Poughkeepsie: The 18th Most Miserable City for Raising a Happy Family

An enormous sign with bold red letters reads EMERGENCY, pointing the way to the local ER. A small group of police officers lean on the hood of their vehicle, all staring off in different directions. One officer is either using a walkie-talkie or eating a sandwich—the photo makes it hard to tell. There’s an orange traffic cone poking into the foreground. This was the image chosen to represent the city of Poughkeepsie on Forbes’s 2013 list of America’s Most Miserable Cities.

The caption reads:

#18
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Poughkeepsie residents must endure crummy weather and long commutes to work. Their average commute of 31.9 minutes is the sixth highest in the U.S. Property tax rates are also onerous.

While cities like Detroit and Chicago have repeatedly appeared on the Forbes list in previous years, 2013 marked the first year that Poughkeepsie earned the dubious distinction of being recognized as one of America’s most miserable metropolitan areas. When the Forbes list and accompanying slideshow went live in late February, town officials were, predictably, peeved.

Dutchess County Executive Mark Molinaro called up the Poughkeepsie Journal to weigh in on the ranking. In an article responding to the Most Miserable list, Molinaro said, “Forbes ought to get its story and act together because the inconsistency at best is ridiculous, and at worst, damages the image of a robust and vibrant community. If there was a methodology, it is severely flawed.”

The Forbes list methodology is based on an original Misery Index that economist Arthur Okun developed in the 1960s. While Okun quantified the misery of nations based on unemployment and inflation, Forbes’s own misery-o-meter is based on city-specific economic and social data collected by national and local governments.

Kurt Badenhausen, the Forbes reporter tasked with churning out the annual Most Miserable list, says that the magazine’s preferred misery metrics have evolved consistently over the six years that this list has been published. This year, the rankings were determined based on rates of violent crime, unemployment, foreclosures, property taxes, commute times, and weather. “We’re looking for data that’s comparable across cities,” he says. “And over the years we’ve changed the metrics to some degree.” Some past metrics, like local sports team performance, were removed for the 2013 rankings; some new metrics, like net migration, were added on. But Badenhausen stressed that the point of the list wasn’t to slam cities ruthlessly. “We’re trying to create a conversation amongst our readers,” he says.

The list certainly sparked conversations in Poughkeepsie, some of which may have been surprising to the Forbes editors. For instance, regular Forbes readers couldn’t help but notice that even though Poughkeepsie was listed as a miserable city in February 2013, the very same magazine had listed Poughkeepsie as one of the country’s Best Cities for Raising a Family in April 2012, only a little over a year earlier. For that list, Poughkeepsie is represented by a photo of the gleaming Walkway Over the Hudson, accompanied by the glib, glossy caption “Costs are high, but so are incomes. And the crime rate is one of the country’s lowest.”

People in Poughkeepsie couldn’t help but wonder, what gives?

Badenhausen didn’t seem particularly fazed by the list overlap. It all comes down to the statistics you choose to look at, he explained. “It’s a question of different things being measured,” he said, comparing the metrics used for the Best Cities for Raising a Family and Most Miserable lists. “They’re looking at housing affordability, and they’re looking at commuting too, but they’re looking at commuting delays. We looked at average commute times.”

In other words, both lists took commuting into account as a quality of life metric in some way—but one painted a positive picture of the average Poughkeepsie commute, while the other was used as an example of the area’s misery. The average Poughkeepsie resident’s commute time is 31.9 minutes, over five minutes more than the national average of 25.4 minutes. In that sense, Poughkeepsie commuters are plain miserable. But the delays faced by the average Poughkeepsie commuter are low (perhaps because many commuters take the train), which contributed to Poughkeepsie’s positive ranking on the Best Places to Raise a Family list last year. When you create a happiness or misery index for an area, each category of data you consider is going to be multifaceted. Which of those facets you choose to consider can completely transform your results.

In fact, when Leonard Nevarez, a sociology professor at Vassar College in miserable old Poughkeepsie, initially saw the Forbes Most Miserable Cities list, his first thought was that Poughkeepsie’s unfavorable ranking had to do with misconstrued data on commuting. “I read it as, ‘Oh this is a function of average commute time,’” said Nevarez. But there’s a much bigger picture to consider. “My personal take is that it’s maybe a little unfair, because that’s clearly influenced by how many people take the train… I don’t take the train, so I can’t personally speak to how miserable it is, but having lived in LA where I drove for significant amounts of time, I know it’s a different type of commute, perhaps not as strenuous.”

