Florida: america’s cleanest state?

A new survey has revealed that Florida is one of the cleanest states in the USA...

Led by Miami, the Sunshine State dominates Forbes’ 2008 list of America's Cleanest Cities with four metro areas in the top 10, including:

- Jacksonville (No. 3)

- Orlando (No. 4)

- Tampa-St. Petersburg (No. 8)

This will be great news for prospective property investors, who are always on the lookout for information to help them make an informed choice. With the built-in advantage of weather patterns that blow out smog, these large metropolitan areas, together with No. 2-ranked Seattle and No. 5 Portland, Ore., top the  2008 list. But it's more than just sea breezes pushing these metros up the list; these big cities are reaping the rewards of investing in efforts to keep clean, even as their populations boom.

Eradicating harmful emissions

In recent years, Florida's Department of Environmental Protection has launched programs aimed at providing power plants with the equipment needed to scrub out harmful emissions before they're discharged. The agency has singled out the Tampa Electric Co. for going beyond federal and state requirements on emission reductions. On the water side, the agency has aimed its budget not only on fighting direct discharges into public waters but on indirect spillage from things like storm drain runoff.

Tom Van Riper of Forbes commented: “To determine the cleanest major cities in the U.S., we initially measured the rankings for air pollution and ozone levels among all 49 U.S. metro areas with populations exceeding 1 million, using data from the American Lung Association.

“After eliminating those areas that ranked poorest in air quality, we measured the remaining 29 cities on the additional but less-weighted factors of water quality and per-capita spending on Superfund site cleanup and solid-waste management. From this list, we drew our top 10. All figures were based on Metropolitan Statistical Areas (which include the city and surrounding area) with the exception of waste-management spending, which was based exclusively on the city proper. Water cleanliness rankings were derived from statistics compiled by the University of Cincinnati from local reports of EPA violations.

Cleanliness has an ‘economic impact’

Mr Van Riper added: “Metros were ranked based on reports of bacteria, chlorine byproducts and chemicals or metals such as arsenic, copper and lead in the drinking water. Operational expenditures for solid-waste management are recorded at city-data.com. Beyond health, cleanliness appears to have an important economic impact. While nine of our 10 cleanest cities showed population increases between 2000 and 2006, major metro areas losing residents over that period tend to rank near the bottom of the cleanliness list.

“They include Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit. Many factors, notably economic ones, go into a person's choice to move, of course. But a reputation for clean air, water and streets seems to count as well”.