A study of the best cities for families conducted by Apartment List has ranked Asheville number 441 out of 509 cities studied on measures like safety, housing affordability, education quality and child friendliness. The full report can be found here.
Report from Apartment List:
At Apartment List, we know that searching for a home is tough, and the decision can be even more complicated for families than it is for singles. Families look for different traits in the communities in which they choose to settle, and since they tend to have lower rates of mobility, the impact of their choices may be more enduring. For the past two years (2015 and 2016), we have dug into data on a number of pertinent factors to produce a family-friendliness index, and we’ve just updated the analysis with the most recent data. Read on to see the results!
Methodology
Our index is calculated based on a weighting of 4 factors that are of particular importance to families:
- Safety (35%): We used FBI data to rank cities by the total number of violent crimes and property crimes per 100,000 residents.[1]
- Housing Affordability (30%): We used Census data on median gross rent as a percentage of household income as an indicator of housing affordability in each city. This measure takes into account not only how expensive rents are, but how well they are balanced with earnings.[2]
- Education Quality (25%): Comparing schools across different states can be challenging due to differing education requirements. We have chosen to use data on high school graduation rates, collected by the Department of Education, as a proxy for overall school quality. Cities were ranked by the graduation rates of their respective public school districts.[3]
- Child Friendliness (10%): Communities with a greater percentage of children tend to be more family friendly, so we used Census data to score cities based on the percentage of the population under age 18.[4]
Our family-friendliness index is calculated using the factor weights listed above, and cities are ranked and graded based on that overall score.
- Asheville received an overall grade of D, ranking #441 out of the 509 cities that we analyzed
- Asheville received a grade of F for safety
- Asheville received a grade of D for affordability
- Asheville received a grade of B for education
- Asheville received a grade of F for child friendliness
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