Why Do Livable City Lists Get It So Wrong?

One of the latest superlative lists puts Portland, Maine at the top. Take it from someone who lived there for 10 years. They have no idea.

Let’s say you were a certain kind of person. You were young, unattached, with a huge inheritance tucked away, with no vehicle, no debt, and a satisfying job at a nonprofit just steps away from your overpriced apartment. The job pays only about $18,000 a year, but it makes you feel good, and your financial manager covers your living costs anyways with the pickings from your trust.

If you were this kind of person, Portland, Maine would be an ideal place to live. 

If you were, however, most other types of people—families with kids, for instance, or people without trust funds who are not lawyers or anesthesiologists or slumlords—it just plain sucks.

You wouldn’t know that however, if you read Rent Café’s latest list of livable cities. As if looking out from Plato’s cave, they examine thin slices of Portland’s demographics, then guess wildly about what it’s like to live there. To make matters worse, they screw some of the numbers up in a big way. Their report, for example, says that Portland, Maine, has 540,718 residents. That’s absurd. The Census bureau puts the population of the City at 69,000. The State of Maine only has about 1.2 million residents.

That’s just the beginning of the misleading “data” about Portland. RentCafe bases their livability accolades on 17 metrics that they believe determine happiness. 

What are these metrics?

“Think of it as the combination of all of the reasons that make you happy to call a place home,” they write. “Whether it’s the cost of living that you’re concerned about or income growth, access to gym facilities or the number of entertainment venues nearby, livability manages to cover just about anything that a potential resident is bound to worry about.”

If you look at what they especially like about Portland? Here’s their short list:

• Great higher education opportunities
• Steady income growth
• Plenty of sports facilities
• Fresh food sources
• Diverse health care providers

Clearly, these values align with what I was suggesting about the ideal Portland resident: a person independently wealthy, in her early 20s, who likes to jog and eat out and doesn’t own a home or a business. But what about the other 99 percent of the population?

Between the Lines

Among the other metrics that RentCafe touts as evidence of the good life is income growth and poverty levels. It’s true that overall income has risen over recent years, and the city did pass a $15 per hour minimum wage bill (much hated by many local businesses). Also, the overall poverty level looks low.

But the story behind that income rise is gentrification, not opportunity, because the working poor have been forced out of the city by spiraling rents. Most of the actual jobs in the city are service related: waiters, barristers, cooks and so on. They’re not lucrative careers. The combination of digital nomads and early retirees have skewed incomes higher. And the City is stuffed full of legal firms and, yes, has lots of hospital beds.

That being said, available health care does not mean affordable healthcare. I know from experience I had a small day surgery a couple of years ago at Maine Medical in town, and ended up with $16,000 out of pocket after insurance.

The people who do the hands-on work in Portland don’t typically live there. Almost no one I’ve encountered at City Hall, for example, can afford to live in town. The guy who co-runs the Historic Preservation office and exercises absurd control over every sign, renovation, and heat pump installation, lives a half hour away, in Freeport.

Many workers in Portland drive in from far-flung towns such as Sanford and Windham. And they can’t find enough warm bodies to do the thankless work of plowing roads, maintaining public restrooms, and cleaning up after the large and exploding homeless population.

Last I heard the City was operating with only 50 percent of its staff positions filled. They can’t offer enough in bonuses, for example, to coax new police officers to patrol the streets.

If you really wanted to measure the livability of Portland or any other City, you need to factor in the things that really affect quality of life, not the hypotheticals for a hypothetical person. Here are some that should be on the list:

Large unhoused population. Portland is a compassionate city. The citizens care for a large homeless population (close to 3,000 people, although estimates vary) that comes from all over, and they spend huge resources housing and feeding and managing them.

But they’re overwhelmed. This category of residents include a growing population of “asylum seekers” from other countries. Many of the homeless are drug addicted. The city, in efforts to solve the problem, ends up mixing the two populations together, renting out entire hotels to house them.

But on the street level, when you live in Portland’s more urban neighborhoods, you encounter stressful situations every time you leave the house. My wife has been followed and harassed on numerous occasions by drunken or mentally ill people at all hours.

Walk out your door in the morning and you sometimes find yourself dodging vomit and hypodermic needles. My former neighbor had to hang special blue lighting next to his house so that addicts would be unable to find a vein when they ducked into the shadows. 

Public schools under pressure. The in-town schools are overwhelmed too. Some, such as the Reiche school in The West End have seen a huge influx of  immigrant kids struggling to learn English. They’re great kids, well behaved and generally kind, but they’re on a different trajectory than an English-speaking native, so you find yourself weighing whether to send your kid there. 

