Big Downer For Big D

Big D as in Dallas. Another Big D, that being Denver was in the #1 top spot in a new Pew Research Center national survey that asked Americans where they'd like to live if they could.

San Diego was #2, with Seattle in the #3 spot.

Detroit was at the bottom of the list, with only 8% of Americans wanting to move there. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Minneapolis also did not do too well, occupying the bottom 5 positions with Minneapolis doing the best of that group with 16% thinking that town was a place they'd want to live.

It seemed to me that Dallas did pretty well, coming in at #16 with 24% of Americans saying they would like to live there.

Fort Worth was not on the list, but the actual question asked if they'd want to live in a particular city or its surrounding area.

Fort Worth does not like thinking of itself simply as an area surrounding Dallas, and why would they, what with Fort Worth being the envy of cities and and towns far and wide causing a widespread green with envy epidemic.

I first learned of this Pew Research Center survey in this morning's Dallas Morning News. The headline was "Big Downer for Big D," with the sub-heading being "So Americans rank us just mediocre, huh? Well, y'all don't know squat."

The article is amusingly tongue in cheek, both pointing out good things that are in Dallas, and making fun of some other things that have to do with Dallas, like their hapless football team. That doesn't play in Dallas.

I don't know if the hard copy edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had an article about the Pew Research Center survey. I saw no mention of it on their online version. That paper tends to keep this type information from its readers due to it sort of contradicts the party line about Fort Worth being the Center of the Known Universe causing that envy epidemic problem I mentioned above.

I also saw no mention of this survey in the online Seattle P-I. But they are used to being at the top of such things, so it's no big deal. Had Fort Worth been near the top we would have likely had a city wide celebration, like we had when an obscure Washington, D.C. lobbying group put Fort Worth on a list of America's supposedly most livable communities. Tacoma/Pierce County was also on that list. But had no city wide celebration. Because they knew it was a bogus award.