Writer Cormac McCarthy nailed the description but missed the location

Alaska rated worst for old folk

The website Bankrate has a disturbing message for Alaskans thinking about retirement, and it might most easily be summed this way:

Get your money and get out.

Why? Because, according to Bankrate at least, Alaska is ranked as the worst state in the country for retirees. It beats out New York, Washington, California and North Dakota in that order from worst to less so.

Alaska, according to Bankrate, was “dragged down by back-of-the-pack scores in affordability, quality and cost of health care, weather and crime.”

Apparently, the financial services company has not been cued in as to Alaska’s status as a climate refuge, which should warrant a top score for weather rather than a bottom score.

Yes, the old Alaska can still rear its head as it did last winter, but the nation’s coldest state has been transitioning toward a warmer, human-friendlier, more habitable place for a while now.

Still, Bankrate put it dead last for climate, apparently missing the fact that the weather in the state’s urban core is milder than that of 49th-ranked Minnesota.

Minneapolis, the largest city in that state, can be miserably hot in summer. The temperature there on Friday was 91 degrees, according to Accuweather. 

And the winters can be so miserably cold that the Minneapolis.org website tries to tempt new residents with the promise that “we understand the cold isn’t for everyone! There’s plenty to do inside with the family, with friends, or solo.”

Winter or summer, one can admittedly escape to the climate-controlled, more than 2.8-square-million-foot Mall of America, the world’s largest mall, on the southern edge of the Twin Cities metro area in Bloomington.

So, possibly, Minnesota should have scored better than number 48 North Dakota, which is equally hot in the summer and cold in the winter, not to mention windier, with even less in the way of climate-controlled amenities than in Anchorage.

Fargo, the largest city in North Dakota, has an average July high temperature of 83 degrees – a sweaty 18 degrees higher than the Anchorage average for that month – and a January average low of zero – a chilly 11 degrees colder than Anchorage.

At the end of the day, however, weather didn’t appear to be the big determinate anyway. Crime was the big difference.

Crime-ridden north

Alaska was ranked next to worst for crime. Only New Mexico scored lower. Both Minnesota at number 17 for crime and North Dakota at number 18, were in the upper quarter of the rankings.

California, the fourth worst place to retire, was like Alaska dragged down by crime. It was ranked 12th worst.  And Washington state, the third worst place to retire, didn’t score much better. It was ranked 16th worst.

California also suffered due to a high cost of living driven by the state’s astronomical housing prices. The median price of a single-family home there is quickly approaching $1 million, KTLA-TV in Los Angeles reported in May. 

Bankrate scored the Golden State dead last for “affordability” with New York state close behind. The rankings resulted in big hits for both states given that affordability was weighted to account for 40 percent of a state’s score versus 10 percent for weather.

New York, the second-worst state to retire after Alaska, saddles its residents with the highest tax burden in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation. 

Alaska has the lowest tax burden, which helped to move it up to number 41 in “affordability” despite a famously high cost of living due to the costs of shipping everything in from far away.

The 41 was an improvement on 2023 when Alaska was ranked 43 for affordability and again the worst place in America to retire. 

The state did score a better “well-being” rank this year. It was in the middle of the pack – 26th in 2024 and 27th in 2023 – just below Minnesota and just above West Virginia.

How exactly Bankrate arrives at a well-being score is unclear, especially given that New Mexico, the most crime-ridden state in the nation, had a well-being rank of 24th.

Living in a crime-ridden state would be expected to take a serious bite out of one’s sense of well-being, but Delaware, which was ranked the best state to retire, had a well-being rate of two despite a crime rank of 36, while Kentucky, which just missed making the top-10 list for low-crime states (it was 11th) scored a well-being rank of a miserable 48.

Indiana, meanwhile, ranked dead last for well-being but had a crime score of 22, significantly better than Delaware at 36.

Bankrate’s explanation of its well-being methodology didn’t shed much light on these differences. It said the wellness score was based on an analysis of “2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, including the number of arts, entertainment and recreation establishments per 100,000 residents for each state and adults 62 and older per 100,000 residents for each state. Racial and ethnic diversity index data is as recent as 2020 from the Census Bureau. Bankrate also factored in Sharecare’s 2022 community well-being index. Sharecare’s community well-being index measures various wellness factors, including access to healthcare, food, physical health and economic security.

Fading ‘Sharecare’

A decade ago, Alaska was the nation’s Sharecare leader followed by Hawaii, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana in that order.

Hawaii remains number two, but the Western red states have since taken a beating. Alaska is down to 23rd with Wyoming at 28. South Dakota, meanwhile, has dropped to 33 ahead of Wyoming at 36.

