From USA Today.
A new study takes that principle a step further, ranking the USA's "most literate" cities not by how many residents can read, but by various measures of how many do. And by those measures, Minneapolis is the most literate, El Paso, the least.
The study examines the extent to which residents of the USA's largest 79 cities behave in literate ways -- such as buying newspapers and books or checking materials out of the library.
Like Minneapolis, many top-ranked cities (Seattle, Washington, Boston and San Francisco) also boast some of the nation's most highly educated and affluent residents. In contrast, low-ranking cities, such as the Texas-Mexico border town of El Paso, tend to attract recent immigrants, many of them poor and with little schooling. Of the 20 cities at the bottom of the heap, Texas and California are home to 14.
Most cities at the top of the list are not surprising -- they can generally be characterized as "yuppie magnets" that attract highly educated, relatively young and affluent professionals working in creative jobs, says Richard Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who studies metro-area trends in a knowledge-based economy. He notes also that the most literate cities "are the ones with the fewest kids."
But among cities topping the list, Minneapolis stands out as exemplary, he says. Several of these cities "are becoming colonies of the highly educated, with almost everyone else being forced out," he adds. But Minneapolis, together with 16th-ranked St. Paul, "is evolving in a way that is including more and more of the population."
Most literate cities
- Minneapolis
- Seattle
- Pittsburgh
- Madison, Wis.
- Cincinnati
- Washington
- Denver
- Boston
- Portland, Ore.
- San Francisco
Least literate cities
- Garland, Texas
- Fresno
- Arlington, Texas
- Long Beach
- Anaheim, Calif.
- San Antonio
- Santa Ana, Calif.
- Corpus Christi, Texas
- Hialeah, Fla.
- El Paso
Source: America's Most Literate Cities 2004
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