Preface

This book began as a question a great many people ask once or twice in a life, usually at a kitchen table, usually with a map or a spreadsheet open and a feeling that the tools are not quite equal to the size of the thing. Where should we live? The question is enormous and ordinary at the same time. It decides the weather of your years, the distance to the people you love, the shape of an ordinary Tuesday for a decade at a stretch — and it is usually answered in a weekend, on a hunch, defended ever after as though it had been reasoned.

What follows is an attempt to answer it slowly instead. Not to answer it for you — the book has no idea who you are, and would not presume — but to show what it looks like to take a decision of that size and refuse to hurry it. Over several years the question was turned into an instrument: a way of scoring places against each other, month by month, on the things that actually make a life livable rather than the things that photograph well. The instrument has a name, the Home Index, and this book is the record of a single year measured through it.

But the reader should understand early what kind of book this is, because it is easy to mistake. It is not a list of the best places to live. It is not a ranking to be trusted because it is printed. If anything, it is a book about how little a ranking is worth until you know exactly how it was made — what was counted, what was left out, what was assumed, and what happened when the assumptions turned out to be wrong. The cities are real and the scores are real; the reader will come to see that they were not quite the whole of the matter.

It is fair to ask, before trusting any of it, what the instrument actually values — and the answer is deliberately plain. It weighs the things a life is actually made of, and weighs them unequally, on purpose. Safety counts for most, because nothing else survives its absence. Close behind come the things that fill an ordinary day: whether the daily errands of a life can be done on foot and without friction; whether the place can host the people you love when they visit; whether the season the month actually delivers is one a person can live outdoors and enjoy.

Then the near-essentials — immediate healthcare, a home worth living in, the civic and cultural texture of a place, the quiet of a street, the reach of a weekend’s travel. And near the bottom, counted but modestly, the things a decade of maps overrates: the distance to an airport, the ease of a long-haul flight. The instrument does not pretend these weights are the only defensible ones. It insists only that they be visible, so that a reader who would weigh a life differently can see exactly where they part company with it.

In practice this produces judgments a simpler ranking would miss. A celebrated city can be lovely in every photograph and still lose the month, because the instrument asks not only whether a place is desirable but whether a household could actually secure a home there for the stay it intends — and a place whose housing market quietly closes its doors in its most beautiful season is marked down for it, honestly, even when it is the author’s favorite. A radiant capital can hold near the foot of a board for one plain reason, that the home behind its lovely face costs more than a household should pay. A famous month of blossom or fire can lift a city and its hardest front door hold it down in the same breath, and the book will say so, and place it exactly where the two forces meet. And when two places finish close enough that no honest method could separate them, the instrument declares the tie and refuses to invent a winner.

These are small things. They are also the whole difference between a ranking and a judgment.

That discipline can be stated plainly, because the whole book is an exercise in it. Measure what can be measured, and do not quietly promote a guess to a fact when the measurement is missing. Prefer evidence to enthusiasm, especially your own — a place you want to win is exactly the place to check twice. Treat a correction not as an embarrassment but as the moment the instrument got better; a method that cannot be proven wrong cannot be trusted when it is right. Add nothing a problem does not demand, and measure the whole of a thing before deciding how much of it to show. None of this is complicated. All of it is hard to do consistently, which is the only reason a book like this needs to exist.

These habits were not invented for the occasion. They are older than the project and borrowed from a plainer tradition of thinking — the notion, mostly, that good judgment is a thing a person practices rather than a thing a person has, and that most errors of decision are not failures of intelligence but failures of restraint: assenting too early, wanting too much, mistaking the vividness of an idea for its truth. The book does not argue for that tradition and will not name it. It simply tries to work the way that tradition recommends, and lets the reader judge from the results whether the way is sound.

So the instrument was built to be argued with. Every criterion in it was contested; every weight was made to justify itself; every conclusion was handed to the harshest reading it could be given, and kept only if it survived. When new evidence overturned an earlier belief — and it did, repeatedly, sometimes dethroning a place the author had privately hoped would win — the earlier belief was retired without ceremony. Two full rebuildings of the method stand behind these pages. What you are reading is not the first version of anyone's opinion. It is what was left after the opinions were tested to exhaustion.

A word on how to read what follows. The year is given a month at a time, twelve chapters, each an honest account of what the instrument found that month and why — written, deliberately, as though the outcome of the year were not yet known, because at the moment of each measurement it was not. No chapter reaches ahead to the ending. Each is allowed to be surprised. A champion holds or falls on that month's evidence alone, and the reasons are laid out so that you can disagree with them, which is the whole intention. If you finish a chapter certain the instrument was wrong about a place, the book has done its work: you will have been thinking about the decision in the only way that ever helps, which is carefully.

The full field is larger than the page. In each month the instrument measures far more places than it prints; the book shows the ones worth your attention and keeps the rest counted but unshown, because measuring everything and displaying everything are different acts, and the second is not honesty but noise. Where the instrument cannot separate two places, it says so and declines to pretend. Where its evidence is thin, it admits the thinness rather than dressing it. These are small refusals, but the trustworthiness of the whole rests on them.

By the end, something will have quietly changed in what the book seems to be about. It sets out to rank cities and does so honestly, but the longer it runs, the clearer it becomes that the cities were the occasion and never the lesson. What the pages actually hold is a worked example of how to face a decision too large to take back — how to gather what can be known, name what cannot, resist the pull of the answer you were hoping for, and change your mind when the evidence asks you to, without treating the change as a defeat. This is not a philosophy book and it will not improve your character. It is a working instrument and a record of its use. But a person who watches a hard decision made this carefully, month after month, comes away having learned something the cities were only the vehicle for.

For the discipline does not belong to this decision alone. The same few questions that sort one city from another are the questions worth asking of any choice heavy enough to shape a life — a career taken or left, a person to build a future with, a risk that cannot be undone. What do I actually know here, and how do I know it. What am I only imagining, or wishing, and calling knowledge. Where is my evidence thin, and what would it cost to make it thicker. Which of my reasons would survive being said aloud to someone who disagreed. The Home Index asks these of a city because a city can be measured; but the habit of asking them is the whole inheritance, and it transfers to every decision that matters.

What the book cannot do is decide for you, and it will not try. It does not know your people, your work, your history, or the particular texture of the life you are trying to build. It offers a year of careful measurement and a method you can inspect, and then it hands the decision back to the only person entitled to make it. Read it, then, not for its answer but for the way it arrives at one — and if you take nothing else from it, take the habit that made it: the refusal to mistake wanting a thing for knowing it, and the patience to tell the two apart before you choose.