US City Rankings

I had downtime for all the month of April as i had left my previous employer and my current employer placed new hires on paid leave while they ramped up the virtual onboarding. It’s probably useful to know I recreationally look at maps and then anything that sparks my interest I will dive further into on whatever the relevant thing would be (Wikipedia, Redfin/Zillow, BLS, NPS/USFS. It’s a weird hobby but I’m not exactly a “normal” person so not a surprise there.

The flow of this is going to be to explain the different city categories, then to explain the ranking criteria, and last to share the outcomes. I do plan on going into detail about each of the city-category rankings to give more information about the cities and to explain the biggest drivers of the cities relative rankings, but that will be at a later point when I get some time to do justice to that. That is probably more interesting than seeing just lists like this but idk what to tell you.

Categorization

What is a City? When I say city I mean metropolitan statistical area as defined by the US OMB — list here — so there are some oddities where places are part of the same combined statistical area but are being classified separately (San Jose and SF are two different MSA’s even though it’s a continuous urban/suburban area, Santa Fe and Albuquerque are separate — lucky you Santa Fe — and Boulder and Denver are separate, among other maybe not super obvious divides).

City Classification: I am breaking cities into 4 size categories to make comparison easier, something like average school quality, unemployment rate, median income are very different in a large city than a small city even if the aggregated number is the same (the level of economic opportunity or high quality school choice will be higher in the larger place if only because of larger optionality).

Big Cities — MSA population > 3 million (Tampa smallest — NYC largest)

Medium City — MSA population 1.5 million — 3 million (Jacksonville smalles — Denver Largest)

Small City — MSA population 500k — 1.5 million (Lexington KY smallest — OKC biggest)

Very Small City — MSA Population 100k — 500k (smallest I considered was Missoula — biggest Myrtle Beach)

Ranking Criteria

I created 7 ranking criteria bins — these bins had subcomponents that contributed to the overall ranking — each bin was then given a 1–5 ranking (1/4 increments if need for separation purposes). The general idea is to create ordinality or meaningful separation between metropolitan areas not to say this place is X-times better than this place in this category. I did a straight average of the rankings across the 7 categories to come up with a final wholistic score.

There are going to be some overlaps between areas and there is definitely a degree of covariance with these factors, and this is going to mean that we are putting relatively more weight on the factors that influence multiple categories.

The seven ranking criteria are:

1. Growth — this blends population growth, labor force growth, and public interest/sentiment (12-month relative search trends).
2. Economy — Unemployment rate, median income, median wage growth, MSA GDP per capita (this is spotty and only consistent for the medium and large cities), Redfin’s economic opportunity score.
3. Environment/Nature — Weather (# of days over 90, # of days below 32, Hours of Sunshine), Surrounding Wilderness (access to outdoor recreation within 1, 2, and 4 hours drive like Beaches, Lakes, Ocean, Mountains, Hiking, whatever other hundred things) and just how nice is that nature that you have access to — Interlaken, Verona, and Santa Barbara are a little different than being on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland even if they are all on or very near bodies of water.
4. Healthcare — I looked at ranking of hospital systems overall and for a subset of specializations (pediatrics, ob-gyn, gp/internist, emergency, and cardiology). Quality of healthcare matters as does actual access, so I looked at hospital beds, nurses, physicians per capita and uninsured rates.
5. Crime — Violent crimes rates as well as property crime rates. There are really substantial heterogeneities in crime within a given metropolitan area, and it’s true that many places that on aggregate have somewhat elevated crime statistics have large swaths of the area that are extremely safe. Looking at a city like Chicago where you have really significant differences in outcomes by subsection of the city (crime rates, economically, educationally) it felt right to punish the overall metro area for having this egregious outcome divide across the segregated regions of the metropolitan area. Even if for an outsider relocating to the city it would be easy to avoid specific areas.
6. Cost of Living — Median home price to median income, average 2 bedroom rent to average income, cost of living adjustment (st louis fed).
7. Bonus round — This was me just placing cities into ranked groups based on how positively I would view moving to live there for say the next 5 years.

