Livability.com screws up royally in ranking Spearfish the seventh best small town in America. They should, of course, rank Spearfish #1!
What makes Spearfish so great in Livability's eyes and mine?
- Downtown commerce and entertainment
- The Matthews Opera House
- The D.C. Booth Fish Hatchery
- 26 parks and recreation areas
- good Internet services for telecommuting (gotta pay for that mountain bike, fishing rod, and climbing gear somehow)
- Spearfish Canyon
- and not mentioned in the article but deserving mention: Lookout Mountain!
Here are the six towns Livability mistakenly ranked as better than Spearfish, plus the remainder of the top ten:
Whitopias, all: brown people need not apply.
Larry,
I lived in Spearfish for two years and never had a problem. At the time it was an ideal location with easy access to Deadwood for great food and a little fun and an easy commute for my job.
The only really challenge for me was the amount of snow Spearfish gets compared to Rapid City. It was just too much snow for me.
Are white lesbians a step in the right direction, Larry? Consider the current effort to start a PFLAG chapter in Spearfish—that's got to kick that ranking up a notch.
LawCo sent no delegates to the SDDP convention, Cory and one half of a Lesbian couple in our New Mexico neighborhood supports Susana Martinez simply because she's a woman sticking it to men.
Los Alamos is a beautiful, multicultural town where Hispanics drive the service sector, people of East Indian and Chinese descent run the lab, and the bankers are white people: little wonder it's at the top of the list.
https://twitter.com/LosAlamosNatLab/status/491651348354453504
Btw: Rick Weiland's campaign lives about fifteen miles across the Rio Galisteo from here.
campaign manager....
Northfield, MN, is a cool little college town. Carleton College and St. Olaf University are very highly rated liberal arts schools in US rankings. Northfield preserved the old and interesting buildings downtown. It's also the home of Malt-o-Meal. What's not to like?
Port Angeles, WA was going to be the temporary US capital if Washington DC was bombed in WW II. It's another interesting and fun little town. It's on Puget Sound.
All that is true, and still, I like Spearfish. Yeah, it's got some issues, but it's good.
Larry, I haven't been in Los Alamos, but I'd put Santa Fe on the list at #1! I love that place!
It's important to remember that government is the largest employer of these communities where medical care is number two and funeral homes not far behind.
Last week I just returned from a tour of MN and Northfield is one of my favorite towns. I always loved the atmosphere at Carlton and St. Olaf and it's not too far from the action in the Twin Cities yet your comfortably away in a smaller community.
I'm seriously looking into returning to Minnesota and my mother who retires next year might move there too. Cost of living, state income tax and health care costs are being looked into which so far are less overall and I made more in income to offset any additional costs in the past.
If the politics in SD were different my ranking of Spearfish would be higher but it's tainted with all the failed policies in my home state. I contacted and offered 3 times to help a candidate here in SD by making phone calls, fundraising given my background in sales and offered to go door to door but there was never any follow up by the campaign and I'm not going to beg to volunteer. Geesh! Oh well! I offered.
Judging from this article, the only places that will be livable in any sense, are the ones that don't fry the residents. When you look at the map, notice the big, blue streak over MN. Yesterday was the first time this year I needed to use my air conditioning. We've only hit the 90s twice.
http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2014/07/rapid-pace-changing-climate-gets-special-emphasis-new-status-report
Jeez fellas,what's wrong with the "land between two rivers" east and south of Dakota and Minn.? Cherokee and Obrien counties are the only two places I have ever lived(nearly 62 years)and counting to a thousand.
Washington DC gets bombed, and we move FDR to Port Angeles, where the Japanese could attack? Nuts to that! Spearfish would be a much better capital!
And speaking of climate, Deb, it gets hot in Spearfish, but it's a dry heat, and it cools off at night. Aaahhh....
Deb mentions that blue streak, i.e., the apparently cooler temps in America's mid-section wrought by climate change. I notice that Russia warms up—uh oh! Better crop production in Russia, worse in U.S.... that has geopolitical implications! I was counting on Canada to heat up so we could annex and grow wheat and corn there!