This ranking suggests young families are better off in the suburbs
If you are a young family living in Boston, you might want to look toward the suburbs – at least according to a new ranking from Apartment List.
In the study, rental site Apartment List looked at four different metrics—safety, housing cost, school quality, and child friendliness (or the percentage of children in the area) – to determine the best cities for young families.
Researchers analyzed 474 cities across the country and Boston did not fare very well, ranking No. 434, and receiving a D grade. The only major U.S. to do worse was Washington D.C., which got an F.
In Boston’s defense, Apartment List noted that most large cities didn’t rank very highly.
“In general, the overall rankings lined up well with expectation in that large cities tend to do a little less well than the suburbs,” Andrew Woo, manager of growth strategy at Apartment List, told Boston.com. “That’s not unexpected—crime rates are higher, they are more expensive, the schools aren’t as good – in that sense Boston’s results aren’t unusual.”
Apartment List gave a score in each of the four categories based on how a given city compared to all of the other cities in the index.
Boston’s best score was in safety, where it received a 51.4, meaning 51.4 percent of the other cities ranked were worse than Boston.
“Looking at the individual stats, Boston’s crime score is actually on the better end of things compared to other large cities,” Woo said.
Other scores were not as high: Boston fell in the 4.2 percentile for child friendliness, 7.5 percentile for school quality, and 5.5 percentile for housing costs. Overall, the city got a 21.9 total score out of 100.
“The housing cost of living is sometimes better in large cities where rents are high but incomes are high,” Woo added. “But in Boston that wasn’t the case. Boston’s cost of living was one of the worse.”
Then, when calculating overall rankings, Apartment List weighted the four factors differently, giving safety a 35 percent share of the overall score, housing cost 30 percent, school quality 25 percent, and child friendliness 10 percent.
The highest score of all the Massachusetts cities Apartment List looked at was Newton, which received an A- rating with a score of 72.8. Its housing cost and child friendliness scores are what brought it lower.
Quincy and Somerville fell close behind, with A- and B+ rankings respectively.
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