Our city’s most prominent architectural feature .. a big frowny face?
… and you can blame the Rams (and Blues) for dragging us down. According to Forbes, how our pro sports teams do is a leading economic indicator (emphasis mine).
Our Misery Measure takes into account unemployment, taxes (both sales and income), commute times, violent crime and how its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years. We also factored in two indexes put together by Portland, Ore., researcher Bert Sperling that gauge weather and Superfund pollution sites. Lastly we considered corruption based on convictions of public officials in each area as tracked by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In fact, while other cities have multiple factors mentioned, their spot analysis of what’s wrong with St Louis begins and ends with the Rammies.
St. Louis is a baseball town, but what about those Rams? The NFL team has won only six games out of 48 the past three years, the fewest wins in football.
You don’t think the big frowny-face landmark might be skewing their perceptions, do you?
Here’s how the country’s NFL franchises rank on the list, where #1 = “most miserable,” and the listed sources of our misery.
#1: Cleveland (you name it)
#4: Detroit (violent crime, foreclosures, unemployment, and the Lions!)
#6: Miami (violent crime, foreclosures, traffic)
#7: St Louis (the Rams)
#8: Buffalo (population decline)
#10: Chicago (taxes, traffic, lost Olympic bid)
#13: Kansas City (total pro sports misery, some crime and taxes)
#16: New York (traffic/commute, taxes, and they still miss coach Spagnuolo)
#20: Philadelphia (traffic, crime, pollution)
