Voting was rigged!!

Here at 64th and Broadway, Barcelona we search far and wide to bring you stories for your entertainment. Obscure films nobody cares about but me, less than popular music, a world class soccer team that nobody cares about, and all rife with typos. But today, we go even further and we go into the pages of world known personal finance magazine, Kiplinger's. Because, if there is one thing 64th and Broadway knows, it's personal finance.

At any rate, Kiplinger's listed the 50 best places to live in the United States. Rankings were based primarily on affordibility and future economic possibilities. Here is how the fine people at Kiplinger's stated it....

To come up with this list of cities, we began by surveying you, our readers, to see what factors you consider most important when choosing a place to live. The top two were cost of living and cost of housing. Quality health care and a low crime rate were also among your top requirements.

We then asked Bert Sperling, co-author of Cities Ranked & Rated (Wiley, $25) and host of BestPlaces.net, to design a database to take these factors into account. Other key criteria used were weather, education (primary, secondary and higher), cultural amenities and transportation.

Unfortunately, no database could allow for another top priority: proximity to family.

To broaden the appeal of the cities on the list, we also factored in economic vitality -- we gave points to well-diversified economies that are good places to start or expand businesses. In addition, we looked at quality of life, which by our definition means the variety of cultural and recreational activities available.

With this tentative list in hand, we sent six writers out to investigate the top cities, with instructions to examine in particular the price of housing, the character of neighborhoods and the ease of living. Were commutes reasonable? Did suburbs have personalities? Were downtowns clean, interesting and vibrant? Based on all of our findings, a panel of eight writers and editors ranked the cities.

And you know what? After all that, 3 Indiana cities made the top 50!

And at an unjustly low number 14, it was Indianapolis, Indiana.

I think voting may have been rigged. We are clearly top 10.

You can read more about it all, HERE.

Sure it would have been nice to be higher, but it's still nice to see Indianapolis where it is, and overall, it's a very interesting list.