Get this! A recent study conducted by Estately, a national real estate company known for their gigantic online listings database, ranks Austin as the No. 2 best city for modern day hermits — which they define as people who often prefers to spend the majority of their time at home.
To get their results, Estately scored the 100 biggest U.S. cities from 1-100 based on a set of five factors:
- Housing affordability based on the price per square foot required to buy a home
- Internet speeds according to the Ookla Net Index
- Percentage of work-from-homers according to the U.S. Census Bureau
- Variety of local food delivery companies listed on GrubHub
- Accessibility of local alcohol delivery services (Drizly, Saucey, Minibar Delivery, Thirstie, and Klink)
Given these criteria, it’s not really surprising that some of the largest and most connected cities made it into the top 10. Chicago, IL actually scored highest, followed by Austin, TX, and Washington, DC, while Estately ranked Honolulu, HI as the worst place for an urban hermit to try to maintain a homebody lifestyle.
Dallas made the top 10 list too, but they came in 6th place. See the full list of rankings and scores here.
As far as specific results go, Austin scored an 83 out of 100 for having relatively low housing costs as compared to notoriously expensive cities like NYC, who literally scored a 0 there, and San Francisco, who scored a measly 16.
Apparently our internet speeds pretty much suck compared to other large cities, as we only scored a 37 in that category. We’re not too sure about that, especially with the dawning of Google Fiber, but Estately did assign ATX a perfect 100 for making things easy on freelancers and other types of professionals who prefer to work from home, which is totally consistent with other studies we’ve read.
And of course, we got a big laugh out of the fact that Austin scored way higher for accessibility of alcohol delivery services than food delivery services. Sounds about right.
So, thanks to Estately, we’ve established that Austin is a total utopia for modern day hermits. But as to exactly why so many of among us would choose to curl up indoors rather than explore our fair city and attend all of the various local events that go down every night, we’re honestly stumped…
It could be a money thing. Maybe, since our local housing market is currently kind of insane, Austinites just don’t have enough cash left over after paying rent to go out and do anything fun.
Or perhaps it’s because we spend all our money on epic local eats and drinks, adorable nonsense like toy dinosaur planters for our succulents and Willie Nelson costumes for our dogs, and tickets to see our favorite bands perform since there’s literally always someone good playing in town… uh yeah, that’s probably it.
