Do You Really Want to be the Best?

Cities see both benefits and drawbacks
to being ranked a top place to live.

By ZACH PATTON

Spend a morning walking around the historic pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, and you'll want to move there. Cafes, bookshops, art galleries and theaters line the brick-paved thoroughfare, which the city closed to automobile traffic in the 1970s.

And it's not just tourist kitsch. Along with the clothing boutiques and handmade pottery stores are hallmarks of a workaday downtown — a jewelry repair shop, a pharmacy and banks. A couple of years ago, the city helped build the Charlottesville Pavilion, a concert venue that now attracts national acts. The pavilion's swooping white tent roof anchors the mall's east end.

On warm nights, the whole mall teems with local families and students from the University of Virginia, whose campus — with its life-sized statue of its founder, Thomas Jefferson — is just a few blocks away. But even on a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, the mall is filled with residents bustling to work or running errands, stopping to chat or to warm themselves briefly at an impossibly cute espresso cart. Looking up over the roofs of the brick buildings lining the mall, you spot the rolling, steel-blue foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.This, you're thinking, would be a great place to live.

As it turns out, you could back up that opinion with empirical proof — or as empirical as this kind of stuff gets. The Charlottesville area was named the best place to live in the 2004 edition of "Cities Ranked and Rated," a hefty compendium cataloging more than 400 metropolitan areas throughout the country. The book, by Bert Sperling, praised Charlottesville's clean air and water, good schools, healthy economy and manageable cost of living. The city cheered the recognition. Retail and housing developments 30 miles away started flaunting their location "in Charlottesville." The chamber of commerce printed bumper stickers touting "America's #1 community."

For this city of 40,000 and for surrounding Albemarle County, which has an additional 90,000 residents, the ranking has been a boon, according to Charlottesville city council member David Brown, who served as mayor for four years until he stepped down last month. "The good growth we've achieved — being able to attract the creative class — has been fueled by that ranking," he says over a cup of coffee at the Mudhouse, a cozy hangout at the west end of the mall. "We've improved as a destination, and I think there's some connection to the ranking. It's been helpful, and it's something we're really proud of."

Others in Charlottesville weren't so happy with the designation. More here.