PHOENIX β If youβre looking to live in one of the small cities in the Top 20 in the nation, youβre going to have to move.
In fact, the way the financial advance website WalletHub figures it, there arenβt even any Arizona communities in the top 20 percent of the 1,268 communities between 25,000 and 100,000 it studied. And only Oro Valley cracked the top 30 percent β barely β driven by things like its high percentage of residents with health insurance and low rate of violent crime.
But there are plenty in the middle β mostly below average. And Wallet Hub finds that, based on the factors it studied, only a handful of places in the country are less desirable than Sun City, at least by its measurements.
Itβs not just one thing that was gleaned from statistics from the Census Bureau, the FBI, Yelp, county health rankings and a site called Areavibes that rates βlivabilityβ of communities.
For example, WalletHub looked at median household income. Sun City, at $36,464, came in the lowest overall of any Arizona community.
The income figure was far lower for San Luis at $31,064. But that community on the Arizona-Sonora border scored better on items like housing affordability and faster population growth.
In some ways, the rankings are only as good as the metrics used to get there.
So someone whose prime concern is a low rate of violent crime would be drawn to Buckeye or Sahuarita, which were the lowest in the state and among the lowest nationwide.
If youβre looking for a prevalence of coffee shops, Flagstaff is where you want to be. And if you want a place that has a lot of bars and restaurants, at least on a per capita basis, youβd decide to move to Prescott β and not to Sahuarita, Sun City or El Mirage.
The top three highest scorers in the poll: Westfield, Indiana (north of Indianapolis); Princeton, New Jersey; and Leawood, Kansas (near Kansas City).
