Surveys

Last night I had dinner with the Doremire clan (sans mom) and a friend of Adam’s flown in from Seattle... not for this occasion, though. The friend brought up a social geography survey method that gauges the ‘livability’ of American regions, mostly urban to quasi-urban centres. I remember three of the four survey criteria: tolerance, technology, transportation, and something else. Maybe higher education? The implication of the survey is no doubt an arrow in real estate agent’s quiver to justify the $100k tack-on to a loft in San Francisco, but apparently meant to lend a scientific authority for urban relocation away from the small towns and rural landscapes of America. I wouldn’t take a breath for arguing against the awesome appeal of urban living along three to four criteria (plus the hundreds others unmentioned or assumed) and didn’t make an attempt to poke holes in the survey’s methodology or results.

Where I had/have a problem is the cultural chauvinism carried by the survey’s results and replicated in the voice of my fellow dinner guest. I bristled at the unspoken but impossible-to-miss judgement made about living, voluntarily and of sound mind, in Holland. Based on the survey’s criteria, Holland cannot possibly be a satisfactory incubator of talented creative people; the city (if the survey’s advocates would even allow the c-word applied) lacks [unspecified] tolerance, reliable and penetrative mass transit, and high technology firms. Holland comes out at best an interesting backwater, a pleasant tourist destination for Middle Americans and at worst a lockstep Christian identity recruiting pasture saturated with Dell laptops and American sedans. My problem with this came out of Adam’s friend assuming that small cities in provincial areas of the Rust Belt cannot produce or attract talented, creative, intellectual, multi-cultural people; further, that these small cities actively repel / discourage that development. What made me most uncomfortable was the anti-intellectual foundation of this comparison. It assumed, in Holland’s specific case, that easily-defended stereotypes from 15 years ago exist in the same form and ferocity in 2009. It also, in a back-handed sort of way, seemed a personal insult in my deciding to buy a home here. Adam, a bit later, acknowledged my irritation of the argument in an even-handed way but prodded me to continue my response. The bastard. What choice did I have.