This was a really interesting article on the Grist website last week that I saved for this Very Special Day. The author discusses two recent rankings of cities as related to their “trick-or-treat-ability”: the opportunity for small children to walk from house to house in a neighborhood safely. I thought they sounded quite suspiciously like several “sustainable communities” indices, but they are a festive twist on this sustainability assessment staple.
Zillow developed the rankings using four proxies for trick-or-treat-ability: Home value index (more ritsy homes mean safer neighborhoods and better candy); Walkability (so kids don’t have to be driven door-to-door by parents…. although this has something to do with laziness as well, I suspect); Density (the more doors closer together, the less walking needed to fill up the bag); and Violent and Nonviolent Crime rate (for obvious reasons). San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu, Seattle, and Chicago top this list.
Richard Florida also gives it a shot, including in his index the percentage of kids under 14, median household income, share of adults who walk to work, density, and percentage of “artists, designers, and other cultural creatives” (read: those people not likely to buy a boring costume at a discount retailer…. a group which may have little overlap with people who have kids. But I digress.) His index ranks Bridgeport-Stamford, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. as the best trick-or-treating spots.
Of course, trick-or-treating is probably just as safe and productive (from a kid’s point of view) in the smaller, rural towns of 10,000 – 30,000, where everyone knows each other and older houses form closely-knit neighborhoods around a central downtown core. The house prices may not be high in these areas, and perhaps the neighbors hand out the fun size bars instead of the real deal, but these towns certainly shouldn’t be excluded altogether from this sort of index.
And yes, Houghton MI is a pretty decent place to collect a pillowcase full of candy on Halloween.