A new report assessing U.S. metro areas for livability includes several Texas cities.
Apartment search website RentCafe.com looked at 139 metropolitan areas nationwide to determine livability. The authors assessed 17 unique metrics that fell into one of three main buckets:
- Socioeconomics: cost of living, income growth rate, poverty rate, unemployment rate, and income inequality ratio.
- Location & Community: share of higher educated residents, share of long commutes, social association rate, share of severe housing problems, and arts, entertainment, and recreation venues ratio.
- Quality of Life: average number of physically unhealthy days, average number of mentally unhealthy days, food index, share of residents with access to exercise opportunities, share of physically inactive, share of uninsured, and health care providers ratio.
“But, what exactly is livability? Think of it as the combination of all of the reasons that make you happy to call a place home. Whether it’s the cost of living that you’re concerned about or income growth, access to gym facilities or the number of entertainment venues nearby, livability manages to cover just about anything that a potential resident is bound to worry about,” reads a description on the RentCafe website.
Dallas ranked highest of all Texas cities, landing at No. 72. The City gained points for a reasonable cost of living, access to healthy food, and relatively low instances of severe housing problems.
Five other Texas cities also made the list, including three of which took the lowest rankings in the country:
- Killeen (#106)
- Austin (#109)
- Brownsville (#137)
- El Paso (#138)
- McAllen (#139)
Earlier this year, The Dallas Express reported that Dallas suburb Flower Mound took spot No. 29 in a report looking at the most livable small cities in the United States.
The report conducted by SmartAsset ranked locations based on annual housing costs as a percent of income, the percent of the population living below the poverty line, arts, entertainment, and recreation businesses as a percent of all companies, and finally, average commute times.
Portland, Maine, topped RentCafe’s ranking, followed by Lincoln, Nebraska, and Des Moines, Iowa, in third place.