US Big City Ranking Breakout

First off, if you are new here check out the note I wrote down before with an explanation of the rankings, criteria, classifications, and the results for each of the city groups.

The other thing I want to comment is that I got a lot of really nice feedback from people with thoughts and suggestions on how to approach this and it was definitely all very worthwhile commentary. Thank you and please any thoughts you have let me know, this was something I did for my own enjoyment and part of that enjoyment is thinking about how to analytically or quantitatively approach something so productive commentary makes it that much better.

The Rankings

1. San Diego-Carlsbad-Chula Vista (tier 1)
2. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (tier 1)
3. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley (tier 2)
4. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria (tier 3)
5. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (tier 4)
6. Boston-Cambridge-Newton (tier 4)
7. Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler (tier 4)
8. Tampa-St Petersburg-Clearwater (tier 4)
9. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach (tier 4)
10. Minneapolis-St Paul-Bloomington (tier 5)

#10. The twin cities

Beating out a lot of more popular and prominent cities solidly landing in our group of semifinalists, this will be a comfortable position that probably will feel like winning for the city that is home of the least successful sports franchises in North America — I want to troll the city but really what could I say to offend a city whose major sports teams gave Kirk Cousins $150 million guaranteed across 2 contracts, and signed the worst contract non-John-Wall-division in the NBA which somehow got flipped for DLo’s bad max contract 3 years later while also dishing out a really-valuable first round pick. Maybe with Glen Taylor selling the team some competent management can figure out how not to waste a generational talent Big-Man, but I mean damn if you can waste KG I’m sure you can waste KAT. Anyway I’m done with sports commentary :)…

While being small cities with large suburban areas, the twin cities actually have really good commute times (avg. commute is < 30 mins) and really solid public transit, highly walkable inner-urban area, and the most bike-able city in the US — you know weather permitting (Walk, Transit and especially Bike Scores are very good). There are solid job opportunities with one of the highest wage growth figures in the US ($44k -> $64k) between 2009 and 2019. The larger metro has solid healthcare in terms of both quality and access, and the education system is good with a number of highly ranked districts.

There’s a lot of outdoor recreation and it’s prettier than most folks who have never been to the Northern Midwest seem to assume. The glacial advancing and really more-importantly receding of the late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs have left the whole area covered in kettle/glacial lakes and a much less flat landscape than associated with the more southern midwest/great-plains. The northern Mississippi is more picturesque than the rest of the length of the river having many areas surrounded by bluffs/cliffs with dense forest giving way to the marshy flood-plains as you descend towards the river. Central/Northern MN and Northern WI are the most southern reaches of the Tiaga/Boreal forest. While a bit further away the lake superior coastline and islands are very impressive and there are some cute towns which have been made-over and transformed following the decline of the great lakes shipping industry. As far as the city proper — I won’t spend time here — the downtown Minneapolis and waterfront area is more modern and “cosmopolitan” than one would expect given the size of the municipality.

What are the drawbacks? Employment opportunities are less diversified and wide spread than most of the large cities, even if wages and growth are solid. Crime rates are high, and anyone paying attention the last 2 months can probably understand why that is. The last thing is, god damn it’s cold!!! The most comparable city in terms of weather is Edmonton… Edmonton… Look at a map, Edmonton is the northernmost real city in North America / Canada and that’s the city with the closest weather. It’s significantly colder in the winter than both St. Petersburg and Moscow Russia, sunnier by a lot but colder.

#9. Miami

This is a very large metropolitan area which stretches over 100 miles north-to-south, it’s almost 3 different metros smashed together into one with Ft. Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Miami all being medium sized metropolitans in their own right. I am going to just write Miami for the whole area, if I am referring to the Miami city proper I will call that out. The city of Miami specifically is well known for its beaches and nightlife and there’s a lot to offer if you are into that sort of thing. The southern tip of Florida is a tropical climate with warm-pleasant winters and hot-humid-swampy summers. The average temperature throughout the year is a high of 83 and a low of 71, with summer highs around 91 and lows near 80. Being tropical they get summer monsoons with almost half of the 60 inches of annual rainfall coming in the 3 summer months.

