The Economist does a yearly ranking on a bundle of cities.....the results are interesting.
"The survey takes over 40 factors into consideration which are weighted across five different categories: Stability; Healthcare; Culture & Environment; Education; and Infrastructure. Across the survey a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data are used, which are combined to give an overall Quality of Life Index rating. Each indicator is given a rating of between one and five, where one means there is no impact and five means the factor is extremely challenging. These are then weighted to produce an index, where 0% means the a city is exceptional and 100% means it is intolerable."
http://store.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=pr_story&press_id=660001866&ref=pr_list
The idea behind all of this....the more liveable the city the less you have to pay employee's to move there, it also plays a factor in deciding what countries to start businesses in.
some results below the fold
"Canada betters neighbour
With low crime, little threat from instability or terrorism and a highly developed infrastructure, Canada has the most liveable destinations in the world. With a rating of just 1% (as a result of a small threat from petty crime) Vancouver is the highest ranked city of all 127 surveyed. A further two Canadian cities (Montreal and Toronto) feature in the top five with ratings of just 3%. All 4 cities surveyed score well in all respects.
Although higher crime rates and a greater threat of terror puts US cities below those of Canada, US cities are still among the world's most liveable. Cleveland and Pittsburgh are the joint best scoring cities in the United States (7%), in joint 26th place in the global ranking. A lack of availability of recreational activities and certain infrastructural shortfalls put Lexington as the least liveable US city surveyed, in 56th place-although its rating of 13% is still low."
Being Canadian this feels good:) But it also has a effect on investment....imagine a company reading this thinking about setting up office in Canada or the US- something like this may be a tipping point.