Some national good press for Cincinnati

Cincinnati Riverfront, originally uploaded by elycefeliz.

Residents of Cincinnati rejoice - we have some good press on the national level to celebrate! While it probably does not have a huge readership, "Outside" magazine gave us high marks for quality of life and ranked us no.9 out of 10 (hey, its something!). We were up there with perennial favorites of Seattle, Portland and Colorado Springs, so there is something to be said for the fact that we are in what i would consider to be prestigious company.
While the press around town went wild for this story, it was nice to (for once) see a national story that our small hamlet had ties to. Kudos to our town! Below is the article - living downtown i really appreciate the compact nature of our downtown and although i am surprised we don't have more riverfront residential development (as stated previously), i am eternally grateful that someone had the foresight to put in riverfront parks and green space all around downtown, although a dog park would be nice.... Enjoy!

Info on how rankings were chosen, from the Outside Magazine website:
How We Ranked Them: First, we started with the 100 most populated cities in America, using public data to rank them on factors like cost of living, unemployment, nightlife, commute time, and access to green spaces. Then we took the 28 candidates with the highest overall averages and put them through a second round of number crunching, comparing things like the percentage of the population with college degrees, income level in relation to home prices, and weather. The wild card? Our own multisport factor, which rated each of our finalists on a scale of 1 to 5 for quality and proximity to biking, running, paddling, hiking, and skiing. After adding it all up, we had our top ten.

Cincinnati
KEY STATS2.1 million: Population (metro)
$106,000: Median home price
B-: Multisport grade
1 million: Pounds of goetta—a German dish consisting of pork, beef, and steel-cut oats—consumed locally each year
With its low cost of living and resilient and well-balanced blend of industries (everything from aerospace to advertising), Cincinnati topped our charts for best economy. But what about actually living there? For a local perspective, we turned to former Outside staffer Jay Stowe, a Cincinnati native who's now editor in chief of Cincinnati Magazine, for a (mostly) objective opinion. For starters, Stowe says, it's an incredibly easy city. The downtown is "very urban and completely walkable," and the city is ringed with green spaces, parks, and lush hillsides. The city council and mayor are trying mightily to get a streetcar line running through the urban core, a long-term cycling-infrastructure plan that will include a downtown bike-commuter complex is in the works, and ground has been broken on the Banks, an $800 million multi-use riverfront development that will change the face of the city. For its size, Stowe says, Cincinnati boasts "cool architecture, genuinely awesome independent restaurants, and neighborhoods full of affordable, eclectic houses—and one of the country's biggest Oktoberfests, where people willingly don lederhosen and do the Chicken Dance totally unironically." Then there's its proximity to what Stowe refers to as a "vast inland adventure empire," by which he means Kentucky and West Virginia. The city is just two hours from Kentucky's Red River Gorge, a world-class climbing area (and a great place to hike and camp), and four hours from Fayetteville, West Virginia, the whitewater hub of the East Coast.