America’s most stressed-out cities
Chicago leads list for second year; housing woes weigh on nation
By Sarah Lynch
Aug. 28, 2009 – Sinking property values, high unemployment and prices, and poor environments add to the pressure felt by residents in these metros.
Few enjoy their commute. Just ask Stephen Dinwiddie, M.D., a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago.
“I think anybody who, like I do, commutes on the Kennedy on a daily basis knows exactly what stress is,” he says, of his daily home-to-work commute on Chicago’s expressway that extends from the Chicago Loop to O’Hare International Airport. “It takes anywhere from 30 minutes to several centuries — at least subjectively.”
But more pressing factors make Chicago for the second year in a row the country’s most stressful city. Crowding, poor air quality, a high 11 percent unemployment rate and free-falling home values have created a cocktail of constant worry affecting many in the Windy City.
Los Angeles, Calif., ranks second, followed by New York, N.Y., Cleveland, Ohio, and Providence, R.I.
To find the country’s most stressful cities, we examined quality of life factors in the country’s 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas, or metros — geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We looked at June 2009 unemployment figures provided by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and cost of living figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research. We examined median home-price drops from first quarter of 2008 to first-quarter of 2009 that were provided by the National Association of Realtors. Population density based on 2008 data from the U.S. Census Bureau and ESRI also factored. Last, we examined the number of sunny and partly sunny days per year, based on 2007 data from the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, as well as air-quality figures, based on 2007 data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The economic climate is clearly kicking up stress levels. In March, the National Sleep Foundation reported that more than a quarter of 1,000 survey participants were sleeping less because of the economy.
The recession has also forced Americans to skimp on health care. In a February telephone poll of 1,200 adults conducted by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, 53 percent of respondents said they cut back on health care costs by avoiding doctor’s visits, skipping dental checkups and not filling prescriptions, among other strategies.
Year-over-year housing-price drops may also be behind Americans’ anxiety.
“A forty-three percent drop is something that could easily be classified as a housing-market cataclysm,” says Andres Carbacho-Burgos, economist at Moody’s Economy.com, of the Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 median home-price plunge in San Francisco. That’s compared with the national median home-price dip of 14.7 percent during that same time. “Over that long a period of time a drop that significant for San Francisco, or for the Bay Area as a whole, indicates just that the economy has turned sour and that credit is very, very tight and has been over the past year.”
