It's always sunny in Cleveland

Forbes magazine recently published a semi-quantitiative ranking of what they've dubbed "America's Most Miserable Cities," and my great City of Cleveland came in #1 according to their measures. I can't say I'm surprised by this - not because I agree in any way, but because Cleveland does indeed fare poorly in several of the categories they've selected as proxies for misery, and because it's become a sort of national sport to dump on Cleveland. I should add that this sport is typically practiced by people who have never even been here.

Admittedly, Cleveland isn't too sharp on some (not all) of the metrics they've considered, which are as follows:

Unemployment
Taxes (both sales and income)
Commute times
Violent crime
How its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years
Weather
Superfund pollution sites
Corruption based on convictions of public officials

I'll give you the first one - unemployment has hit Cleveland hard, and the mortgage crisis was especially pernicious here. I wouldn't be surprised to see us dead last there.

As for taxes, I don't know how we stack up, but it doesn't seem any worse than other places I've lived. Cleveland itself charges a flat 2% on income; I used to pay over 3% in Pittsburgh. Sales tax is 7%; less than I paid in New York, same as Pennsylvania. I don't really know where we fall here. Shouldn't there be some measure here reflecting how incredibly affordable Cleveland is? That makes me happy, the anti-miserable. I had some friends from other metro areas (San Francisco, DC, Baltimore) visit a while back, and they spent the whole weekend in a state of reverse sticker shock. I should think the overall affordability of an area is far more important than a percent here and there on sales tax, and we should clean up in this department.

Commute times - we've gotta be pretty solid here. A traffic jam in the Cleve is a wide-open highway to a Los Angelan. If you have a long commute in Cuyahoga County, it's because you chose a dumb place to live relative to where you work.

Ah, the pro sports thing. I assume Forbes here is trying to quantify that fucking montage of bad Cleveland sports moments that they show on TV every goddamn time we make the playoffs. Moving along...

Weather - now we've got a discussion. I understand that we were ranked last in weather, and this bugs me. Yes, winter lasts about a month too long here, but other than that, our weather is highly underrated. We have four real seasons, it doesn't get too hot and sticky in the summer, we don't get crushed by cold like Minnesota, and the spring and especially autumn are spectacular. It annoys me that people can so easily gloss over our magnificent May, September, and October just because it snows here in the winter. I like snow. I like having all the seasons. Stop bashing us because of the climate.

While I'm here; how many times does someone have to be surprised by nice days here before it stops being a surprise? Every time it's sunny out, which it recently was for nine straight days, someone has to make a wisecrack about how it's never this nice in Cleveland. Sure it is, just like it was last time you made that hilarious joke. We have some nice days and some lousy ones - adjust your mindset to that. We also don't ever have natural disasters. No earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, nothing. OK, I'm finished.

Superfund pollution sites - I know that a full 1/8 of my happiness at any given instant is tied directly to the Superfund pollution sites wherever I happen to be. That was sarcastic. Fun fact: all 50 states export waste to other states. Wrap your brain around that.

Corruption of public officials - guilty as charged. We have some of the nation's douchiest politicians, without question. Cuyahoga County's government is a flat-out embarrassment. If we could get some of those fuck-ups out of office, we might get ourself out of the basement of Forbes' semi-arbitrary rankings.


I like the approach taken by this article,, which ranks Forbes as America's Most Miserable Magazine. Zing!

Here's the thing about this whole business of assessing what makes a city miserable: did you actually talk to anyone? Do you have any idea what it's like to be a resident here? I love being here and I don't want to live anywhere else. When I think about the things that really make people happy, they're hardly reflected at all on this list. Forget all those factors: I have friends here, my family is nearby, my teams are all within a half-mile of my apartment, we have the Metroparks, Lake Erie, PlayhouseSquare, the Cleveland Orchestra, University Circle, Great Lakes Brewery, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and more. Most importantly, I feel a sense of pride and community here, maybe because of all the abuse we take from the national media and the economic troubles we've experienced. We're not miserable, Forbes, but thanks for thinking of us.