A love letter to New York City
When Brooklyn feels like Mayberry
One of the last big projects I worked on at Fortune was the second annual Best Places to Live for Families. It’s a huge data project spearheaded by Megan Leonhardt and Alexa Mikhail that takes several months to come together and requires a monster spreadsheet and quite a bit of number crunching that is honestly over my head. But we didn’t just rely on numbers to decide which cities make the final list. There’s a whole lot of additional research done by a bunch of reporters that culminates in a few of us sitting around a conference room for several days debating each entry on the list.
This year, we decided to include a city from every state, which is particularly challenging, because frankly, a lot of states seem like pretty crummy places to live. Jennifer Fields, the deputy editor of Fortune Well, is always the voice of reason in the meetings, frequently reminding us that this isn’t necessarily a list for us, the four women sitting in a conference room who choose to live in the greater NYC area, but a list that aims to appeal to the Fortune audience at large. So we needed to remember what factors are most important to a wide swath of the population when choosing a place to raise their family. Typically, these are good schools, affordable homes, and safe neighborhoods.
But we also wanted to make sure that we stuck to strict diversity guidelines. And the reality is, it’s hard to find a city or town that’s diverse and affordable with good schools and low crime—let alone one in every state. What’s maybe more depressing is once we nail down the finalists, we’re always on pins and needles ahead of publication, worrying that there might be another mass shooting, and we’ll need to find a last-minute replacement.
Working on this list inevitably makes me think about why I choose to live where I live. New York City is arguably an insane place to raise a kid. The national media would like you to believe it’s a failing city plagued by rampant violence. It is incredibly expensive. And honestly, it can be pretty inconvenient and sometimes stressful. And yet, I really can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Ken and I moved to our small two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Sunset Park just a month before our kid was born. I can’t get over the fact that we’ll have lived here seven years this summer—the longest I’ve spent in any one apartment. This year also marks 20 years since I first moved to New York—the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Does that make me a New Yorker?