Originally Posted by p-did

The thing you must remember about big cities: they are made up of many neighborhoods. One neighborhood may be awful, and skew the stats for the rest of the city. So the murder per capita ranking does not really give us an accurate gauge of what life is like in an average neighborhood.

A more telling sign of qualitfy-of-life is average property values. Since you're good at finding stats, look this up: the average house price in your town or city, compared to that of San Francisco. Likely, the property value in S.F. is double or triple of the value of land in your town. What does that prove? A few things:

-There is much greater demand to live in S.F. than most other parts of the country.
-People in S.F. are more successful (so they can pay more to live here) than most parts of the nation.

The logical conclusion here is that progressive thought leads to greater prosperity in the area.