If you’re searching for the perfect place to start your family, these are the cities that should be the focal point of your house-hunt.
For many, starting a family is one of life’s most significant and exciting choices. Potential homebuyers at this life stage have much to consider when choosing a place for their family to live and grow. Settling on a house is a huge investment on its own, but factors such as nearby schools, opportunities for extracurricular activities and community involvement, and safety all play an undeniably important role in deciding where it’s best to start a family.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of communities across the country where young families and soon-to-be parents are thriving. Not only are these cities hot this year on the real estate market, but they are also safer than average and offer opportunities to foster children’s development in school and beyond. Insurify’s Best Cities for Young Families Award recognizes the communities that are the optimal place for potential homebuyers and new parents to find the perfect spot for their future home-sweet-home.
Selection Process for Insurify’s 2021 Best Cities for Young Families Awards
The data scientists at Insurify, a site to compare home insurance, referred to both proprietary and publicly available data to award the best city for young families in each state. They created a composite score to rank cities on real estate market hotness and inventory, diversity in local school districts, access to parks and outdoor recreational facilities, and residential and road safety.
Insurify’s research team referred to data from Realtor.com to evaluate cities’ real estate market viability. Cities were scored on Realtor.com’s Market Hotness rank, active listing count, and new listing count on a month over month basis. Realtor.com’s Market Hotness index scores and ranks cities based on days on market (supply) and online views per property (demand), so cities scored higher if their rank has trended hotter over time by month. Cities with higher levels of active and new listings month over month additionally received higher scores.
Access to outdoor facilities and recreational spaces was evaluated using Niche’s Outdoor Activities rankings, which rates each city on its quality and access to the outdoors using key indicators of a location’s environment, such as air quality, local weather, and access to natural amenities and outdoor recreation. Insurify’s data scientists also compiled Niche’s most recent Most Diverse School Districts ratings to award bonus points to cities with one or more school districts having an A+ diversity rating, based on diversity statistics and ratings from students and parents.
City safety data is from the FBI’s most recent Crime in the United States report. Cities with lower rates of violent and property crime scored higher. To evaluate driving safety, Insurify’s data scientists referred to their database of over 4 million car insurance applications to determine the overall moving violation rate for each city in the study — cities were awarded for having lower rates of drivers with at least one at-fault violation on record.
States with insufficient municipal data across the various measures were excluded from the study.
Winner’s of Insurify’s 2021 Best Cities for Young Families Awards
Alabama: Tuscaloosa
Arizona: Phoenix
Arkansas: North Little Rock
California: San Luis Obispo
Colorado: Boulder
Connecticut: Bridgeport
Florida: Gainesville
Georgia: Macon
Hawaii: Hilo
Idaho: Boise City
Illinois: Ottawa
Indiana: Terre Haute
Iowa: Cedar Rapids
Kansas: Wichita
Kentucky: Elizabethtown
Louisiana: Shreveport
Maine: Portland
Maryland: Baltimore
Massachusetts: Pittsfield
Michigan: Traverse City
Minnesota: Rochester
Mississippi: Gulfport
Missouri: Columbia
Nebraska: Lincoln
Nevada: Henderson
New Hampshire: Concord
New Jersey: Hammonton
New Mexico: Santa Fe
New York: Utica
North Carolina: Jacksonville
North Dakota: Bismarck
Ohio: Elyria
Oklahoma: Oklahoma City
Oregon: Bend
Pennsylvania: Lebanon
South Carolina: Florence
Tennessee: Johnson City
Texas: Round Rock
Utah: Provo
Vermont: Burlington
Virginia: Charlottesville
Washington: Olympia
Data Attribution
The information, statistics, and data visualizations on this page are free to use, we just ask that you attribute any full or partial use to Insurify with a link to this page. Thank you!
If you have any questions or comments about this article, please contact insights@insurify.com.
