Is Gainesville Number One?

The news is out: the book Cities Ranked and Rated, Second Edition has placed Gainesville, Florida at "number one" in the country. At first glance, this sounds great, but having seen some of the factors involved in the rankings process, now I'm not so sure. If a city has relatively low employment in the manufacturing and construction sectors, that is regarded as "good" while relatively high employment in the public sector is "good", too. I'm not sure why, though. Another "positive" trait of Gainesville that I really don't understand is that our fair city averages 104 days per year when the temperature rises over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Why would anyone think that this makes a city more livable? And it appears that being a college town makes Gainesville a more desirable place to live in than other communities. But I beg to disagree. I've lived in Gainesville, which has an disproportionately high population of late teens/early adults and in Leesburg, which has an disproportionately high population of senior citizens. I personally prefer that the population be distributed more evenly among the various age groups than it is in either of these cities. There are times in the year in Gainesville when you can't get from one place to another because of the excessive congestion. The University of Florida keeps expanding and expanding, now bringing in more than 50,000 students. When I go about my business during the course of the day, I usually take pains to steer as clear from the UF campus as possible, and that sometimes means driving miles out of my way. Also, in a university town like this, some within the student population tend to look down upon the local residents as being rather like "rubes". I know this because when I was a student here, that's the kind of thing that I heard being said. I also think that some of the drivers who are students are very careless and inconsiderate, especially regarding lane-switching and running red lights. And the University itself has such a problem with limited parking that ordinary residents cannot use UF facilities like the library without either using distant parking garages, bicycling there, or taking the bus or a cab.

Gainesville tends to regard itself as a city that tries to balance growth with something called "quality of life". A few years ago, Wal-Mart decided to build two supercenters in Gainesville. The first one was going to be built in the far northern part of the city on the site of a wooded area about a mile and a half from my home. There was a great outcry from two different groups against the plan. One was anti-Wal-Mart, period: Wal-Mart was purportedly a bad company that would come into an area and undersell and drive under local business while providing low wage dead end jobs. The other group claimed that the location Wal-Mart wanted to build on was right at where the headwaters of Gainesville's Hogtown Creek were and building there would ruin the creek. Although Wal-Mart offered an ambitious plan to protect the headwaters at the site and at its own expense, its proposal for this location was turned down by the city commission. It was permitted, however, to build a supercenter way out in the northeast corner of the city, apparently out of the way of any environmental concerns (in economically depressed areas, there are apparently no environmentally endangered places). So imagine my surprise when I saw that on the exact site that Wal-Mart was turned down for, they are now building a huge Home Depot store! Now can someone please explain that to me?! But this is how our city commission works. I believe that allowing Wal-Mart to build out east killed two birds with one stone: it got Walmart out of the way and into a more economically depressed part of the city where it would be more welcome. But the Hogtown Creek headwaters problem, although it may have originally been raised as a legitimate concern, in the end was just a phony issue held up to give the commission a cover to hide behind when they rejected Wal-Mart's earlier proposal. This sort of nonsense doesn't exactly inspire my confidence in the government of my "number one" city!

Having said all this, I still think Gainesville is a good place to live. I think the people here are, by-and-large, quite friendly. Gainesville has a great system of bike paths. There is a good community college here: Santa Fe Community College. And there many other "positives" as well. The ranking of cities in Cities Ranked and Rated is like my ranking of my favorite songs. I use my own subjective factors in my rankings that others may either discount or disagree with. And I strongly disagree with some of the factors used in rating Gainesville!