Here’s an excerpt from Nate Silver’s blog, Five Thirty Eight, from his neighborhood survey that was used as a source in the New York Magaizne article, The Best Place to Live in NY.

The results of my project with New York magazine to rate New York City’s neighborhoods along a number of objective statistical dimensions are now live. This was a fairly grueling and exhaustive project; people are rightly proud of their neighborhoods, and I don’t think you dare to do something like this without being pretty careful about it. With that said, there’s a lot of reasonably high-quality data available on New York and its neighborhoods, so I hope we were at least able to get a little closer toward the truth.

If you want to look at a static set of rankings, Brooklyn’s Park Slope ranked first, followed by Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Queens’s Sunnyside. But that’s not really where the utility of this project is. The coolest part, rather, is an interactive applet that allows you to determine for yourself the relative importance you attach to 12 different categories of data (housing cost, housing quality, transit/proximity, crime, schools, green space, food/restaurants, health and wellness, shopping and services, diversity, “creative capital” and nightlife). If you play around with the applet for long enough, you’ll find that it’s fairly easy to slot any of 15 or so neighborhoods into the top position, and any of 40 or so of the 60 that we evaluated into the top ten.