If you’ve read this blog a time or two, you’re already well aware that we love the Heights (and Houston in general) and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. So it understandably makes us pretty excited when other people recognize how awesome our city is, too. The US Cities Scorecard for Millennials surveyed thousands of young adults on a variety of factors that makes a city a desirable place to live, and ranked the top twenty-two metropolitan areas, along with explanations of why they were great places to be. Guess what city took top honors? That’s right – Houston, baby!
Houston was the #1 city on the list because it was determined to be the best value, meaning the costs of living here (factoring in aspects like commute, every day expenses, housing prices, healthcare, and taxes) were far outweighed by the benefits, including good schools, family-friendliness, parks and green spaces, and a thriving job market.
Of the forty factors taken into account when ranking the best cities, Houston was high on the list for ease of meeting people, low every day expenses, fair income taxes, diversity, and amenities for children, and when all forty were combined into a value ranking, enough categories had high scores that Houston came out on top overall. The overall value score assigned for Houston was 117, with an average score of 100 across the cities surveyed.
There’s a cool interactive feature where you can choose a city and see a word cloud of the things people love most and the things they think is the biggest problem in their city. Not surprisingly, Houston got lots of love for the food, culture, diversity, and of course, the awesome people who live here. To read more about the ranking process and see what other cities made the list, check the scorecard out here.