Using state borders makes analysis easy but distorts the results, you even point this out when you mentioned Newark.

Personally I can attest to Louisiana having many of the problems attributed to it in your story but I live in a part of Louisiana that has none of those problems. I can say that Alabama is bad but Huntsville, AL is great. Mentioned is Maryland, it has three distinct regions all different.

California can't be pigeonholed. It would seem that with the powerful analysis tools available someone could do a useful analysis to tell us the best places to live with more precision than just a ranking of the states.

TEK