Utah dominates our 2016 ranking of the best cities for raising a family, claiming three of the top 15 spots. Low crime, quality schools and a youthful population earned the Provo-Orem metro area the top spot. Provo not a fit for your brood? House hunters need only drive 80 miles north to visit Ogden, which came in a close second. Along the way they can stop in Salt Lake City, which tied for 15th.
To compile our list we evaluated America’s 100 largest metro areas on:
- median household income (data from the Census Bureau)
- the percentage of owner-occupied households (also Census)
- percent of population under 18 (Census again)
- average commuting delays (Texas Transportation Institute)
- violent crime rates per 100,000 inhabitants (FBI)
- local school quality (greatschools.org)
- cost of childcare by state (the percentage of income an average two parent family spends on child care for two school age kids-Childcare Aware)
We also considered cost of living (as indexed by the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness) and housing affordability (the percentage of homes in the area affordable to those making the local median income from the National Association of Home Builders), but could not officially factor these into our ranking because of missing data for some metro areas. We avoided subjective items you might find on other lists of this sort, in favor of a logical, objective set of criteria to measure family friendliness... Read More
