Forbes' best cities for young professionals

[TheGerbil]

http://www.forbes.com/realestate/2007/06/2...realestate.html

We actually fared pretty well in this ranking. I can't say I trust it any more than their "best cities for singles" ranking, but it's refreshing that they ranked us favorably in several categories. Maybe this will help counter-act the bad publicity from that "singles" ranking.

Here is a quote from their blurb (emphasis added by me): "Pittsburgh ranked 9th for best big and small businesses. A rank of 20th for attracting young professionals and rank of 34th for highest never-married population dragged down the score for this affordable city."

We were ranked 21st overall out of 40. Not bad for a city that they claim is so bad for singles. Looks like the only bad score they gave us was population of "never married" people.

I am particularly interested in the business category mentioned above, for which they put us in the top ten. Considering how bad everyone says our business climate is, I sure do see us ranked high on a lot of business-related lists (not just Forbes).

[urbanophile]

This sounds about right. I think the other Forbes survey (the one that perenially ranks Pgh at the bottom) was about best cities for singles. This one is about best cities for young professionals. Factors such as availability of professional jobs, presence of other high level college grads, etc. are weighed more heavily. As seen in the survey, while some cities like Miami may offer better nightlife, it doesn't offer the jobs and it doesn't have as large of a population of people from the top ranked colleges, hence Miami is ranked much lower than Pittsburgh. With the presence of UPMC, the various engineering companies, Bayer, the unviersities, etc., Pgh does over a decent amount of professional jobs. Sure it's not NYC, DC, Boston, or SF but those are much larger places. For its size, Pgh does offer a pretty large amount of professional jobs.