Burdensome property taxes. A couple of years ago, the city engaged in what the then city council and mayor described as a long overdue “revaluation” of every property in the City up to 90 percent of market value—based on appraisals done at the height of the Pandemic property price surge.

Taxes on many homes doubled or nearly tripled overnight, driving many long-time residents out of their homes. The unapologetic city council and mayor quickly retired or termed out after that debacle, but the damage had been done. And they’re planning yet another revaluation this year. 

Limited kid-friendly parks and playgrounds. Although Portland has several parks and playgrounds, most are frequented all day by homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill and/or drug users. That’s not to malign these unsheltered people. They need a place to be during the day, when all of the shelters close. But they often don’t mix well with families and small kids, especially the ones who leave their drug paraphernalia around the playgrounds.

And if you do find an empty greenspace, watch where you step. Portland’s residents seem to include increasing numbers of dog owners who lock their canines in their condos and apartments all day, popping in to walk them at lunch. There’s always one bad owner who allows his dog to defecate whenever the whim allows and walks away (despite ordinances trying to get people to collect their doggie doo). 

Number of public restrooms. For visitors and residents alike, the lack of public restrooms had become truly horrific by last summer. The few porta potties available were literally overflowing with fecal matter. More recently one group has pushed for some new public facilities, but when your five-year old (or a 50-year old) has to pee, you’ll be competing with hundreds of full-time homeless residents.

Rental governance: slumlords and rogue socialists.  I have been both a landlord and a tenant in Portland, so I know the score. Rents have nearly doubled, as corporate entities have grabbed up more of the housing stock. The only force restraining them is an organization called the Democratic Socialists of Maine, who have passed citizen referendums limiting rent increases and so on.

The problem with these, however, is two-fold. The city rarely enforces the new ordinances, and the “DSA” operates like tinkering amateurs, creating policies that often overreach, with little discussion or compromise. They simply don’t respond to communications.

Percent of city staff positions currently unfilled. When your police staff is down by 50 percent, and your City Hall hours have been cut due to staff shortages, something’s wrong. Cap it off with the requirement that you schedule appointments to go in and talk to zoning or permitting or other branches, a limitation put in place during the Pandemic and kept in place, and no one is there to help you. 

Unbuildable streets. Let’s say you want to move into one of the city’s nice inner ring suburbs. You find a cherry open lot on a quiet street, where you’d like to build a new home. Forget about it.

In Portland most of the hundreds of remaining empty lots lie on what are called paper streets. They’re not officially maintained by the City. That being said, however, all of the ones I know about actually are maintained, and receive trash service, recycling and so on. Many have water and sewer available at the curb.

But Planning officials have gone to great lengths to shed all infrastructure responsibility and put it on you, the would-be developer. To build you have to widen and curb the ENTIRE unfinished section of the street, and so on. It’s a cost only a very wealthy individual could bear.

Number of parking tickets issued. Portland’s heavy-handed approach to parking is little mentioned in travel reviews. The warning signs posted all over the City are impossible to understand (forbidding parking on various days and times), and they’re quick to tow you away or put the boot on your vehicle if you don’t pay up.

Public garages are available, but prices keep rising. Private businesses hire their own parking thugs to watch every vehicle that enters a lot, and have untagged cars towed away immediately. Getting out of hock will cost you $150 to $250, once you figure out which outside company towed away your car.

Bottom Line: Data Can’t Be Trusted

This morning, an article from MIT Technology Review titled “The Dictatorship of Data” crossed my desk. It recalls how incomplete and incorrect data was used during the Vietnam War era to suggest that the U.S. was winning (we weren’t) and that certain tactics indicated a path to victory (they didn’t.) It’s a more extreme of example of how easy it is to mislead people with the wrong metrics.

The writer notes that:  “We are more susceptible than we may think to the “dictatorship of data”—that is, to letting the data govern us in ways that may do as much harm as good. The threat is that we will let ourselves be mindlessly bound by the output of our analyses even when we have reasonable grounds for suspecting that something is amiss.

Education seems on the skids? Push standardized tests to measure performance and penalize teachers or schools. Want to prevent terrorism? Create layers of watch lists and no-fly lists in order to police the skies. Want to lose weight? Buy an app to count every calorie but eschew actual exercise.”

The authors make a salient point. Perhaps it will give pause to the hacks who put together these best cities reports. Without boots on the ground, interviews with residents, and frankly, just reading the local newspaper, data gives you no idea whether a City is livable or not. Best to rent a place in town for a month or two and try it out yourself.