it’s almost becoming ritual for Austinites to brag about how awesome our city is, but that’s just a natural side effect of Austin actually being that awesome. List after list and study after study confirms what pretty much everyone here already knows: This is the best place in the U.S. to live. And today, we got further confirmation.
This time it’s WalletHub.com, a personal finance website aimed at consumers and small business owners, that’s singing Austin’s praises by naming the Texas capital the best place to live in the U.S. They’re doing it nice and nerdy too, with stats and numbers and science. We’re all about that here.
They came up with this ranking by adding up the results of 31 different measurements, each angled at a few crucial factors for average folks, like the quality of each city’s education system, the health of the population, how the local economy is doing, what the tax situation is like, and how livable each place is. They also drew from previous WalletHub rankings — like this one, which found Austin is actually the 22nd best city for families — to determine the final scores.
Although Austin came out #1 overall, we didn’t top the charts in every category — but we came close, hitting #2 for quality of education, local economy, and taxes. Then there was that #7 ranking for livability (Colorado Springs somehow got #1 in that category). We also landed #16 ranking for population health… Turns out San Francisco is where most of the granola-eating health nuts are. Go figure.
Also, for the record, Dallas placed #50, right above #51, Los Angeles. In other words, living in Dallas is only a slight improvement over living in the most-polluted and second-most populous city in the country. Meanwhile, Corpus Christi at #26 somehow managed to beat Houston (a city also near Los Angeles’s level of pollution), which placed #29 overall. At least they’re not #62, Detroit, which came in last place.
Check out WalletHub’s whole chart below…
