What makes one city more livable than another?

That is the question that keeps researchers and writers at Livability up at night!

Livability is an online lifestyle company, that bonded and partnered with scientists 9 years ago over a mutual love of small and medium cities. They longed to find the best of the best, but do it in a scientific way. Thankfully they're both crazy for data too!

The goal every year is to find the 100 most livable small and medium cities in the U.S.

Every year, the list changes: we conduct exclusive studies and surveys, adjust our algorithm and add new variables and data points. But one thing remains constant — we always start with the data. We compared more than 2,300 cities and examined 50 data points, grouped into eight categories, to calculate each city’s LivScore. - Livability

Once they do that, they start ranking them by asking questions about what makes each place so livable.

We started with the age-old question: Why should someone want to actually live here? What are the ways in which each of these cities is creating an environment that is accommodating for remote workers? Where can you spend a Saturday afternoon or meet your friends for happy hour after a long day? How is this city different from other places?- Livability

 

So who's on this list?

This year they focused on medium-sized cities with populations of 500,000 or less. After the number-crunching was done and questions were all answered, two Minnesota cities Rochester and Minneapolis ended up very high on the list.

Agree to disagree, but here is the top 10 list of best places to live in the country.

1. Madison, Wisconsin
2. Ann Arbor, Michigan
3. Rochester, Minnesota
4. Naperville, Ilinois
5. Overland Park, Kansas
6. Minneapolis, Minnesota
7. Fishers, Indiana
8. Salt Lake City, Utah
9. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
10. Carmel, Indiana

Is Sioux Falls still on this list?

Of course! While in the past, Sioux Falls has been at the very top of this list, this year it landed in 38th place. Still respectable out of 100, if you ask me!

You can see the Best Places to Live in 2022 by checking out Livability

Sources: Livability