EDIT: The survey is now closed — thank you to all who responded and Happy Easter, all.
I am currently working on a project with New York Magazine to rate New York City’s best neighborhoods based on a wide array of objective indicators. Literally everything from the number of cockroaches to the number of Whole Foodses is considered, along with all of the more obvious things that can make an urban neighborhood a great or terrible place to live. Although this all sounds very whimsical it’s actually a fairly rigorous project and from what I can tell is the first time that anybody has tried to evaluate New York’s neighborhoods in exactly this fashion.
One thing that’s difficult to know, however, is how to rate the different factors relative to one another. And because New York has a lot of great neighborhoods (the top two-dozen or so are all within a couple of points of one another), the weighting happens to make quite a bit of difference. Toward that end, I could use some help from those of you who currently live or have recently have lived in a major city by taking a brief survey. What is a “major city”? You tell me, but I’m generally thinking about cities that are both large enough and dense enough enough to support a number of distinct and “livable” neighborhoods within the city limits — cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, London, Toronto, along with what I’m sure are many others.
The survey should take only about 5 minutes and can be completed by clicking here. And, no, I’ve by no means come around to the virtues of online surveys in general — but this is one of those cases where a blunt instrument is better than nothing.