By Bobby Tanzilo Senior Editor/Writer Published Oct 17, 2022 at 2:02 PM

Do you feel more neighborly today than you did a year ago?

Well, according to the Neighbor Blog at neighbor.com, you are. Congratulations! Well done, Milwaukee.

In its new ranking, released last week, Neighbor named Milwaukee the seventh Most Neighborly City in America. That’s up from 10th place last year.

“Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the #1 city for neighborly acts this year, meaning it had the highest number of residents who report doing favors for their neighbors and other members of the community,” says Neighbor Blog.

“Milwaukee also ranked very highly for proximity to parks, with 90 percent of its residents living within a 10-minute walk of a public park.

"Milwaukee is also home to plenty of fun things to do. The Public Museum houses the world’s largest T-rex head, the Milwaukee Wave is the oldest soccer team in the United States, and the Oriental Theatre has hosted a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show every month since 1978.”

Number one was Rochester, New York, with Madison taking second. Provo, Utah was third and Oxnard, California; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Raleigh, North Carolina were fourth, fifth and sixth.

Also in the top 10: Poughkeepsie, New York; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Des Moines, Iowa.

How is this list determined?

“Each year, we’ve based these rankings on a variety of publicly available data sets related to charitable giving, generosity, happiness and well-being of residents, and other factors we think contribute to a city’s overall neighborliness,” the blog notes.

“This year is no different – we still took into account all those factors for the top 25. But what’s different in 2022 is that we surveyed actual Americans about their neighborly habits, their relationships with their neighbors, and what they think makes a community most neighborly.”

Bobby Tanzilo Senior Editor/Writer

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.

He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.

With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.

He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.

In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.

He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.