So good, so bad

This does not compute:

South Bend is now an All-America City. The award is presented by the National Civic League to 10 cities each year that demonstrates innovation and describes successful efforts to address local challenges.

This comes only months after South Bend was labeled a dying city by Newsweek Magazine. So how can a city be so good and so bad at the same time?

The story explains that the National Civic League and Newsweek used "very different criteria." It also could have pointed out that this bit of coincidental timing illustrates the limits of all these "best of" and "worst of" designations. For one thing, they're the judgments of people who don't actually live there and reflect their fields of knowledge (or areas of prejudice, if you will) and not the needs and desires of residents; the criteria tend to be narrow and very arbitrary.  For another, worrying about how to get on a list or stay off one is a distraction from the tedious but necessary tasks of day-to-day resource management. In most cities, I think, people really know what they need -- they just haven't made the final decision to commit to what it takes to get it done.