It’s home to a lot of employment opportunities, with particularly large over-indexing in professional services. Miami is home to some 1500 Latin-American HQ’s for multi-national corporations, as well as many financial services, tourism, and international-trade businesses. While opportunity is solid at the top end of the income distribution, Miami is also one of the worst large metropolitan areas in terms of percentage of families living below the poverty-line. The metropolitan area as a whole is very car dependent, especially for work, however the City proper is relatively highly ranked across all aspects on non-car access to places.

Cost of living varies substantially — particularly housing — throughout the metro area, however the average is about 20% above the national average (which puts it in the more affordable half of the big cities). Some of the areas in and around the city of Miami proper are the most expensive housing zip codes in the US. Healthcare is good — I mean come on does it even need to be said — this is South Florida the second biggest retirement destination in the US after Arizona. The health systems are flush with that old people and medicare money. Education is hit or miss with some very good schools — mostly private schools — and bad schools.

#8. Tampa — St. Pete

The biggest positive relative to the other big cities for Tampa is cost of living. Tampa is in the top tier for most affordable big cities — with the most affordable real estate and really solid cost of living across the board. Economically the region is really well placed with over a quarter of Florida’s total tech/finance/insurance employment, as well as having a very substantial defense/DoD/Government-contractor presence and healthcare. Healthcare access and quality is among the best in the US, really not surprising given the demographics.

The weather is pretty similar to Miami, though it is classified as humid subtropical instead of tropical, it has similar average annual temps, summer temps, and while having 30% less rainfall it still is very humid and rainy in the summer. Being on the Gulf there are obviously beach activities — and if you love red tide the west coast of Florida is a great place to be. Also if you love shitty rich white college-kids on spring break you will definitely love the March-April beaches. Well at least it isn’t Pensacola/Destin/PCB…

#7. Phoenix

Did you know it’s only 2 hours from a vast 7k ft. plateau and 12k ft. mountains with the grandest of canyons? Scottsdale is also pretty cool. There’s a lot of really good hiking in the city/metro-area, and if you venture a little further it’s really high quality. The weather does suck in the summer but it really isn’t any different than most of the country being atrocious in the winter.

Economically it has a pretty standard diversified service oriented business environment, with really strong healthcare oriented services. Tourism and uhhhh old people decades long palliative tourism are massive contributors to MSA gdp. If you live east of the front range of the Rockies you would probably be better off visiting Phoenix between October — April than staying home, and that fact is a really substantial income boost to the area. The central phoenix areas are pretty accessible via non-car transport but the entire metro is very heavily car dependent. It’s also pretty urban-sprawl-y even if each of the cities peoria, tempe, scottsdale, phoenix, gilbert, etc.. are actually pretty self serving in terms of resources.

#6. Boston

Boston is one of the absolute best places to be in the country for education. The healthcare again is really unmatched in terms of quality. The higher education and research in Boston, and Massachusetts more broadly, is globally-unmatched, like really entire regions/continents can’t compete with the quality of the greater Boston area. That contributes to a really strong economy/labor market with the tech and biotech scenes being prominent. It’s hard for a place with the quality of talent that Boston has to not be extremely productive.

It is an expensive city. Most of the metros we are looking at have expensive parts, but Boston is expensive in a much more consistent manner. The weather and natural environment are also drawbacks. Crime rates are higher than average.

#5. Dallas

I spent 3 months living in $150 per week hotels in Dallas, and if you want advice on what disgusting hotel/motels to stay in I can tell you where not to stay, and how likely you are to get robbed, shot, or interact with cockroaches in various trashy places in DFW.

Anyway, the area has a lot of economic opportunity. Throughout the metro region there are opportunities, whether we are looking at Ft. Worth, Arlington, Dallas, Plano, etc.. The cost of living is in the top tier for most affordable metro areas. You just have to drive, and god damn they know how to do traffic, one of the side effects of substantial urban sprawl and bad public transit.

