Ferndale's 'Vibe' Ranks 5.8 Out of 10 in New Online Evaluations

Lists of "best" albums, teams, restaurants, vehicles and neighborhoods are bait for debate, and new nationwide rankings of communities' "vibe scores" are sure to bring boasts and roasts.

Ferndale comes out above average, barely, in ratings posted by MapQuest, the Internet mapping giant. It recently launched mqVibe.com, which rates communities on a 0-to-10 scale based on dining, nightlife, shopping, residential-business mix and fuzzy factors such as walkability, popularity and edginess.

Ferndale is described as "lively and edgy," though its overall rating is 5.8 –contrasting with 9.3 for Birmingham and 9.4 for Clawson. In Royal Oak, residents and business owners may wonder how their city earned – if that's the right word – a score of 2.2 (but its downtown gets a 9.3)

Ferndale's commercial core at Woodward and Nine Mile is given a "vibe score" of 9.0.

Numbers are based on the frequency of MapQuest searches for local attractions and businesses and on users' votes for neighborhoods and businesses. "We have a lot of data points – billions of data points in fact," the company says in an introductory blog post. "These data points collected over 15 years tell us, among other things, where people are, where they are going, what they are looking for and when they are looking for it."

But because it just launched Oct. 13, mqVibe doesn't yet reflect a broad user consensus and is driven partly by "an editorial evaluation," as the company's FAQs put it. And though it starts with rankings for 40,000 neighborhoods in 27,000 cities, including 15 distinct sections of Ferndale, no neighborhood breakouts are available yet for West Bloomfield or Troy.

Developers acknowledge mqVibe needs crowd clicking to work best. "It is just the beginning of a revolution in how you discover your city, participate and influence your local community, and explore out of town," says an oct. 17 blog post by Simon Hill of Denver, a principal product manager at AOL, parent company of MapQuest (as well as Patch).

In other words, let debate begin about Ferndale's standing, as well as whether West Bloomfield really has a near-zero vibe and if Clawson is fairly ranked at 9.4.

Community

Vibe Score

Description

'Hoods Rated

Top Neighborhood Rating

Berkley

5.7

Social, edgy

23

8.5 (Downtown)

Birmingham

9.3

Walkable, lively

14

10 (West Side)

Bloomfield Hills

8.8

Convenient, lively

4

8.8 (All)

Bloomfield Twp.

4.3

Social, well-liked

3

4.3 (All)

Clawson

9.4

Walkable, social

6

9.4 (All)

Ferndale

5.8

Lively, edgy

15

9.0 (Woodward/9 Mile)

Huntington Woods

1.3

Residential, undiscovered

1

1.3 (West Lincoln and Woodward)

Oakland Township

5.7

Walkable, undiscovered

1

5.7 (Collins/Orion)

Rochester

3.1

Convenient, social

1

3.1 (Edinshire)

Rochester Hills

4.8

Residential, undiscovered

2

4.8 (Orion/Roch.,  Auburn/Roch.)

Royal Oak

2.2

Familiar, residential

10

9.3 (downtown)

Troy

7.4

Lively, comfortable

0

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West Bloomfield

0.8

Lively, familiar

0

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Source: mqVibe.com