KALAMAZOO (WKZO AM/FM) — You can take where you live for granted, you may never realize how special it is if it is all you know. Readers Digest has been looking around for the nicest places in America and they say Kalamazoo is one of those places.
What makes Kalamazoo so nice? If you graduate from its public schools, they will pay all your college tuition. If you have a problem, the city will send a police officer who is also an EMT with social service skills, who puts out fires to boot.
If you are homeless, we got’cha covered, so much so that we attract the homeless here. Even If you commit a crime, you are more likely to end up in a program than a jail cell. We are one of the smallest communities in the nation that have mobilized to end generational poverty.
One of the reasons cited by the magazine was Kalamazoo’s reaction to recent calamities. They said even when violence struck: like the mass murder, and the biking tragedy we rose to the occasion to help the victims.
Readers Digest Senior Editor Jeremy Greenfield says The Promise also got their attention, but it was the stories that put us in the top ten. His favorite one of those stories came from a Promise scholar who used the money she saved traveling around the world, and she said when she described to the people she met, where she came from, how nice the people were and what she has been able to do, they did not believe her.
Greenfield says they set about on this quest to find the nicest places because right now America is not a very nice place with all its political discord, the rudeness bordering on a crisis of civility.
He says they asked readers to submit nominees and got over 400. The final ten include a wide variety of places, a yoga place near a military base that helps soldiers with PTSD, a Falafel restaurant in Tennessee and a Texas town wiped out by hurricane Harvey.
Greenfield says they were looking for more than just the recovery story or the random act of kindness they were looking for places that have niceness baked into the bones.
And one thing they found is that for all the for all the political discord and anger, there are still a lot of very nice places in the U.S. and a lot of very nice people, and their winners are places to emulate.
The winner will get a cover story in Readers Digest and a profile on Good Morning America this fall. Here is the location where to vote. Tenbest.com/nicest
