BY JOE SCOTCHIE
jscotchie@antonmediagroup.com
When the Village of East Hills makes the news, it’s usually for the achievements of its residents, whether students or adults, or the attractiveness of its park and its top-rated school district.
But here, maybe, is the best news yet.
East Hills has been listed by AreaVibes as one of the most “boring” towns in America. Not only that, it has been named as the fifth boringest town in the nation, ahead of Mount Carmel, TN, Pelham Manor, NY and La Canada Flintridge, CA, but behind Hillsborough, CA, San Marino, CA, Ladue, MO and Cherry Hills, CO.
This, in fact, might be one of the finest compliments paid to the village. Read on.
The people at AreaVibes said the first criteria for the list is a town between 5,000 and 50,000 residents.
“To figure out how boring a place is, we rely on a complex algorithm that factors in things we generally think make a pale exciting, and then we figure out which cities have the least number of those things,” a release from AreaVibes stated. Using their own data, the company measured towns on the following criteria:
• Percent of population over 35
• Percent of married households
• Median age
• Percent of households with children
• Percent of households with people over 65
• Population density
For the first five listings, the higher the percentage, the more boring a town is. For the last one, the lower the percentage the more boring.
“Then, our algorithm ranks each city for each of the criteria, takes an average of the individual ranking, and identifies the city that scores as most boring across the board,” the AreaVibes report continues. “For this list, we used every American city that qualified for our rankings based on having a population of between 5,000 and 50,000 residents. That left us with nearly 4,000 places to rank, and kept us from prejudicing our rankings by including very small pockets of retired people.
AreaVibes’ entry for East Hills states: “This small village on Long Island has more married people with kids than Cherry Hills Village [the Colorado town listed as number four on the list]. However, the median age is far lower, meaning that overall, there might be slightly more energy in the air near this region of [Nassau County]. According to internet chatter, East Hills is a quiet, clean, enclave on Long Island.”
So, it’s for perfectly healthy reasons that East Hills is on the list. The village has a fine mixture of young and old. Instead of elderly people leaving for Florida, they stay in East Hills. Instead of young couples doing the same, they stay in East Hills. Young adults get to see their parents. Grandchildren get to know their grandparents. What’s more healthy than that? In fact, the village, as with others in the Roslyn area, is populated by normal people living normal lives, people too busy loving their children to be “exciting.”
Still, the people at AreaVibes might want to spend a Saturday afternoon in the summer at The Park At East Hills or come to the Independence Day or Labor Day parties at that same park or take in a football or basketball game at Roslyn High School. Boring? Not a chance.
