Special Report
America's 50 Best Cities to Live
February 24, 2020 6:51 pm
Last Updated: March 13, 2020 4:14 pm
Methodology:
To identify the best cities to live in, 24/7 Wall St. created a weighted index of 25 measures across four categories: affordability, economy, quality of life, and community.
1.) The affordability category consists of three measures:
2.) The economy category consists of four measures:
3.) The quality of life category consists of six measures:
4.) The community category consists of 12 measures:
Data on population, employment, unemployment, median home value, median household income, median property taxes paid, commuter characteristics, average travel time to work, and poverty came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and are five-year estimates for the period 2014 to 2018. Employment data used to calculate five-year employment growth are five-year estimates for the years 2010 to 2014. Data on cost of living came from real estate analysis company ATTOM Data Solutions and is for the year 2014.
Data on the share of the population in urban census tracts or areas at least one mile from a grocery store and in rural census tracts at least 10 miles from a grocery store, a measure of poor food access, came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 update to the Food Access Research Atlas and is at the county level.
Data on hospital locations came from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Data on 30-day readmission rates and 30-day mortality rates also came from the CMS and are for the period July 2015 to June 2018. Data was aggregated to the city level for cities with at least one hospital, and was aggregated to the county level for cities with no hospitals. Data on the number of drug related deaths per 100,000 residents per year from the period 2015 to 2017 is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is at the county level. Data on preventable hospitalizations per 1,000 Medicare enrollees came from the 2019 County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, and is at the county level.
Data on the number of violent crimes and property crimes reported per 100,000 residents came from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and are for the year 2018.
Data on the number of movie theaters, libraries and archives, theater companies and dinner theaters, museums, nature parks and other similar institutions, alcoholic beverage drinking places, and restaurants and other eating places came from the Census Bureau’s 2017 County Business Patterns series and is at the county level.
To avoid geographic clustering, we only took the top-ranking city in a given county. Our list includes cities, towns, villages, boroughs, and Census designated places. We did not include places with fewer than 8,000 residents in our analysis. Additionally, any city or town with a poverty rate or unemployment above the national average was not considered.