America's Best Small Cities
Dentists have a wide range of geographic freedom. So where's the best place to live and work?
Being a dentist is one job you can do anywhere
— everyone needs a dentist, after all. For many, that wide-openness also brings a challenge: Where should I actually live?
The consumer finance website WalletHub recently endeavored to create an exhaustive — and I do mean exhaustive — ranking of America’s small cities. For their purposes, “small” cities are those with populations of between 25,000 and 100,000. After compiling a list of 1,268 such cities, the site used a total of 22 metrics, ranging from housing costs, to school quality, to coffee shops per capita, in order to rank the cities.
Coming in the very last place was Bell, CA, a city known to many for the corruption scandal that shocked many in California and beyond. In fact, California in general didn’t fare so well. The bottom 23 cities on the list were in California, although that may have a lot to do with the facts that a) California has many small cities; and b) It’s an expensive place to live.
Aside from that, it’s difficult to draw too many trends. If you’re interested in your own city, you can use the chart below to find it. In the meantime, we’ve pulled out the nine “best” cities, according to the list. They’re presented along with the city’s population, median household income, affordability rank, and quality of life rank (the latter two metrics are out of 1,268).
Source: WalletHub
Population: 51,567
Median Household Income: $74,077
Affordability Rank: 26
Quality of Life Rank: 436
Image: Carl Wycoff/Creative Commons
8. Northampton, MA
Population: 28,495
Median Household Income: $57,991
Affordability Rank: 865
Quality of Life Rank: 55
Image: Flickr User “6SN7”/Creative Commons
7. Westfield, IN
Population: 33,382
Median Household Income: $87,435
Affordability Rank: 24
Quality of Life Rank: 1,054
Image: Derek Jensen/Creative Commons
6. Southlake, TX
Population: 28,234
Median Household Income: $172,951
Affordability Rank: 3
Quality of Life Rank: 403
Image: Nicolas Henderson/Creative Commons
5. Leawood, KS
Population: 32,991
Median Household Income: $135,960
Affordability Rank: 77
Quality of Life Rank: 523
Image: Flickr User “Jeff”/Creative Commons
4. Brookfield, WI
Population: 37,999
Median Household Income: $87,708
Affordability Rank: 206
Quality of Life Rank: 248
Image: WisPolitics.com/Creative Commons
3. Dublin, OH
Population: 43,607
Median Household Income: $113,182
Affordability Rank: 171
Quality of Life Rank: 190
Image: Flickr User The Pug Father/Creative Commons
2. Littleton, CO
Population: 44,275
Median Household Income: $59,699
Affordability Rank: 742
Quality of Life Rank: 28
Image: Jeffrey Beall/Creative Commons
1. Princeton, NJ
Population: 29,008
Median Household Income: $109,865
Affordability Rank: 1,144
Quality of Life Rank: 41
Image: Doug Kerr/Creative Commons
To read WalletHub’s entire list, click here.
