Forbes, In Depth: America's Most Livable Cities
Source: Forbes, 4.01.09, Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Worcester, Mass. ranked number 9!

Metro Area: Worcester
Metro Population: 787,000
Income Growth: 3.5% (No. 145 of 379)
Cost of Living Index: 106.1 (No. 147 of 379)
Culture Index: 98 (No. 7 of 379, tie)
Crime per 100,000: 2,334 (No. 29 of 379)

Unemployment: 7.8% (No. 13 of 379)

To form the list, Forbes looked at quality of life measures in the nation's largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. Forbes eliminated areas with populations smaller than 500,000 and assigned points to the remaining metro regions across five data sets: five-year income growth per household and cost of living from Moody's Economy.com; crime data and leisure index from Sperling's Best Places; and annual unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.