Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 31, 1994 TAG: 9406030065
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Especially happy are those Virginians fortunate enough to live outside the high-growth urban crescent stretching from the Washington, D.C., suburbs through the Richmond metro area to the Tidewater region: Good jobs and big money may be harder to come by, but so are the daily hassles of living in a densely populated corridor.
It's myth-shattering time.
Results of a poll conducted this spring by Virginia Tech's Center for Survey Research, and reported recently in the center's "Quality of Life in Virginia: 1994," suggest that such comfortable notions are not nearly so self-evident as is sometimes assumed.
Statewide, for example, Virginians appear to be less happy than Americans as a whole. Of the 596 random-sample telephone interviewees, only 27 percent chose "very happy" when asked how they'd say things are these days. That was up from 24 percent in the center's poll last year and 23 percent in 1992, a reflection perhaps of improving economic news - but still less than the 31 percent recorded nationally in 1991 in answer to an identically worded question.
Whether living inside or outside the urban crescent, Virginians in the '94 poll were about equally likely to choose "very happy." But urban-crescent residents were likelier than other Virginians to say they were "pretty happy"; other Virginians were likelier than urban-crescent residents to say they were "not too happy."
The urbanites indicated greater satisfaction with their income and financial situations; other Virginians, with their amount and quality of leisure time. Perhaps more surprisingly, non-crescent Virginians indicated less satisfaction than the urbanites with not only the level of their medical care but also its cost.
Urban-crescent dwellers consistently gave local government and most local services - from law enforcement to outdoor recreation - ratings as high as or higher than did other Virginians. Only in secondary public education did substantially fewer urban-crescent than other Virginians rate their local service "good" or "excellent."
Nevertheless, a higher percentage of Virginians outside the urban crescent gave their own communities good marks for clean air and water, for reasonably priced housing, as a place to vacation, as a place to settle down and retire in, and as an overall place to live. The big exception: Urban-crescent Virginians gave higher scores to their communities as a place to find a job.
How can non-crescent Virginians think better than the urbanites of their communities as places to live, yet be less apt to report personal happiness? Well, you can't eat magnolias. Jobs are a quality-of-life ingredient, too.
The intangibles, in other words, are important, but so are economic prospects. The challenge for Southwest Virginians is to enhance the latter without destroying the former.
by CNB