Click here to listen to the fun segment on today’s show.

As NPR describes it:

Professor Richard Florida, director of the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, has released his Trick or Treat Index for 2010. It’s a kind of Lonely Planet guide for hobgoblins. He gives us his top-five list of the best U.S. cities for Halloween trick-or-treating.

Here’s the original list, a map, and the list for Canada.

This map, courtesy of my MPI colleague Zara Matheson, shows how all U.S. metros stack up on my Trick-or-Treater Index. It expands the top 20 list I posted earlier this week at The Daily Beast and covers all metro regions across the United States.

From The Daily Beast:

With Halloween just around the corner, you probably don’t have time to move to a different city to improve your (or your kids’) candy haul. But you may be lucky to already live in one of the best cities for trick-or-treating all ready. We crunched the numbers to come up with a list of the best cities to be when the costumes come out.

Our Trick-or-Treater Index is based on five criteria. A good place for trick-or-treating needs lots of kids, so we used the percentage of children aged 5 to 14. The haul is likely to be better where people have more money, so we included the median household income. It’s easier to canvass neighborhoods that are walkable so we measured as the share of people who walk to work—and also those that have a greater density of population. And then there’s that hard-to-miss Halloween spirit. The most over-the-top costumes and celebrations often occur in artistic neighborhoods, so we included the fraction of artists, designers, and other cultural creatives. The Trick-or-Treater Index covers all 300 plus U.S. metros and includes both their core cities and suburbs.

Read the full article here.

In keeping with the spirit of this holiday weekend, here’s a fun list of how Canada’s metros stack up on our Trick-or-Treater Index. While of course all the metros are likely to have great neighborhoods for trick-or-treating, the original index we did for the United States generated so much interest that my MPI colleagues and I decided to do a similar one for Canada.

It’s based on five key criteria, all similar to the ones we used for the U.S. index.

A good place for trick-or-treating needs lots of kids, so we used the percentage of the population that is 5 to 14 years old. The haul is likely to be better where people have more money, so we included average income. It’s easier to canvass neighborhoods that are walkable so we measured the share of people who walk to work — and also those that have a greater density of population. And then there’s that hard-to-miss Halloween spirit. The most over-the-top costumes and celebrations often occur in artistic neighborhoods, so we included the fraction of artists, designers, and other cultural creatives. My colleagues Kevin Stolarick and Zara Matheson extracted the data, Charlotta Mellander crunched the numbers, Michelle Hopgood did the graphics, and Zara made the maps – all on tight turnaround.

As I explained in my original post:

The idea for the Trick-or-Treater Index came to me several years ago, right after my wife and I spent our first Halloween in Toronto and I wrote about it in Who’s Your City?. I’d lived in many urban neighborhoods in the United States in New York, Boston, D.C., Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Buffalo, and frankly had never seen many trick-or-treaters. Maybe I lived in the wrong kind of places — perhaps too trendy when I was younger or perhaps a bit too far removed from the beaten track as I got older. But it could have been something else, too. Because of real or imagined dangers in urban communities, many parents don’t let their kids go up to houses where they don’t know people, and are more likely to create supervised parties or trick-or-treating rituals for their kids. Nearly half of all children in the United States live in places where their parents fear that neighbors may be a bad influence, and more than one in five are kept indoors because they live in dangerous neighborhoods, according to a 2007 Census study reported in The New York Times.

But our house in Toronto is always mobbed with kids trick-or-treating, from teeny tots to tweens and teens, many of them going it on their own without parents along to supervise. And our house was not in some far-off suburb, but rather in a residential neighbourhood of older single-family homes, about two miles from downtown. I later learned that Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, came up with a similar index — the Popsicle Index — which she describes as the percentage of people in a community who feel that a child can leave home safely to buy a Popsicle.

Pumpkins, witches, candy, ghosts… it’s all important. But Halloween just isn’t Halloween without some pint-sized trick-or-treaters. How does your neighborhood rate?

Playborhood cites Richard Florida’s concept known as the “Trick-or-Treater Index” which rates the child friendliness of a neighborhood:

The idea is simple: just count the number of trick-or-treaters at your door on Halloween night and you’ll get a measure of how child friendly your neighborhood is the whole year. Certainly, it’s quite simplistic, but I would agree that neighborhoods with lots of trick-or-treaters tend to have lots of children who are comfortable being outside in their neighborhood.

Tonight, count the number of rings and knocks at your door and report back to us with the details. What’s your trick-or-treater index where you live? What are your thoughts on this annual event as a measure of the child friendliness in your neighborhood?

Happy Halloween from all of us at the Creative Class Exchange!