RI has high rents and awful pizza, and wants to quit sugar. What do these surveys know?
Rhode Island has crazy high rents, unsavvy tech seniors and the biggest thing we want to quit is something besides alcohol, gambling and tobacco.
These are things I’ve learned because groups send survey results to reporters like myself – lately on matters from RI romance scams to electricity costs.
Today, I’m passing on a few results
RentCafe, an apartment rental site, tells me Providence rents are among the country’s half dozen or so hottest. Good and bad, I suppose.
We have a 96.4% occupancy rate, and low turnover with 68.7% of renters renewing. RentCafe crunches that into a scale called the Rental Competitivity Index. Providence gets a stratospheric 115 score – double the national average. Twelve people are usually competing for each apartment in the city which means most get grabbed within 36 days. That’s an average, meaning many are gone a lot faster.
A related study by “Forbes Home” tells the result: Rhode Island has the 8th highest average rent nationally at $1,359.
The good news is that Bridgeport, El Paso and Tulsa, among many others, are all lower so you can always rent there.
Once you find a place, electricity won’t be cheap. That’s what a study by a solar company called SunPower shows. We have the 6th highest electricity costs in the country at 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Part of the problem seems to be New England. New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts are second, third and forth and both Maine and Vermont are in the top 10.
The west apparently has electricity figured out. You’d pay half as much if you moved to Idaho, Washington, Utah, Oregon or Montana. But stay away from Hawaii. They’re the priciest – almost double what we pay.
Another survey by Seniorly, which helps people find assisted living, ranked whether Rhode Island geriatrics are tech savvy - meaning folks over 65, a demographic I might belong to. As such, I found the survey, well, is patronizing the right word?
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“The last decade,” the survey said, “has been scary for some seniors as the world grew increasingly reliant on technology.” How did they know we’re all hiding in our basements clinging to our rotary phones?
Ninety percent of RI seniors own a computer and 83.2% have online hookups, which sounds high, but puts us only 18th nationally. DC and California have the savviest old techies while West Virginia and Mississippi have the least.
Gallus Detox, which runs drug rehab centers, did a survey on substances of all kinds people in each state are trying to quit.
In Rhode Island, it’s not drugs, social media or shopping. It’s sugar.
The country’s big three “detox” searches are alcohol, tobacco, and pornography. Other top things people want to quit, in order, are: biting nails, cannabis, caffeine, gambling, junk food and social media.
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Here, it’s sugar.
Social Catfish, which verifies online identities, tells me Rhode Island has had its share of romance scam victims. In 2021, 72 here lost an astounding average of $62,773 per victim.
Another survey was done on work-life balance by an online Solitaire company called Solitaire Bliss. I am pained to report that along with Idaho, Iowa and Tennessee, we have the worst balance.
The state with the best is Vermont, with 7.1 hours of daily work and 4.6 of leisure. Rhode Island, says Solitaire Bliss, averages a crazy-high 10.2 hours of work per day and only 2.6 hours of leisure. And we only sleep 7.3 hours a night. This could mean we’re diligent, but also perhaps desperate; the survey didn’t say.
Preply, a language learning app, surveyed how regional accents are seen. Guess which one Preply says is the one in America that sounds smartest?
The Northeast. Which seems to mean New England, because New York came in second.
I’m a local booster, but honestly - does “Pock the cah,” and “Lobstas and mobstas” really sound erudite? And you can raise the same question about New York. Fuhgettaboutit?
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More random facts: The online Grand Canyon University says Providence is the 4th best place to be a tutor with a salary of $52,400 – double Wichita at $29,300. And despite what they say about our business climate, Forbes Advisor says Rhode Island ranks in the middle, not the bottom, of best states to start a small business with 970 opened last year and a 76.9% survival rate.
And InsureMyTrip tells me the top destinations for Rhode Island travelers are the U.S., Bahamas, Aruba, Mexico and more generally, the Caribbean. I presume if they dug deeper, they’d find that in our case, “U.S.” mainly means Florida.
Oh, and Shiny Smile Veneers says Rhode Island folks rank 19 in selfies, taking 1.32 a week – in Illinois, it’s four a week, and in Kansas, only .4. More specifically, Rhode Island leans toward gym selfies.
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In the “we’re not shocked” category, a Forbes Advisor survey finds Rhode Island ranks 11th in most belligerent drivers, though surprisingly, seemingly mellow Utah, Missouri and Colorado are the three worst.
Finally, there are surveys that clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. A site called Clever Real Estate ranked the country’s best pizza cities. They based it on factors including a poll of 1,000 people, average price, Yelp reviews and number of pizza joints per 100,000 residents.
Their results? New York, L.A. and Chicago are the top three. Not sure about Los Angeles, but OK. The bottom three: Oklahoma City, Providence, and Columbus, Ohio. Only 2% supposedly called us a top five pizza city. This is blasphemy.
I might even call to complain in an erudite New England accent, but not yet, as I am too fixated on quitting sugar and trying to figure out how my computer works.
mpatinki@providencejournal.com
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Surveys claim RI has high rents, bad pizza and unsavvy tech seniors
