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| http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eddf45edgee/no-6-des-moines-ia/ |
Wow...As mad as I am America, I can hardly believe I managed to miss a day, but America's Deadly Sins was in bad need of posts, and I still haven't finished up...I owe 'em one more Price is Your Rights cartoon, as well as another full post. S'ok tho, I'll catch up soon enough.
Now...today's Ranking to be utterly stomped on is this one:
#6 - Best Cities to Raise a Family (Forbes Magazine, 2014)
Ok, FINALLY, a source that might be good to trust! One I've heard of even!! The validity of this ranking though, as well as any value it might contribute to this city, is yet to be shown.
I'll reiterate for sure though, and say that I've lived here on and off (more on than off) for over 37 years. I was here during the OK years; let's just say those were from 1975-1984. I have to say that those were indeed some of my better ones in this city. Then, if you'd like to maybe stretch it somewhat, you could almost say that some more good years might have been from 1992 - 2000. Other than that, I can rarely, barely and scarcely say that any of the remaining ones were all that beautious, or grandiose, either nor.
Not long after I first got here, well, I wouldn't have exactly considered this a great place to raise a family. Johnny Gosh had just disappeared, and it would seem that I was one of the next ones to follow. Fortunately, I managed to get smart and run. As I remember, when I returned to Des Moines for a while to stay, I wouldn't have exactly called this a great place to raise a family either, in 1982. There were dirty book stores and gay bars right downtown for all the world to see, and the Register sported a FULL complement of escort services. I should know, I happened to manage the biggest one, at the time.
After leaving and coming back again, I remember vaguely, turning the corner onto 13th Street, from University one evening back in 1984 to find cars, bumper to bumper lined up and down 13th....as far as the eye could see, and people out on their front porches were waving me in. I had given a girl I'd known from some time a ride that direction, and she'd been asking to get dropped off around there. I was flabbergasted. I couldn't see the houses for the amount of people that were out, that's for sure..."What's up with all this?" I remember asking. That's when I'd first heard of crack, and our city, which wasn't what I'd call primo anyway, began its decent right down the tubies. Within a couple months, there was a hooker, a slave to crack and willing to do whatever it took to get more, on just about every corner of the hood, with more walking around Des Moines, then moving to other areas when they were tired of being busted on the usual corners. I would have to say that the city being a great place to raise families rating had gone down about 25 points in about 3 months, then pretty much remained there throughout the 80's, well into the 90's. I began seeing an end to that rather lowered rating somewhere around 1992; however; the neighborhood was pretty much scoured clean, then done in with yet another clean-up not long after to make certain. Still, it would be a while, at least in my opinion, before the rating would be anything close to back around the rating it was pre-1983, if it ever bounced back.
Now there was yet another fresh drug out there to mess things up just coming to bear...meth. Somewhere, just about the time crack was a deader fish, no longer good-tasting and sizable enough to not throw back into the lake when you caught it, well, along came meth amphetamine, and proved that even an illegally fished from lake could be refilled, repopulated, and create more problems than anyone had ever seen to date. I won't go into the drug (I think we all know more than we want to about it by now), what the drug's made of (hence the funny looks you get when you stock up on batteries for Christmas, and cold medicine for that nasty bug that's been going around your house lately), or how it simply and utterly destroyed the better portion of this city before anything was done to stop the flow. What I will say is, that if you talk to nearly half the populace in Des Moines; or at least it nearly seems so (they'll try to tell you that number is minuscule...but it's much larger than you know, this town's just very good at shuffling them away from the public view), you'll see an overabundance of missing teeth, recovering addicts, the tell-tale twitching faces and bodies of homeless monkey-backed beggars (half of which are still high from the last time they did it, about 4 hours ago) and you may even notice about 1/5 of your friends that have fallen prey to this wonderful drug as well. I've done it myself...only I sniffed it first, and dropped it fast, thanks to the fact that it massively interfered with my job...then I came back for a little puffy puffy at later times...and yet after watching it totally destroy the better portion of my previous *friends list* (in all fairness, some gave it up and are really trying hard to stop) I just couldn't imagine myself a true addict, so I gave it up for more sensible hobbies. If you talk to any one random person here, you will find that somewhere in their closet is either a personal experience, a friend or family member, or some other person they work with or live close to that either does it, deals it, or has had their lives thrown into turmoil by it.
Iowa is smack dab in the middle of the nation. A central hub for a lot of things, including drug traffic. Innovative Tech Hubs that aren't on the radar? Nnnnnot so much. We here in Des Moines have known this for a very long time. We're also very close to Chicago, whose residents, along with Detroit's and Milwaukee's, have been branching out to find new and clean cities to destroy. Those, of late, include the likes of Madison, WI, the Quad Cities, and of course...Des Moines Iowa. You know, the promising and richer types of cities. Davenport and those other cities, well, they aren't exactly rich (except maybe Bettendorf), but they were along the way soooo....what the heck, huh?
Anyway, I don't think it's such a good idea to advertise and put out there how wonderful this place is, even at 6th place, for families and clean living, mostly because that sort of advertising tends to draw UNWANTED attention to go along with the good kind. I can see that family of neighborhood criminals now in Detroit, sitting in their living rooms, getting on the web and wishing they had more houses to break into where the police weren't always right there to see what they were up to before they could even get going...and seeing Des Moines...and thinking..."Hey!! That's not too far away! Hey Jay-Rod...think that Caprice of yours can still make it 400 miles one-way? This town's gotta be FULL of nice people and suckers!!!"
Thanks to the coming and going (although meth is FAR from gone) of two such devastating drugs, this town is anything but suitable for family habitation. With the exception of a few major businesses, this town doesn't really boast anything much better than say Cedar Rapids, or Waterloo, and really isn't far off from either one economically. Believe you me, I can find you TONS of references that will tell you both of those cities are a complete waste of space.
And, just like anytime you have a problem like meth completely ruin anything good about your city, biases, more stringent hiring policies, and police harassment towards anyone, while looking for drugs or their abusers, tends to become almost ridiculous, especially when you're driving in certain areas...or in our case, almost an entire side of town. During our crack era, the north side was very nearly evacuated trying to clean it up. Now the south side is suffering due to the amount of immigrants and meth users that populate it. There's even rumor (and has been for a lot of years) of the Mexican Mafia operating a branch of themselves here. I know that, when I lived there, that it seemed to be almost 50% or more Italian populated. Now you're lucky to spy a Scavo anywhere on that side of town, unless he's just passing through.
This place, a wonderful city to raise families in? Nooooooo.......I don' think so. No city over 10,000 people really is, anymore. In my opinion, the only good place to raise a family is in the country, and only if you're ten miles or better from the nearest town or city. Clive is MUCH better than Des Moines, though I still truly doubt it. West Des Moines is around the same. Urbandale, for the most part beats it out by a mile. Waukee, same story. Maybe I should look at the list...maybe those are the first four. I don't think so, but any one of those could easily beat out, or replace Des Moines. So I'm sorry Forbes. Maybe you should invest a little more time into beating the streets of Des Moines to be absolutely sure before next year's rating.
Author's addendum: I did finally bring myself to espy the list that Forbes put out about this (http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2014/04/16/the-best-cities-for-raising-a-family-2/). The one thing I noticed was, that even though a lot of the choices I thought were pretty well determined, that some were just stupid, and were only put on the list due to the low cost of living (the job market and bad economic overtones of the same were actually brought to the forefront, followed by low cost of living, which we know, for a fact, is BECAUSE of a crappy job market...????) and, in our case, the low traffic flow was even used as a plus. Not exactly Family friendly stats, if you ask me. Good reporting there, Forbes.