The natural environment isn’t all that great, I like white rock lake, parts of the trinity river area, lower greenville and highland park, but it is still limited within the context of the larger area. Unlike most of these other cities you don’t have significant outdoor recreation options in the areas surrounding the metro.

It’s a typical big city where you can find really good services in education and healthcare if you live in the right areas or have access to the right health systems.

#4. Washington D.C. — Maryland — Northern Virginia

Arlington is nice, Georgetown is nice too. I never saw the Maryland parts but I’m sure Chevy Chase is okay too. D.C. is not really a city the way these other places are — something about historical places stops from densifying the urban core — but with the history, national mall monument/museum campus being adjacent to both the Arlington riverfront downtown-ish area, and the Georgetown/Foggy-Bottom/Downtown DC area it might actually be a cooler and prettier central area than normal downtown areas.

Economic opportunities are really strong, obviously, stealing money from tax payers is good business :)… These are jokes people. There are a higher concentration of high paying, high skill, jobs in the D.C. area than basically anywhere in the world. When looking at median income for counties, the DC area has most of the highest median income places in the US. The large government, government sponsored enterprises, DoD, government-contractors, and government-adjacent technocratic institutions provide a large number of low 6-figure jobs. There’s also a very highly educated populace with this huge over-indexing of jobs being for folks with graduate degrees.

It’s close to the forests and east side of the Appalachians, and right along the Potomac, which are both very beautiful. There’s also the whole Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia beach areas which offer seemingly less crowded ocean/beach experiences than FL/NY/CA. The summers are swampy and shitty but really not that terrible, and the winters are more moderate than the midwest and Northern-atlantic cities. Schools, education, transportation, and all other services are really good. I recall the public transit being really effective and could easily replace the need for a car.

#3. San Francisco-Oakland

People probably don’t need a primer on the San Francisco area — it’s home to a lot of tech employment and is probably the largest financial hub west of the Mississippi. Wages are high and productivity and labor force growth have been solid, but it’s expensive with price per sq ft in the city of SF proper >$1000 and in the whole metro just a bit under $500 per square foot. Median price of a listed home can fluctuate quite a bit month-to-month but in SF city-proper it has been fluctuating between $1.2 — $1.6 million the last 2 years. That puts median home price to median household income at or above 10, compared to the national average of around 3.5. That metric can be a little tricky to compare across metro’s since rent/ownership rates are different and places with 70%+ renting will look a lot different than places with 70% ownership. It’s useful as a measure to understand housing ownership entry costs or accessibility not necessarily to measure the cost burden to present home owners. The east side of the bay while still very expensive is much more affordable than SF-proper.

Oakland is a much nicer place than people realize. There’s this zeitgeist that Oakland is the place out of the memories of the late 80’s early 90’s and that just isn’t true. It’s a high income, highly educated city with a lot of positives. The east half of Oakland while probably less hip and having less cultural stuff, has really good schools and is forested and sort of hilly/mountainous and overall pretty. The 1986–1994 impression of Oakland still exists in some of the areas north and south of Oakland — I’m thinking largely of places like Richmond.

The environment is a significant plus. The weather is very mild and even with may-gray and fog it’s sunnier than the midwest and east coast, and the eastern areas don’t deal with those coastal afflictions. The access to the outdoors/wilderness is phenomenal. The Marin headlands, redwood state parks, coastal mountains, beautiful central California coastline, and a relatively short trip out east gets you into the sierra’s or south to big sur.

#2 Seattle

Ohhh where to start. I guess let’s start with the economy, 10 fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the MSA (Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, and Expedia most notably). The tech industry is as strong as any non-SF-bay places, with the obvious giants I just mentioned, along with Tableau, Zillow, Redfin, Convoy, Remitly, Payscale, IMDB, Zulilly, and many other companies HQ in Seattle. There are very large presences from the worlds largest tech companies with FB, Google, samsung, apple, coupang, airbnb, lyft, uber, and nearly every other major company have significant regional presences. The non-profit and research sector is also massive boosted significantly by the Gates foundation and the Paul Allen institute. Median household income in the Seattle area is $94k with the median tech worker bringing home >$200k per year. Also no state/local income tax which on the west coast is uhhhhh a godsend — as a California expat I can confirm this is a very nice perk :).

