Kennedy: Money off base with list

Money magazine has published a list it calls the 100 Best Small Towns in America. My copy came in the mail this week.

Flipping through it now, let's see, here's No. 2 Milton, Mass., OK; and No. 6 Hanover, N.H., nice; and No. 8 Middleton, Wis., a handsome town.

The magazine's centerfold has a big map. Each of the 100 Best Small Towns is marked with a black dot. In the Midwest and along the East Coast the dots are so dense that, taken together, they look like beard stubble. There are also clusters of top towns in the Pacific Northwest, the suburbs of Denver, northern Utah and east Texas.

Money says the No. 1 small town in America is (drumroll, please) Louisville, Colo., where a typical, single-family home sells for $368,000.

Shifting my gaze down to the bottom of the map, I'm feeling the blood gathering in my cheeks now. Money says (or at least its data indicate) that there are almost no noteworthy small towns in the South.

Bull.

Connecticut (with 5) has more places on the Money 100 Best Small Towns list than Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina and South Carolina combined.

Seriously?

Tennessee has no towns on the list. Georgia (Peachtree City) and Alabama (Madison) have one town apiece.

As a person who grew up in the small-town South, I would like to invite the editors of Money magazine to kiss my grits.

According to the magazine's report, towns on the 100 Best list scored highly on such factors as "job growth, home affordability, safety, school quality, health care, arts and leisure and diversity." Money looked at 3,570 towns with populations between 8,500 and 50,000, it says.

Well, two can play the spreadsheet game.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Tennessee (which Money says has zero exceptional small towns) grew by 11.5 percent between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile, Connecticut, the epicenter of small-town bliss, according to Money, grew by only 4.9 percent.

Hmm.

North Carolina grew 18.5 percent during the decade, and South Carolina grew 15.3 percent. Georgia, with only one town on the Money list, grew 18.3 percent. The national average was 9.7 percent.

I'm seeing a pattern here.

Now, in the Midwest, the cradle of the Money 100 Best Small Towns list, Ohio grew by only 1.6 percent, Pennsylvania 3.4 percent, and Illinois grew 3.3 percent.

The numbers don't lie. Obviously, the Money list is a dubious indicator of real quality of life. People seem to be fleeing from the Edens of the East and Meccas of the Midwest to the sad, sad South.

People in the South are not dumb; we love our small-town culture for good reasons. Our quality of life can't be measured by simply crunching a column of numbers.

As long as our basic needs are covered, most Southerners are pretty happy living simple lives. Our happiness revolves around the four Fs: faith, family, food and football.

Most of us believe God provides, and we don't need $365,000 houses to be fulfilled. In fact, most of us don't even believe our net worth is a number. What's more, our daily bread is cornbread, and we have it in abundance.

From family we derive free day care, comedy, counseling and low-cost loans.

We think art galleries and museums are nice, but we also think a punt return in the SEC championship game can be a work of art.

In short, we each think our Southern hometowns are pretty special.

And we don't need Money magazine to tell us where to live. Nor, apparently, do the millions of Americans who are moving to Dixie every year.

That's enough ranting for now, I need a glass of sweet tea.