According to Forbes.com Chicago has been rated the ‘Most Stressful City In America’.  Sort of a surprise to me, but after reading a little about it I can see it.  I’ve heard so many great things about how ‘Chicago is the perfect city’ when it comes to development, and urban living and all that.  Turns out, not so much.  What’s really interesting to me, and much less of a surprise is that six of the top sixteen most stressful cities are in California.  That’s a big number.  Interesting to see Vegas so far down on the list, simply because I’m always a stress case anytime I am there.  But then again Wal Mart stresses me out a little too, so I guess that makes sense.

From what I can tell the information was based on five things in bold below.  Seems like a pretty good list of things to base this on.

METHODOLOGY
To find the 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 (OMB) 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 (C2ER). We examined median home price drops from Q1 2008 to Q1 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 US Environmental Protection Agency.

So what do we think?  Pretty accurate list?  Where’s your city rank?  Glad to see Nashville way down at the bottom there.