I'm pretty sure that I bring this up every month, but if you were to make a list of the "Top 10 States or Cities Most Likely to Make a Stupid Link Baiting Internet List," Oklahoma and our state capitol would rank near the top. It's a good and bad problem to have. We usually appear on the good lists (Best Places to Start a Business, Best Cities With Phallic Architecture, Top 10 States for Weathermen), but also make the bad ones (Worst Places for Minorities to Live, Best Locales for Anti-Art Politicians with Batman Fetishes, Worst States to Responsibly Enjoy Cannabis in the Privacy of Your Home, etc).
Of course, we recently made some new lists. Instead of writing about them separately, I thought I'd group them into one monthly post...
According to The Daily Beast, Oklahoma City is the 4th most aspirational city in the U.S. Yeah, I don't really know what that means either. Here's their explanation:
Call them aspirational cities, or magnets of opportunity, but the urban areas attracting today’s ambitious citizens are most likely Southern, culturally vibrant, modest sized, long on jobs, and short on traffic...
The great rule of aspirational cities is that they change over time, becoming sometimes less entrepreneurial, more expensive, and demographically stagnant. In the meantime, other cities, often once obscure, suddenly become the new magnets of opportunity.
To determine America’s current aspirational hotspots, we focused in large part on economic indicators, such as employment growth, per capita income, and unemployment. But we also took into account demographic factors, such as the growth of domestic migration and the movement of college-educated people and the foreign born.
Finally, we considered quality-of-life factors such as traffic congestion, housing affordability, and crowding—which are keenly relevant to young families hunting for the places with the best “inventory of the possible.” In a sense, we believe aspirational cities reflect a kind of urban arbitrage, where people look for those places that provide not just economic and cultural opportunity but a cost structure that allows them to enjoy their success to the fullest extent.