My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #9, August 29, 1997

WE'RE NUMBER 300!

My town, Davenport, Iowa, doesn't make the national news all that often. Oh, we were there when the Mississippi flooded in 1993 and our baseball stadium on the riverfront became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mississippi. It made a great picture, with the river not only surrounding it but filling it, so that all you could see were the tops of the fences, and odd bits of debris floating in left field. But mostly, the world ignores us, and that's just fine with us. This year, however, Money Magazine, in its annual survey of 300 major metropolitan areas for "livability," made Davenport (the entire Quad Cities area, actually, on both sides of the river) number 300.

Well, that kind of annoyed me, but it seriously ticked off our city fathers, who conducted a ceremonial burning of Money. Because if you insult us by calling us unsophisticated, we don't mind--we've never claimed to be urbane. We KNOW we don't have any four and five star restaurants, and if we did have, most of us wouldn't eat there, because by and large, we're more likely to stomp on snails than eat them. But call us unlivable and you've got a fight on your hands.

What is so puzzling about Money's overall assessment of Davenport is that in most of the individual categories it measures, (available for viewing at http://www.pathfinder.com/@@ct2uPgcAyQQJZj71/money/best-cities-97/index.html), Davenport comes out well ahead of most of the cities surveyed. What makes for livability? Personally, I'm inclined to think being able to afford a house is a nice start, and Money agrees that our home prices are below the national average. The median home price in the Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, and Rock Island) is $75,000. My mortgage payment and taxes come to $360 a month, which means that a rather nice chunk of my income is disposable. I don't know about you, but I hate to fritter away my money on necessities.

How about education? Money ranks Davenport 24th among the 300 cities in high school graduation rate, though to my way of thinking this is not much of a measure of the quality of education. Try this instead. My son was a National Merit scholar. When he took the PSAT test, and placed second in the entire state, a girl in his class was annoyed because she was sure she was smarter than Brian, but she only placed fourth in the state. When one high school turns out two students that good, it says something not just about that school, but about the middle schools and elementary schools those kids went to. I'm also impressed by the fact that in our relatively small metro area we have both an excellent Lutheran liberal arts college, Augustana, and a fine Catholic university, St. Ambrose, both of which are integral parts of this community.

Wouldn't you think livability includes having a job? Money itself says we rank well below the national average in unemployment (4.2% vs. 5.3% nationally). And how about the amount of time people waste, fuming in their cars, fighting traffic just getting to work? Even though many of us live in one state and work in another, funneling through one of three bridges at rush hour, Money ranks us 55th in commuting time among the 300, with an average of only 17 minutes on the road. As for health care costs, we rank 79th. Yes, it's true we rank 261st in number of doctors per capita, but I'm not sure that's all that relevant in Davenport, the birthplace of chiropractic medicine, where many people go to chiropractors as well as, or even instead of, doctors. And of course many of us go to the University of Iowa Hospitals, an hour away, for nationally ranked specialist care.

Money doesn't think much of our recreational opportunities, which they measure by the number of professional sports teams we can sit on our duffs to watch (we're 140th). As far as I can tell, they don't seem to have looked at the sports we actually play, so they didn't notice the bike path that runs all the way through Davenport and Bettendorf, or our new ice rink, or the huge numbers of softball leagues, or all the people out boating on the Mississippi. Money had no interest, I guess, in all our well-cared-for parks, with their baseball diamonds and soccer nets and basketball courts. Did the editors talk to any of the people strolling along the river walks, or enjoying concerts in the band shells by the river? Did they consider some of our special events, like the annual Bix festival, where we honor native son Bix Beiderbecke with several days of nonstop Dixieland jazz? Or the wonderfully corny event where people "buy" toy ducks that are dumped into the Mississippi and raced, all for a chance to win a big prize and raise money for charity?

Perhaps they think because we are in Iowa we are by definition in a cultural backwater, and yet we do have home-grown orchestras, traveling Broadway productions, and an arena where I got to see Tom Petty, Billy Joel and They Might Be Giants. (It would have hosted Nine Inch Nails too, had a local minister not officiously prayed them away--he took personal credit for the ice storm that canceled the concert and saved us innocent midwesterners from corruption and decadence.)

Obviously, as a librarian, I measure a community by its bookstores and libraries. Money also values good libraries, but it measures library service in terms of books per capita, and finds us pretty average. That's simply an odd way to assess libraries in a town where it doesn't matter which library owns a book, because anyone with a library card can check out any book from any library in the system. In fact, our library network is unlike any in the country. It includes public, school, college and hospital libraries in 2 states, at least 6 counties, and 30 or more towns, and shuttles books and articles from one library to another every day. ( It boggles the mind to think about how many boards of directors had to approve this arrangement!)

There are so many quality of life issues that Money does not concern itself with. I don't mean to sound like a shill for the Chamber of Commerce, but I like living here. I like knowing that when anyone is in desperate trouble here, we will rally around, offering everything from casseroles to fundraisers. I love the overwhelming greenness of the place. I love it that our people here are so house-proud; they're always repainting their houses and keeping their yards trim, and cultivating flowers in the front yard. I love the way no two homes in a neighborhood look alike. Beautifully restored Victorian mansions mingle with bungalows and newer two story homes and ranch houses.

It's a town people can walk around in, a city of 100,000 people that has the feel of a small town because it is really a collection of small quiet tree-lined neighborhoods. This is partly because all the traffic stays on about five main traffic arteries, leaving the neighborhoods safe for kids playing frisbee on the streets. There are birds and squirrels all over the place--even ducks that will venture away from the parks to nest and hatch their babies. (Every spring we get to see our own Make Way for Ducklings scene, as mama ducks escort their babies across busy streets.) It's a safe place for biking, too. And while I'm walking or biking, I chat with the other walkers and bikers--this small secret society of the unvehicled is a sociable lot.

By Money's own figures we compare well on most categories. What on earth does Money find unappealing? Well, I grant you, we do have more snow than most--30 inches annually vs. 23 inches for the national average. (And Money wasn't even counting the fact that in winter we'll have those bonechilling 20 below zero days, and in summer those godawful days when the temperature and humidity both are in the 90's.) Money also seems to have placed inordinate emphasis on the fact that our job growth is below average, and our violent crime is above it.

But in a nation of people who vote with their feet, Davenport is unusually full of families who have been here for generations, and expect their children to stay here and raise their families too. The real question about those crime and job growth figures is, do we who live in Davenport feel safe, and confident about our future? And the answer by that token is, yes indeed.

So, to the editors of Money, I say, "You have been in New York too long." Five star restaurants and Broadway plays are all very well (if you can afford them). But what we have here is pretty good, too. Comfortable and, as they say, livable. Maybe you have to be just a little less sophisticated to appreciate it. Jimmy Stewart would have understood, though.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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