If it wasn’t clear that there was a degree of subjectivity before the 7th criteria it’s clear that this is not a purely quantitative exercise. Criteria 3 has a high degree of subjectivity as I view mild climates with sunshine as better and the data points I’m ranking on reflect that bias (I prefer something like Coastal Australia, Coastal Southern California, Portugal, and Spain over something like London, Brussels, or New York City), there’s also a judgement being made that something like Lake Tahoe or the Cascades are better than like the Mississippi river to be an hour from. There’s subjectivity in cut-off points within different ordinal ranking buckets though my belief is that this is subject to a much smaller degree of bias and has a very minimal impact on the overall rankings.

The Rankings

Big City

This generally doesn’t surprise me.

San Diego is the nicest weather city in the world — just google best weather city in the world and first organic result #1 on the list :) — , it also has phenomenal recreation activities. Two of the best rated health systems in the US (Scripps and UC-Health), really good schools with multiple top-100 US school districts, really strong employment for high skilled workers being one of the 2 biggest biotech hubs in the world (the other being Boston), a lot of tech regional offices, a handful of tech HQ’s, a lot of finance, educational, and professional services. It’s pretty expensive to buy housing, renting doesn’t over-index the way owning does, and non-housing costs are not terribly out of line with most cities. It’s also the lowest crime of the big cities.

Seattle and SF are also very unsurprising to me with super strong scores in economic opportunity, weather (we live in Seattle and I’d take Seattle weather over the midwest, SE, and east coast without a doubt), recreational activities. Pretty strong healthcare and schooling scores. SF is significantly hurt by cost of living and high petty/property crime rates — my assumption is this is very much related to the high level of homelessness and failure in addressing the underlying causes.

The biggest surprise for me on this list is Tampa St. Pete, mostly for a lack of every thinking about the Tampa bay area, it’s really affordable compared to other big cities which was its most positive point.

Wondering why the 3 biggest cities in the country didn’t make it? While they do have strong economic opportunities, particularly NYC, it isn’t actually a large advantage over many of these other big cities and in many cases the per capita opportunity metrics are much stronger in these other big cities. The same thing can be said about schooling and healthcare. They also have some significant issues in terms of access to opportunities that smaller cities don’t struggle with as much — very long commute times and labor markets that are actually segmented within the metropolitan area. For example good luck living in Orange county and commuting to Glendale or Thousand Oaks.

Wondering what the worst City was…. drum roll………. Ahh you guessed it Inland empire (san bernardino and riverside). Are you interested in 90 minute one-way commutes 120 degree summers and the worst air quality in the country and even though it’s cheaper than the rest of southern california it’s still pretty expensive on a national level. Detroit while very low couldn’t give the inland empire a run for its money.

Medium City

I don’t have much to say about these. I think this is largely not going to be surprising to people. These medium cities all have strong economies, pretty solid access to healthcare and education resources. There is quite a big difference in cost of living here with San Jose being pretty much the most expensive metro and Columbus being very close to the most affordable (I think Indianapolis might have be more affordable in terms of wage-to-cost metrics but I don’t think anywhere else was that low).

The top half of this list is probably more of our highly-and-properly rated cities in the general zeitgeist. I’d say the bottom half are probably pretty underrated cities, they definitely all have some knocks whether it’s weather, the environment, crime rates but they more than make up for it with positive characteristics. In particular if I had to call out one city that I think is very under rated, if only because it gets compared to the other California cities which are more glitzy and glamorous, Sacramento. It’s really close to some of the most spectacular wilderness in the country sitting in the plane at the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills and so close to Lake Tahoe.

Last place……… Memphis TN…

Small City

There’s a lot to comment here with the number of cities so I won’t try until I do a detailed breakout. The only quick callouts are that these are many of the highest Quality of life places in the US. Many of these have the service advantage of a bigger city, with pretty solid employment prospects, but without the big city negatives or stressors such as very high cost of living in the most desirable places and long commutes/traffic.

Very Small City

This is basically a list of where to retire. We’ve toyed with the idea and done cursory searches for second homes in damn near half these places. Many of these places have incredible environments with okay access to services (many small cities have almost no access to high quality government, healthcare and educational services). These places largely have those services as well as a level of economic opportunity that may be less than bigger cities but is still quite good for the relative size. NH and VT being tied for 20th was not on purpose.