Nevarez has spent time studying “best/worst place to live” literature in a sociological context, and is familiar with what these lists aspire and sometimes fail to accomplish, as well as the data “cherry-picking” that can affect results. He sees the value in best/worst city lists, but also stressed that it’s important, as readers, to maintain a healthy skepticism of broad, facile rankings like Forbes’ Best Cities for Raising a Family and Most Miserable Cities lists.

“These titles—happiest place, or best place to raise a family or most miserable—they’re not really scientific. They don’t withhold scrutiny too much,” he said. He explained that as journalism erodes in the new age of the “listicle,” major publications are often on the lookout for content like best/worst cities lists, which are fast and easy to produce. “They can be done now from your computer on an Excel spreadsheet. Then you can—on the basis of what is still an objective if not totally valid ranking of particular indicators— then you can just go to town in how you choose to write and interpret this data,” he said.

In Poughkeepsie, officials and locals alike had a major gripe about the interpretation and presentation of data on the Most Miserable Cities list: the area that Forbes called “Poughkeepsie” isn’t really Poughkeepsie at all. The geographic region Forbes defines as Poughkeepsie is in fact a patchy mélange of disparate districts. To generate the list, Badenhausen et al use statistics collected for government-defined “metro statistical areas.” Basically, that means that the broader region technically referred to as the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown Metropolitan Statistical Area was simply called Poughkeepsie for the purposes of Badenhausen’s article.

John Davis, a local news and features reporter at the Poughkeepsie Journal, wrote a response piece to the Forbes list—“Residents Outraged by ‘Most Miserable’ Rating.” He said that the residents he interviewed were unhappy with the way the data appears lumped together for a sprawling area. “The identification they were using was really broad,” Davis explained. “Newburgh is a lot worse off than Poughkeepsie in almost every standard of living, and Middletown is a different city too…to classify that whole area as Poughkeepsie is really absurd.” As for the point of his own response article in the Poughkeepsie Journal, Davis said, “I think the whole point was to show how ridiculous that is…it was kind of a light-hearted thing to me. It wasn’t anything serious. It was just this magazine making these very subjective judgments, and the criteria were so overly broad that it really does seem unfair to Poughkeepsie.”

So, at the end of the day, how credible is a misery index methodology like Forbes’? Is it possible to quantify the misery of a geographic region? What’s the point of putting together a Most Miserable Cities list in the first place?

Nevarez has weighed some of these questions in his own research. He said that from the perspective of the magazine these lists are great. In addition to being easy to produce, there’s a clear public interest in best/worst city lists. Stories like these are compulsively shareable; when your city is ranked as one of the happiest in America, or one of the best places to raise a family, you’re going to want to post it on your Facebook wall. Likewise, Forbes’ Most Miserable Cities list garnered a relatively large amount of attention on social media platforms, with over 2,700 retweets and 21,100 Facebook shares.

Best/worst city lists can also reflect revealingly on a growing phenomenon of “consuming places.” Like travel channels or regional magazines, Nevarez says that best/worst city lists imply a society with new levels of choice in where to live and travel. “I find it fascinating that people are just consuming all these lists,” said Nevarez. “Everyone is consuming places, trying them on in their imagination… people used to have less choice in the kinds of places they live in and places they visited; people picked from a smaller array of choices.”

Nevarez doesn’t see best/worst places to live as fluffy or useless, though he does take them with a grain of salt. “It’s a valid, useful practice insofar as it conveys a lot of complex information very quickly,” he said. “But it’s not clear to me that everyone knows how to read them so critically.” Moreover, he said, lists like Forbes’s can begin to shape the discourse about a city, which can be worrisome.

So, how will Poughkeepsie fare in the wake of its takedown on Forbes’s Most Miserable list this year?

“I suspect that Poughkeepsie is gonna live this one down. It has a larger set of issues,” Nevarez said. According to him, the main thing to keep in mind about using a list—Forbes’s or anyone’s— to determine a region’s quality of life is that “they’re maybe the first word—not the last word.”

This article appears in May 2013.