well, well, well...
here is there methodology...
"... took the top (and bottom) US metros for building personal net worth (taking into account local salaries, cost of living, and unemployment relative to the national average). Median base pay was correlated across more than 2,500 different benchmark jobs in our calculations. Housing costs, living costs, and metro unemployment/job growth figures were also used to rank the metro areas..."
salary.com rankings (//%22http://www.salary.com/sitesearch/layoutscripts/sisl_display.asp?filename=&path=/destinationsearch/advice/part_par531_body.html%22)
i've been saying it for years....