Sharecare claims to base its “index on decades of clinical research, health care leadership, and health economics. We conduct regular surveys within every community in the United States. We then analyze that data and score each community on a scale of 0 to 100.”

But well-being is a hard thing to measure. For instance, one of Sharecare’s metrics is what it describes as “Purpose: Liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals.”

Some of us, however, tend to end up in jobs we hate when we’re not loving them. And some,  no doubt, find themselves fired up to get things done on one day and without motivation on another.

Wellness measured by feelings is about as predictable as the weather. It is better measured by physical parameters, but there Sharecare sets the bar pretty low as in “having good health and enough energy to get things done daily.”

How much energy does it actually take to “get things done daily?”

Crime and costs of living are probably the easiest things to track with some degree of objectivity, but the rest of it gets complicated.

To get its weather rating, Bankrate says that it “analyzed two decades of average annual temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2000-2023). Bankrate also analyzed NOAA data for average tornado strikes between 2013 and 2022 and hurricane landfalls between 2000 and 2023, along with earthquake reports from the U.S. Geological Survey between 2010 and 2015.”

So what about floods; mudslides; blizzards; wildfires, the smoke from which can make life miserable in significant parts of some states at various times; heat waves and other weather-related events?

“Wildfires causing smoky, unhealthy conditions in much of Oregon,” the Oregon Capital Chronicle headlined last week above a story warning that among those most at risk are “older adults.”

Bankrate gave Oregon a well-being rank of 11 for retirees. Maybe that was just for younger retirees, or maybe it reflects the big problem with all of these rating systems:

What was yesterday doesn’t necessarily predict what will be tomorrow.

See Alaska’s plummeting Sharecare rankings and consider that states in these rankings can go up as fast as they go down.

It might well be that the “best” state in which to retire is the state in which you feel happiest. Or maybe even more the city in which you feel happiest even if you’re view of the state overall is crappy.

Despite North Dakato’s low score with Bankrate, for instance, Forbes magazine says “Fargo is the only city that’s been on Forbes’ Best Places to Retire list 10 years in a row.”

“The grisly Oscar-nominated comedy Fargo opens with a blinding white landscape, the fog of a blizzard obscuring flat plains blanketed with snow as far as the eye can see,” Forbes reports, and “the winter climate it presents is appropriate. It looks like just about the last place you’d want to live.”

But…

“Its median home price of $228,000 is 20 percent below the national median.” The city scores big points for “cost of living, doctors per capita and walkability.”

The $500 million Sanford Medical Center opened in 2017 “as the largest hospital in North Dakota, complete with a Level 1 trauma center, cancer research and cardiovascular care to give aging adults peace of mind. Microsoft’s Fargo campus employs 1,600, and North Dakota State University enrolls more than 13,000 students.”

All good if you don’t mind the topography.

Fargo is basically a flat, windy, small-college town (population 125,000), something a lot like Fairbanks except for the Microsoft tech center and the lack of winter temperatures down to 40- or 50-degrees below zero.

Fargo, at least this century, bottoms out in the minus-30s. The lowest temperature set in the new millennium was 36 below on January 30, 2004, according to the Current Results weather site.

Fairbanks still reaches minus-50.

“…Another prolonged cold-snap will return to the Interior,” the National Weather Service reported from there in February. “Valley locations will fall back to -40 F to -50 F…for overnight lows, with high temps struggling to warm much beyond -30 F,’‘ making the warmest part of the Fairbanks day about the same as the coldest part of the coldest Fargo day.

But, despite this, the Milken Institute in 2017 put Fairbanks in the top-10 of “Best Cities for Successful Aging.” Ranked 10th overall, the ranking rose to ninth for those ages 65 to 79.

Fairbanks thus edged out Boulder, Colo., which was 11th.

“Fairbanks leads the nation in community engagement, with cultural amenities and social organizations offering a warm vibe in a chilly climate,” the Institute said. “Economic growth is slow in this fishing, hiking, and snow-sport haven, but residents  remain financially sound.”

A snow-sports haven? Anyone who has tried cross-country skiing at 40- or 50-degrees-below zero knows that’s nonsense. At those temperatures, snow becomes like sandpaper, and skis refuse to glide.

There is a reason the Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center, which has produced a number of Olympic athletes, is based in Anchorage. It’s because Fairbanks is a better place to train for walking on skis as opposed to racing on them.

One can only guess that whoever was involved in the Milken ratings doesn’t know much about snowsports, all of which are more fun at zero degrees than at 20-, 30-, 40- or more degrees below zero.

Which is the problem with all these rating schemes. They’re open to wide interpretation, and at the end of the day, the results are in the eye of the beholder.

There are, in fact, people in Alaska who would argue Alaska is the best place to retire rather than the worst.