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If I were looking into moving the first thing I would look at is the Census information on the community. DEMOGRAPHICS is the key to any community. What is a bigger indicator of the quality of life of a community than the people who live there.
Here are the most important demographic characteristics of a City or town:
The race of the population (especially if you are from an ethnic minority yourself)
What country most of the residents came from (A German Town is completely different than an Italian town)
The amount of people who work in professional or technical jobs
The number of people who graduated from high school or college
The average income of the residents of the community
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Why would anyone move to a new town without looking at demographics?
Agreed. You'd really have to visit a city and/or talk to lots and lots of people who are from there and who visited there many times. This forum could be a good supplement to that.
I was shocked at how the demographics of the Portland, Oregon area had changed, from visit to visit, and how much that change had accelerated since I moved here. It is very difficult to determine demographics in some regions of the country more so than others I have found. Had I known just how fast the demographics especially where it appeared it might lead to more crime prone areas, I don't think I would of ever moved here. Live and learn I guess.
I think it is important to look at the demographics of a city or town but many thing can impacting it either way. For example, some cities have very high violent crime rate but have very low violent crime rates in the metropolitan area because they have not annexed in 100 years while other cities have been annexing and cherry-picking the best areas to annex for years so while their city has lower violent crime rate the metropolitan areas themselves have higher ones because of all the annexation.
I think it's better to look at the demographics for the entire metropolitan area as opposed to just cities proper when looking for new cities/states to live in.
I think the best way to narrow down the choices if someone wants to move to a city is to look at the numbers and if they are favorable then visit the city first. Many cities look very favorable such as Bismarck with high job growth rates, very low unemployment rates, very low violence rates etc. but many, many people would probubly be absolutely miserable in Bismarck, ND then again it might be other people's utopia. One usually has to visit a place first at the very least to see if they will like it.
I doubt there's a difference in these attitudes in every major city.
I've found a few but important differences.
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