Ouch – Report Ranks DC 454 out of 474 in their List of Best Cities for Young Families

Photo by PoPville flickr user Nathan Castellanos

Well we were on a roll… however since we are also one of the smartest cities in the USA – go destroy their methodology please!!

From an email:

“Apartment List recently conducted a study of the best US cities for young families, and we are releasing the results today. Here are some of the highlights:

• Washington ranked #454 out of 474 cities in our study
• It’s best category was housing cost, where it had a score of 41%
• In the child friendliness category, Washington received a score of 5%
• Nationwide, Allen, TX ranked #1 overall, with Indianapolis and Dallas suburbs performing exceptionally well

Our report contains data for Washington, DC and 473 other cities in the US (use the search box at the bottom of the article). See below for additional detail on our methodology.

Methodology

Our analysis centered around the 4 factors that we identified as being important to families:

• Safety (35%): We used FBI data to rank cities by the number of violent crimes and property crimes per 100,000 residents.

• Housing Cost (30%): We used census data to calculate the percentage of the median renter income required to rent a 2-bedroom apartment.

• School Quality (25%): Cities were ranked on high school graduation rate for public school districts based in that city. Comparing schools across different states can be challenging, but using high school graduation rate data from the Department of Education gives us a good estimate of overall school quality.

• Child Friendliness (10%): Communities with a greater percentage of children tend to be more child friendly, so we used census data to score cities based on the percentage of the population that’s under 18.”