We've all heard the phrase, 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours,' referencing to a mutual helping hand among two people, but a new federal survey suggests that if you visit or live in Miami, you might not get the help you need.
Two federal agencies, AmeriCorps and the U.S. Census Bureau, collected data from the 12 largest metropolitan areas in America and looked at two categories: informal helping and formal volunteering through an organization.
Overall, Miami ranked last, or least helpful.
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According to the survey, only 35.5% of Miamians helped others with informal favors for their friends or neighbors such as "house sitting, watching each other’s children, lending tools, and other things to help each other.”
Coming in as the most amiable area in the country was Boston, with 57.9% of Bostonians giving a helping hand. The City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, was second at 57.8% and Chicago was third at 54.6%.
The survey showed that although the rate of Americans informally helping others remained stable between 2019 and 2021, with nearly 51% of Americans exchanging favors with friends and neighbors, the formal volunteering rate, fell seven percentage points.
Local
Of all the areas surveyed, the Riverside area of California, ranked last with just 9% of residents saying they participated in some sort of formal volunteering such as supporting food banks, cleaning up trash, or feeding the homeless.
And believe it or not, the Miami metro area was just second from last at 14%.
The cities that were the most actively volunteering were Philadelphia at 28.7%, Washington, D.C. at 27.9%, and Chicago 27.6%.
The Sunshine State did not make the top 10 in either of the state rankings of informal or formal volunteering. In fact, in four other measures of civic engagement, Miami ranked at or near the bottom.
According to the study, Miami took last place for “doing favors for your neighbors," was third from last in “membership in an organization” and second from last in “donating to a charity or group.”
Why is the Miami metro area considered among the most unfriendly and unhelpful areas in the country?
Unfortunately, there is no one perfect answer to this question.
Miami is a melting pot. It welcomes immigrants, transplants, and snowbirds. It is a key vacation destination for tourists and therefore a place where many different cultures and languages merge.
"[In Miami] you don't have the glue that you would have in Boston, or Philadelphia, or Chicago where people have spent their whole lives there and some of them in the neighborhoods that they were born in," The Miami Herald's Linda Robertson said to WLRN's Tim Padgett. "I think that contributes to the sort of sense of hostility ... and the language barrier is a big problem here because a lot of people don't speak English or don't speak Spanish and I think they make assumptions about who they are interacting with."