The environment is quite incredible with arguably the most remarkable and beautiful mountain wilderness (the cascades) starting at the edge of the metro area. The access to incredible mountain/forest wilderness within 1-2 hours is rivaled maybe-only by the two major cities nested up aside either edge of the rockies, if those even compete. The temperatures are mild, the rain is wildly exaggerated with the metro receiving 2 feet less precipitation than the Florida cities we talked about before, it’s gray but not really worse on sunlight than the great lakes and north atlantic cities, the biggest difference being the mild winters.

Transit, healthcare and education services are very good, with high quality rivaling any big city. It’s expensive but relative to the high wages it isn’t as terrible as many of the more expensive cities, particularly for high skilled workers where we see engineer and tech workers median wages going further in Seattle than any other city (this is largely a high wage driven thing).

#1 San Diego

I commented on San Diego extensively before so I won’t go too much into detail, but man do I love San Diego. San Diego has the best weather in the world — it really is substantially better than the LA metro area especially when you start to take into account that nearly the entire population of SD county is within 10–15 miles of the coast. Coastal Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia and whatever other place makes the top 10 rankings, still can’t size up to the delightful pleasantness of San Diego.

The average school quality is quite impressive with even the more undesirable areas like north tijuan… shit I meant Chula Vista, or the eastern edges of the metro (Poway, rancho bernardo, scripps ranch, santee, el cajon, la mesa, bonita) having very good schools almost entirely 8–10 scores on great schools rankings. Healthcare is very high quality with two very highly ranked health systems (scripps and UCSD) along with the sharp and kaiser systems which score very high on regional rankings and level of access.

Economically it is very strong being the second biggest biotech hub in the world, as well as being the 5th biggest driver of tech job growth over the last decade (behind SF, San Jose, Seattle, and Boston). I somehow forgot to mention it in the previous post but San Diego is home to a number of the largest aerospace, satellite, and defense contractor companies. The massive DoD contractor and military-industrial-complex related sector is a function of the deep water port and being home to the largest naval fleet in the world. San Diego grew up from a medium military city into being a very significant metropolitan area with deep military-industrial-complex roots.

The beaches, ocean-side cliffs, eastern desert parks, and 5k–6k foot mountains just 30 miles from the coast make for an incredible outdoor recreational area. It’s really not a wonder why it’s home to one of the most active and fit populations.

Other commentary…

I received comments from no less than 5 of you on Inland Empire. I absolutely do not revise my sentiment. Is Temecula nice and livable? yes absolutely! Is Chino Hills totally fine as a place to live? Sure, I mean do you think a man as esteemed and essential as Lavar Ball would live in a shit hole. No place that has brought us Big Baller Brand can be bad. Let alone being the hometown of the beloved Kawhi “board man gets paid” Leonard the greatest alum in SDSU’s history — take that Marshall Faulk and Tony Gwynn. Inland empire also has access to way better — though somewhat crowded or limited in diversity — wilderness activities than most places. San Bernardino National Forest with it’s massive peaks, beautiful lakes, and surprising green valleys is wonderful, Joshua tree, and Mt. San Jacinto are also spectacular (the last two are very close even if they are in the Palm Springs-Palm Desert-Indio MSA). But with every other consideration and Chino/meet-me-in-temecula as the peak existence, if it came down to Inland Empire or a random non-developed-country-large-MSA, I’d take my chances with that lottery. I’m sure Kabul has some nice neighborhoods, I mean have you seen those mountains?!?! Lahore, Tashkent, Quito, Chisinau, Baku, Bangkok… At least a dollar would go far and they have more culture than 1000 sq miles of strip mall parking lot.