We’re #4
SustainLane, a website that bills itself as The Web’s best community resource for healthy and sustainable living has a list of what they consider the cities in the US offering the highest quality of life. Seattle ranks fourth, right after San Francisco, Portland, and Berkeley. (Amusingly enough for me, my favorite and frequent vacation spot–Santa Monica–is right behind Seattle in fifth place.)
Quoth the site:
The city excels in management innovation and in maintaining a state-of-the-art knowledgebase, working closely with Mayor Greg Nickels.
I’m not even sure what that means.
They define these terms in the explanation of their methodology. They define “city innovation” (presumably the same as “management innovation” and “knowledge base” here. It looks like a lot of the credit goes to Nickels’ efforts to meet the Kyoto protocols.
It’s worth noting the categories where Seattle performs poorly: zoning and land use. Seattle suffers from too much sprawl, not enough mixed-use development, and a lack of parks. The article also points out that our water and air quality are mediocre for our size and location.
Cascadian: We don’t suffer all that much from a lack of parks. Over 10% of Seattle’s land area is taken up by parks (6052 acres of parks, 10.74 acres per 1000 population; compare San Francisco with only 8.26 acres per 1000, or Los Angeles with less than 6). That the category is so low should point out the very severe lack in the other element of their land use category: too much sprawl.