the more likely it is to simply regress to the mean. Actually, the most interesting result is that Los Angeles county, which with ~10M people is the most populous in the U.S., is not closer to the middle than it is.
- TheCoelacanth 12y agoThat doesn't appear to be accurate. #3 Fairfax County, VA and #9 Montgomery County, MD both have over a million people which puts them in the top 50 counties in the US by population. The others are smaller, but many are still much larger than Los Alamos. #4 Loudoun County, VA has 350,000, #6 Howard County, MD has 290,000, #2 Arlington County, VA has 227,000 and #7 Alexandria City, VA has 140,000. It's also worth mentioning that those six counties are all contiguous with each other. That's a combined total of over 3 million people. That's far too many to dismiss as simply a statistical outlier.
- lisper 12y agoI'm not saying that these results are completely invalid, just that they can't simply be taken at face value. You have to take things like population into account when interpreting the data.
- xmstr 12y agoThe bible belt continues to have some of the worst (or hardest) places to live in US. If find this very interesting, as many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.
- bdunbar 12y ago> shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible. Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?
- jchrome 12y ago> Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education? - He/She never said that any biblical passage tells Christians to shun higher education. Nice straw man. He/She said "many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible." But, since you are asking the question, lets look at an answer: - How about all of the passages justifying rape/slavery/violence in the Old Testament? All of these, while not outright shunning higher education, do so implicitly. Just one example among many: "However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT) Something else to look at - "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" (Richard Hofstadter). A great book. His tale begins with itinerant Baptist ministers traveling through the bible belt, denouncing those "New England intellectuals". Anti-Intellectualism and organized American religion in the South are very good and old friends.
- refurb 12y agoYou've never actually visited those areas i take it?
- ams6110 12y agoI guess "hard" is subjective. I was guessing the hardest place might be rural Alaska where you have no electric power or water unless you provide it yourself, and you have to spend most of the short summer cutting firewood so you don't freeze to death over the winter, and growing vegetables, fishing, and hunting so you don't starve.
- fivedogit 12y agoI'm from Lexington, KY, the blue dot in a sea of orange on the map. You hear a lot about Appalachia's woes (the stories on the local news from Bell County, Bath County, etc are depressing beyond words), but it's been hard for me to understand why Appalachia is the way it is: chronically, horribly and uniformly poverty stricken. So I just read this PBS author interview which tries to put some reasons to it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/duncan.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings... The main takeaway, as I read it, is that in cities and other rural areas there is a middle class and even some upper class folks around and the resources they bring along (and maybe even the example they set... sorry if that's offensive) is a positive influence on the extremely poor. In cities, obviously you have better municipal services and programs and a professional class of doctors, lawyers, etc. In rural farmland many families own their land which has some value and there are some wealthy landowners with large tracts sprinkled in. In Appalachia, there's none of that. The land isn't worth anything and it's just poor poor poor as far as the eye can see (which is large, geographically, unlike inner cities). Except for coal mine owners and operators. That, I can't explain. Do they live in the area? Do they not contribute to the communities? The PBS article goes as far as to say they actively held the poor down to keep them working in the mines, but I'd have to see more evidence to believe that wholesale. In any case, it strikes me that this wasteland of poverty with very few middle class or wealthy folks is the opposite effect of tech hubs. Brad Feld and others have written about how the density of entrepreneurs and angel investors with deep pockets is what makes a tech hub viable (very liberally paraphrased). From a general perspective, it seems like a normal curve where the outliers at the top are places most uniformly non-poor and populated densely and the outliers at the bottom are uniformly poor and populated sparsely.
- bane 12y agoIt's a bad cycle. Imagine you're the "wealthy" person in a town of poor, jobless people. What local businesses do you spend you time and money in? Groceries and gas? Both are probably not locally owned, so most of what you spend leaves the area. You drive 2 hours on weekends to get to the nearest Walmart to buy clothes, so again most of your money leaves the area: and none of the places you're spending at employee lots of people and/or pay them lots of money. Most of the jobs servicing those industries will be part-time anyways. For the people who work in the mines, they make more money, but they honestly don't really know what to do with it...and there's nothing in particular to spend it on locally anyway. Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area! So it's hard to even build a local agricultural economy. It's isolated from transport links, landlocked and hard to navigate. If you pick a route from anywhere East of Appalachia, and take it to San Francisco or L.A., you'll be routed entirely around the area in favor of a Northern or Southern route. I didn't grow up in Appalachia, but I grew up in an area not too different from it. Honestly, if we hadn't been within commuting distance of a major city, my career options would have been farm work or gas station attendant. There wasn't even enough of a commercial sector for "retail clerk" to make the list. It's a useful thing to drive through that area: it's stunningly beautiful, but you start to get a feel for why there's so little going on there.
- burger_moon 12y agoWhen you compare it to this dot map which shows population density you can see a relation to high density in rural areas to the worse areas on the other map. http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/ http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
- Zaheer 12y agoVery interesting data, also compare it to the Racial Dot Map: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/ http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
- enntymes 12y agohttp://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeQ_wfUBjws http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeQ_wfUBjws