City ranking are fun (*cough* *cough*), but depending on the data used (if any) you can get some very different results. In fact, this week Miami Beach was named both Florida's most livable city and its most dangerous city by different websites.
The first ranking comes from Livability.com, which considered more than 2,000 American towns with populations between 20,000 and 350,000. The towns were assessed on more than 40 data points that fell into nine general categories: economy, health, housing, civic capital, education, amenities, demographics and infrastructure. The site says it decided which factors were important to people based on input from a survey of 2,000 people.
Miami Beach came in 38th overall, making it the most livable city in Florida. The city had particularly high scores for amenities, education, infrastructure and demographics, but was lacking overall for civic capital, economy and housing.
(By the way, Coral Gables was the only other South Florida city on the list, coming it at number 100 exactly).
Apparently though crime rates did not figure to heavily into Livability's rankings, as HomeSecurityShield.net (which, yes, is trying to sell you a security system) has ranked Miami Beach as Florida's most dangerous city.
Their source: FBI data.
They added the annual number of violent crimes and property crimes together to come up with the number of crimes per 1,000 residents. Here's how Miami Beach fared:
Annual Crimes Per 1,000 residents
Violent Crimes: 10.33 per 1,000 residents
Property Crimes: 99.14 per 1,000 residents
Total Reported Crimes: 109.47 per 1,000 residents
Of course, the site's assertion that Miami Beach residents have a "1 in 9" chance of being a victim of being a victim of crime is completely disingenuous. A significant amount of those violent crimes are committed against tourists (at times by other tourists), and and property crimes include everything from vandalism of public property to someone stealing something from a hotel room.
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