We need a page for this because it’s becoming a meme.
In May, 2013, Movoto, a real estate blog which had previously voted Oakland the #2 city for singles, voted Oakland the “Most Exciting City in the United States”. (This announcement came notably before Oakland had 3 chiefs in 3 days, which was also pretty damn exciting.) It is also worth noting that Movoto’s analysis came despite the fact that Oakland is also the Robbery Capital of America.
Here’s how they made their decision:
”To formulate our list, we first had to decide on 10 criteria we feel make a city exciting. This isn’t a perfect definition, but you can think of our list as ways to fight that ever-present boredom everyone faces at some point or another. We then surveyed each city based on these criteria using various websites such as Yelp and Yellow Pages. Depending on the category (below) we looked at a criterion on a per-person or per-square-mile basis. To be very clear, we looked at each individual city’s size; this excludes suburbs or nearby cities. In other words, it’s not covering an entire metro area.
”These are the 10 criteria we surveyed:
- Park acreage per person
- Percent of population between 20 and 34 years old
- Fast food restaurants per square mile (the fewer the better)
- Bars per square mile
- Big box stores per square mile (the fewer the better)
- Population diversity
- Movie theaters per square mile
- Museums per square mile
- Theater companies per square mile
- Music venues per square mile
”Once we compiled our criteria, we surveyed the 50 most populous cities across the country, ranking them from 1 to 50 based on each individual criterion. Cities with the lowest average rank across all categories placed highest. We’ll go through each criterion individually.”
