The Five Most Sinful Cities in America

Spoiler Alert - they're not the ones you expect.

I ran across this article on the five most sinful cities in America yesterday, and was well and truly amazed to find none of them to be cities I might have expected. The ranking was done by the property-listing website Movoto.com on the basis of the prevalence and effects of the Seven Deadly Sins (greed, gluttony, sloth, envy, wrath, lust, and pride) in 95 major American cities, using these measures:

Wrath - based on the FBI's annual report on each U.S. city's violent-crime rate -- the number of murders, robberies, aggravated assaults, rapes and non-negligent manslaughter cases reported each year per 1,000 residents;

Envy - calculated from each community's FBI property-crime rate, which counts how many burglaries, larcenies and car thefts occur each year per 1,000 residents;

Gluttony - based on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) latest estimates of each city's obesity rate;

Greed - based on Philanthropy.com's figures of how much the average person in each city gives to charity in a given year. The lower the percentage of disposable income donated, the higher the assumed greed;

Lust - based on each community's Lust level by determining the number of strip clubs per capita as advertised on Yelp.com;

Pride - estimated by calculating how many plastic surgeons each city has per capita, again based on Yelp.com listings; and,

Sloth - based on CDC estimates of each city's inactivity rate, the percent of a community's population that's not physically active.

Using these yardsticks, the five most sinful cities in America were assessed as:

5. Milwaukee, Wisconsin;

4. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (my home town, AARRGGHH!! The Steel City placed sixth among communities studied in terms of Pride, with one cosmetic surgeon practicing there for every 3,170 residents, and ninth for Sloth, with the CDC estimating that 28.4% of Pittsburghers are inactive. We also ranked 14^th for Greed, 20^th for Lust, 26^th for Wrath and 27^th for Gluttony. We did, however, score low on Envy, ranking just 66^th among the 95 cities that were assessed);

3. Minneapolis, Minnesota;

2. Orlando, Florida (the fact that my brother lives nearby has nothing to do with it. Really.);

And in first place,

1. St Louis, Missouri (sorry about that, Mike).

You can read the detailed reasons each city received the ranking it did by reading the original article.

To my friend Pepper* who lives in Las Vegas, I'm really sorry about the loss of your town's title of "Sin City." Better luck next year.

And what about Disneyland-on-the-Potomac? One might have thought that Capitol Hill and the K Street corridor would by themselves represent a critical mass of deadly sins.

Shows how much I know.

Have a good day. Try not to be sinful.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Happy birthday, by the way, Beautiful Lady!