Decatur Can’t Register As a “Best Place to Live”
Decatur Metro | July 13, 2009 | 11:23 amFor all the grief I give city rankings, I sure do spend a lot of time talking about them! You might as well just add “hypocritical bloggers” to the list of things that apparently make Decatur an un-best place to live.
According to Money Magazine’s 2009 “Best Places to Live“, Decatur isn’t even worth mentioning. While Peachtree City ranks 8th in the entire country (?!) and Suwanee ranks 35th, Decatur can’t even manage to be acknowledged as one of Georgia’s less deserving “Other Cities.”
Truth be told, Decatur has never registered, which makes me think it’s more an issue with how Money is classifying “places” (Atlanta and “North Druid Hills” register, but Decatur doesn’t) than an actual critique against the city.
But that sort of post doesn’t a good blog make. So, cue my artificial exasperation.
Golly-gee! Peachtree City?! Apparently a horribly long commute doesn’t hurt your ranking.
Would love to see Decatur & Dunwoody on the list, if you have info on registration please let me know. Thanks.
Can’t tell if we want to be on the list or not. Sometimes it’s nice to be a secretly great place without hordes of wannabes arriving and driving up land values, crowding the schools, and changing the atmosphere. On the other hand, in this recession, I guess the city wants to attract well-heeled taxpayers.
“Sometimes it’s nice to be a secretly great place without hordes of wannabes arriving and driving up land values, crowding the schools, and changing the atmosphere. ”
Good one.
Wink-wink. Nod. Nod
Yep…WAY too late on avoiding that!
Any list that would rank PTC as one of the top 10 places to live has to have some mighty narrow criteria. My sister lived there for 7 years, and couldn’t wait to move. I even got to where I disliked going there to pick up our nieces or to visit her. People there seemed very uncomfortable with/hostile to racial & ethnic diversity (or, for that matter, GLBT folk), and the schools aren’t really all that (just try to find one of them in the Top 100 schools listing that DM posted here a while back). It’s one of the most culturally backward “modern’ suburbs I’ve ever been in, and that’s saying something (there’s more to life than being able to shuttle around in golf carts). I’ll take the cultural richness & relative “obscurity” of Decatur over the suffocating sameness of PTC any day !!!
Yeah, I can vouch for PTC being a hole. In college I knew a bunch of kids from that neck of the woods and they were, almost to a one, screwed up on some fundamental level – a bunch of latchkey kids with absolutely nothing to do but take the golfcart to their friends’ houses, break into the liquor cabinets, get screwed up and try not to get pregnant.
Not that the children of Decatur are saints or anything, but it was pretty much the worst suburban stereotypical excessiveness you could imagine. Also, yeah, the hell with that commute.
I always laugh at the positive press that Peachtree City gets for its golf carts. This is a town that has taken car dependency and kicked it up a notch. Places that would be walkable are accessed via golf cart. That town has to be a current version of the ex-earthlings on the movie Wall-E, who are confined to chairs that move them everywhere, have forgotten how to walk, and are all obese.
That is too funny. I never thought of it that way, but that is so true.
Oh no, 6 injured as crane falls at Decatur Metro site:
http://www.hindu.com/2009/07/14/stories/2009071455301000.htm
I hope everything comes around–ya know, the whole life cycle thing AND not ever taking converts.
I really feel for the crane though–hangers on will always fall by the wayside, but to have the whole damn thing fall, that’s what’s really sad.
That’s it — I’m never reading Money magazine again.
Wait a minute … I’ve never read it.
I can’t believe that one of the measurements listed in the results is restaurants within 15 MILES!! That’s not exactly on the doorstep!
The whole golf cart thing is pretty cheesy. In movie terms, Peachtree City just makes me think of the Stepford Wives!