The one thing that would make it really useful to me in the next year as my family decides where to move is the inclusion of public grade school/high school national rankings. I've been looking for some way to easily cross reference cost of living with quality of public schools.
I'm also curious about how you evaluated diversity. For example, my current city and one I'm intimately familiar with (Denver) scores only a 2 on diversity, while Boston scores a 5. Ethnically, both cities' largest demographic is non-hispanic whites (Denver 52%, Boston 47% -- not tremendously different; when you add in suburbs Boston is considerably whiter than Denver). The next two groups for Denver are Hispanic or Latino (32%) and Black or African American (10%), and for Boston Black or African American (24%) and Hispanic or Latino (17%). Again, these don't seem tremendously different to me. Denver has the largest Mongolian population in the United States, hosts one of the largest Native American Pow-Wows in the country, and has had 2 Black mayors and one Hispanic mayor (Boston has never elected a non-white mayor.) I realize there are other forms of diversity, but Denver does fairly well on those too (for example, 5.8% of Denver's population is LGBT; Boston is a slightly higher 6.2%.) Point being, I don't understand what criteria were used to score these cities on opposite ends of the diversity spectrum given that they both seem fairly diverse to my eye.
http://two88cities.herokuapp.com/cities/details/342/Hawai'i/...
When I lived in Boston I noticed a high density of small ethnic grocery stores / eateries vs what I was used to in Denver. Within a radius of a few blocks from where I lived in Boston I had a Korean store, an Indian store, a Vietnamese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a Korean restaurant, and an Italian restaurant (none of which were franchised). In Denver I had a deli, a bunch of franchised fast food, and franchised ethnic food (Chipotle, Olive Garden, etc). My anecdata would score Boston as more diverse in this sense.
I notice that if you increase the minimum percentage of the population that uses public transportation to 15 percent, it eliminates basically everywhere except the major east coast cities, Chicago, and San Francisco.
I wouldn't find that surprising if using public transportation means using it exclusively, but I would find it surprising (and disheartening!) if it means using it regularly, or at least some of the time.
[1] 76% drive alone, 11% carpool, 5% take public transportation, 8% other (walk, bike, taxi, work from home). http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3683/9286810188_548716198e_n.j...
Live in Vancouver, shop in Portland seems to be highly efficient jurisdictional arbitrage. It's also a win if you spend years out of the country.
(A lot of datacenters are in OR specifically because of the lack of sales/use tax on servers; I used to think cheap power was the primary draw, but it actually is #2. Great fiber, supportive local governments with tax/etc. credits, etc. also contribute, but are less critical.)