Where are the hardest places to live in the US?

[Horse with no Name]

Pretty cool interactive map. As expected, my county is at the bottom of the barrel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html?emc=edit_th_20140629&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65469826&_r=1

[yeoman6987]

1. Not bad.....Number 180 out of 3,135

Anne Arundel Maryland.

[bluedigger]

2. 846/3135.

I can live with that.

[Horse with no Name]

3. 2874/3135.....actually better than I expected, lol

[Marrah_G]

4. Mine is right in the middle.

[likesmountains 52]

5. Wow...59th!

[Art_from_Ark]

6. Of course, these are *counties*

What about *cities*? Or even districts of cities? If they were considered, the list might be completely different.

[MiniMe]

7. Mine is 6 out of 3135

Said the DU'er who has been unemployed for several years.

[Blue_In_AK]

8. 377 here in Anchorage,

but rural Alaska is in the two thousandsies.

[XemaSab]

9. The State of Jefferson is not doing well

The map alone lends credence to the SoJers' complaints about California.

[freshwest]

10. Can't figure out my county from the map. But my state is almost all green.

[frazzled]

11. These rankings are pretty stupid

as, imo, are all these computer generated data-crunching maps and graphs. Full of sound and fury and signifiying nothing.

How do you measure "hard"? What does "hard" even mean? Why didn't they measure for things like cultural amenities, or availability of public transportation, or quality of hospitals, or number of libraries or institutions of higher learning per capita? How about the freaking weather?

For comparison's sake, I took the county where I live, Cook County, IL (ranked 1,110 of 3,135) and Sweetwater County, WY (ranked 362 of 3,135), just because it looked so big and dark blue. Sweetwater shore doo sound like a great place to live (though I think I'd rather slit my throat than live there).

First of all, Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, has a population of 5,240,700. Sweetwater has a population of 43,000. Rather hard to compare. The demographics are very different, too. For Cook County: The racial makeup of the county was 56.27% white, 26.14% Black or African American, 0.29% Native American, 4.84% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islanders, 9.88% from other races, and 2.53% from two or more races. 19.93% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. For Sweetwater: The racial makeup of the county was 91.62% White, 0.73% Black or African American, 1.01% Native American, 0.64% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 3.59% from other races, and 2.37% from two or more races.

One big difference is density. Cook County: 5,530 per sq. mi.; Sweetwater: 4 people per sq.mi.

Interestingly, despite Cook's far more diverse racial and ethnic makeup, it's college education populace is 34.3%; Sweetwater: 17%. We're even less obese (31% versus 35%). Yet we are ranked much much lower.

I like where I live: a city in which the population is fairly well divided between 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Hispanic and Asian. I like that we have one of of the top three symphony orchestras in the entire world (and first in the US), great art museums, superb architecture, a slew of colleges and universities, and fabulous restaurants from tiny, cheap ethnic ones to internationally recognized ones. And the El and hot dogs. (On the downside, we've got the Cubs, but I don't think Sweetwater has anything).

It would be hard for me (personally) to live in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.

PS: I think this map is essentially a map measuring whiteness.