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Forbes, ever the arbiters of cool, have decided to rank America’s coolest city. The good news: Miami came in 13th in the top twenty. The bad news: apparently a dozen other cities are cooler than ours.
Uh, nah uh, Forbes.
To compile the list, Forbes took into account a number of equally weighted factors. They include an arts and culture index (taking into account things like museums, theaters and musical performances), a recreation index (including things like sports teams and other recreational attractions), a foodie factor (number of restaurants per population, with an emphasis on non-chains), diversity, population between 18 and 34, and population growth between 2010 and 2013.
Here’s how Miami scored:
Arts & Culture Index: 94
Recreation Index: 89
Diversity Index: 67.55
Local Eats: 83.4%
Population age 20-34: 28.2%
2010 – 2013 Net Migration: 4.0%
Pretty respectable actually, but what of those other cities that are supposedly cooler than us?
Here’s the top 12, and what we really think of them:
12. Oakland, California
Oakland’s recent hip renaissance is really just a byproduct of techies taking over San Francisco, jacking up rents, and forcing all the cultural movers and shakers who had come to define the city across the bay to Oakland. When you think about it, is that cool or just kind of tragic? Let’s just make sure we someday don’t do the same to Fort Lauderdale.
11. New York, NY
New York is full of people who move there specifically to be cool, try way too hard in that pursuit, and yet it can’t even the crack the top ten. There’s nothing less cool than trying too hard to be cool and failing.
10. Dallas, TX
Just go ahead and text ten random friends, “Hey, I was thinking about taking a trip to Dallas. I heard it’s really cool now,” and see what the response is. Seriously, do it.
9. Boston, MA
If you’re idea of cool involves placing the word “wicked” before the word “cool,” then, sure, we guess so. Never mind the fact that everyone who graduates college here moves away almost immediately.
8. Riverside, CA
The name of this town sounds like a gated community.
7. Denver, CO
Everyone who lives in the Midwest and wants to move to a big, “cool” city without moving too far away from home ends up moving here. Denver is the sad, end result of all that concentrated coolness.
6. San Diego, CA
You may notice that Los Angeles is not on this list. Which we note, because whenever we think of San Diego we only think, “That is another large city in Southern California that is not Los Angeles.”
5. San Francisco, CA
These people live in Oakland now. They were replaced by Marc Zuckerberg and other white dudes too young to be wearing ill-fitting dad jeans.
4. Houston, TX
Exhibit A in why this list is probably BS: Even people in Houston don’t believe that Houston is cool.
3. Austin, TX
OK, Austin has officially been branded “cool” thanks to SXSW, the annual conference where giant multinational corporations come to sponsor things so that people think they’re cool.
2. Seattle, WA
Girl, is this the ’90s? At least Portland has Portlandia. No one even bothers to make fun of Seattle anymore.
1. Washington, DC
Come party with young lobbyists who spend their days trying to get tax relief for the defense industry and their nights doing drugs to numb the growing realization that what they’re doing with their lives is pure evil. Cool!
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