How is Pittsburgh the #1 'most livable city'?

It is a beautiful city on the water with lovely architecture, great colleges, and wonderful art.

In addition to what @marinelife said: great public transportation and it’s close to NY if you want to get a way… and rent is affordable (looking on craigslist compared to Seattle where I live)

An index can assign whatever weights to the factors it considers, so if polllution is not considered that important, a polluted city can still rank at the top.

It is SUPER affordable. Some of my friends pay less than 200 a month to live in Pgh….I about died when I learned that. It’s small, there are great museums, like @marinelife said, it is BEAUTIFUL. Especially the view from Mt. Washington…..the ghetto areas are fairly concentrated in certain areas so if you want to avoid them it’s pretty easy. There is a real sense of “togetherness” in Pittsburgh….mostly because of the Steelers I’d say…but, whatever it is, it makes it a fun place to live. And the pollution is NOWHERE as bad as a lot of other cities. Maybe it was when Pittsburgh was all about steel manufacturing, but it’s not anymore. Also, as soon as you go outside the city, you’re in the middle of beautiful farm country. The only extreme weather Pittsburgh will EVER see is heavy snow. There are a lot of really good colleges and gorgeous parks….

Sounds like they rate low rent as a big factor in “livability”, and not pollution. It is a nice interesting city, with several college campuses and interesting architecture, landscape, parks, rivers coming together, etc.

Livability can be defined from so many different perspectives, though. I have a hard time living someplace away from a sea or ocean, myself. :-)

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, these are the criteria:

The 2011 Global Livability Rankings assessed each city based on 30 factors in five categories: stability, health care, education, infrastructure and culture and environment. Each city was then given an overall ranking of 0 to 100, with 100 being the most “ideal” city in the world for living.

Lol this is odd because I read that Vancouver, BC, Canada is the #1 most livable city in the world. Pittsburgh, on that list, is #29. Are you talking about the list from The Economist Intelligence Unit that was released?

@PluckyDog Pittsburgh is 29th in the world, but first in the country, is what I got out of that.

@deni Ohhh, first in the USA. Thank you ..I get it now :)

[mod says] Please keep in mind that this is in general, folks. keep your comments on topic and helpful. Thank you.

Pittsburgh is incredibly polluted – I’ve lost count of the number of active advisories warning of poor air quality this year. As far as being livable—it is true that it is cheap, but then in this city, sadly, one pays for what one gets.
As far as those livability gauges – my sense is that they are calculated numerically, on a per capita basis. Pittsburgh may have may restaurants (for instance), but that doesn’t mean that these restaurants necessarily serve very good food.