Guess what Wisconsin suburb was chosen as the best affordable suburb in America? After winnowing down hundreds, if not thousands of suburbs, the wise folks at Business Week chose....
Pewaukee.Yes, Pewaukee. Look, Pewaukee's a pretty place, wouldn't mind spending a weekend or two there, but... affordable?!? From the Business Week article-
Median home price:
$267,500. Obviously we have differing opinions on what affordable is.
To be fair, they don't look purely at housing costs-they have a number of other factors, hence the "best" adjective.
Here's part of the criteria that was used:
Editor's note: The selected suburbs were limited to towns within 25 miles of the most populated city, with populations of 5,000 to 60,000 people, median family incomes of $51,000 to $120,000, and lower-than-average crime rates. We weighted a variety of factors including livability (short commutes, low pollution, green space), education (well-educated residents, high test scores), crime (low personal and property crime), economy (high job growth, low unemployment rate, high family income), and affordability (median household income, cost of expenditures). Affordability was most heavily weighted in our calculations. We penalized places with bad weather, a lack of racial diversity, high divorce rates, and few children.
Let's take a moment to review. "We penalized places with...a lack of racial diversity...." Pewaukee is a city that is 97.2% white, compared with 75.1% for the United States, or even 88.9% for Wisconsin. Obviously it was not a stiff penalty. And note that they look at affordability purely in terms of the household income of residents vs their expenses, not the cost of housing vs the income of the broader community.
Please don't misunderstand me-I'm not knocking Pewaukee as a place to live, but knocking BusinessWeek for poor use of statistics. As we used to say in my high-school computer class, GIGO. That's "Garbage In, Garbage Out."
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