I am making a document/spreadsheet where I rank cities on different categories. I need a few more (rent)

[KettleMoraine]

I am making a spreadsheet where I score US cities off of 20 (perhaps more) categories. I need a few more

I am looking for some categories that are easy and quick to research (ideally less than 5 minutes to research per city). I also prefer to have a category that would be useful to know when visiting a city, as I only have general statistics and statistics that are useful for someone who wants to move to a city, although it doesn't really matter.

My current categories are:

Crime Rate
Population Growth Rate
Job Growth Rate
Unemployment Rate
Live-Work Rate
High School Graduation Rate
College Graduation Rate
Average Household Income
Poverty Rate
Average Home Cost
Average Rent Cost
Cost Of Living
Air Quality
Water Quality
Average Commute Time
General Health Rate
Distance To Nearest Hospital
School Effectiveness

Just a note that I am not just looking at big cities, but smaller cities as well, meaning that I would like to get recommended a source that would give me data for as many cities as possible

[Crazybreakfast]

This seems like a really good list. I think one thing to just consider is the percentages assigned to each of your categories. For example, Crime Rate and Poverty Rate might be very important, but household income less so (as it might vary by region etc).

Just things to consider! Excited to see the list and hope NOLA and Memphis make it (or one of the surrounding towns, hah).

[TheTimidBlueBars]

Originally Posted by KettleMoraine

I am looking for some categories that are easy and quick to research (ideally less than 5 minutes to research per city). I also prefer to have a category that would be useful to know when visiting a city, as I only have general statistics and statistics that are useful for someone who wants to move to a city, although it doesn't really matter.

Relevant for tourists: concentration of museums. For a quick data point: # of results on WhichMuseum.com (e.g. 14 for Sacramento)

Maybe # of national parks within (say) 3 hours as well. You can ignore national forests, state parks, etc.; those will be highly correlated with the # of national parks anyway. You could just check drive time via Google Maps.

[Matt Marcinkiewicz]

Yeah, definitely include something climate-related. Fair too assume that most people are willing to pay some level of sunshine tax (I type this from one of the cloudiest cities in the country)

[AnythingOutdoors]

I would include some criteria around quality of governance. For example, level of unfunded liabilities, size of budget, tax burden, and so on. You need to normalize this per capita to make a meaningful comparison across cities of differing sizes. For example, unfunded pension liability per resident.

Would also add a category around homelessness. Things like rate of homelessness, percentage of homeless unsheltered (higher rates indicate difficulty dealing with the situation). And so on.

As for your Poverty Rate criteria, I would instead use (or maybe add) the Supplemental Poverty Rate, which is a more meaningful measure since it takes cost of living into account.

[kyle19125]

Mass Transit would be worthy of a space determined by overall accessibility and utilization percentage.

[bus man]

Population
Population Density
Average High and Low Temperature (January and July) *
Annual Rainfall
Annual Snowfall
Distance to Nearest Major Airport **

I would suggest modifying "Distance to Nearest Hospital" because most cities have at least one hospital, so the distance won't really be meaningful. Perhaps it would be better to list "Number of Hospitals" or "Number of Level One Hospitals" or something like that. If you want to include distance, you could make it more specialized, such as "Distance to Nearest Trauma Care Hospital" or something like that.


* I would break out Average High and Average Low instead of just "Average" because it's more helpful to know just how hot and cold it gets, and the "average" tends to obscure that information.

** Define "major" however you like, but you should specify whatever metric you use.

[citylove101]

You can include a metric for ethnic diversity, something many people would want to know. Lots of these already exist. I have also seen metrics that rate a city's segregation. These also exist, but I haven't seen one for a while.
But anything that gives some measure of what groups live in a city would be helpful.

[ckhthankgod]

College student population, as that can have an impact on multiple metrics.