The Best Place To Live in RI: Money Magazine's Pick

You can start a pretty lively discussion just by asking, "Where's the best place to live?" One person's ideal of a quiet, leafy neighborhood might be another person's idea of unbearable dullness. Luckily, there's always the listmakers at Money magazine to figure it out, um, objectively.

Each year the magazine ranks the Best Places to Live in the U.S., which often omits entire states. So now the editors have taken another look at the numbers to find the best place to live in every state, judged by a range of criteria from the cost of buying a home to median household income. (In most states, the places under consideration all have 50,000 people or more. See the rest of the methodology below.)

The best place to live in Rhode Island? According to Money magazine, it's Cranston. Here's what Money had to say:

Population: 81,817
Median Household Income: $66,177
Median Home Listing Price: $229,900

As the state’s second most-populous city after Providence, some of Cranston’s recent growth may be attributed to its impressive 6.3% increase in jobs since 2010. But there’s plenty to do once you arrive. Head over to the Pawtuxet Village, named after the town’s former moniker, to shop in Colonial-era buildings and enjoy seasonal events like holiday carriage rides, or visit the Cranston Historical Society. The area also has 143 nearby golf courses, including a public course at Cranston Country Club used in numerous state golf tournaments. (Fun fact: Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane—who attended college in Rhode Island—said he modeled the animated series’ town after Cranston.)

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Methodology

To create MONEY’s Best Places to Live in Every State ranking, we looked only at places with populations of 50,000 or greater. We eliminated any place that had more than double the national crime risk, less than 85% of its state’s median household income, or a lack of ethnic diversity. This gave us 583 places.
We then collected more than 135,000 different data points to narrow the list. We considered data on each place’s economic health, cost of living, diversity, public education, income, crime, ease of living, and amenities, all provided by research partner Witlytic. MONEY teamed up with realtor.com to leverage its knowledge of housing markets throughout the country. We put the greatest weight on economic health, public school performance, and local amenities; housing, cost of living, and diversity were also critical components.

Reporters then researched each spot, checking out neighborhoods and searching for the kinds of intangible factors that aren’t revealed by statistics.
Using the process above, we discovered the best-performing city in 45 states. For Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont and West Virginia—the five states that had no eligible cities on the list due to our initial screening factors—we considered the broader set of data that informed our 2017 Best Places to Live list. In these cases, figures in the article represent 2017 numbers. The 2,400-place data set included locations with populations between 10,000 and 100,000 and similarly excluded any place that had more than double the national crime risk, less than 85% of its state’s median household income, or a lack of ethnic diversity.
Rankings derived from more than 70 separate types of data, in the following categories:

• Economy — based on local unemployment rate, historical job growth, projected job growth and the level of employment opportunities available, among other factors.
• Cost of living — based on tax burden, insurance costs, commuting costs, medical spending, utility, and home expenses.
• Diversity — based on racial makeup, racial integration, and economic diversity within a place’s population.
• Education — based on math and reading test scores and local and county level high school graduation rates.
• Income — based on historical median household income, projected household income, a comparison between local and state median household income and change between current and historical household income.
• Housing — based on realtor.com Housing Affordability Index and Housing Growth Index at city level, plus other realtor.com housing statistics available at realtor.com/research.
• Crime — based on property and violent crime risk as well as homicide and drug overdose rates.
• Amenities — based on number of doctors and hospitals in the area as well as number of leisure activities in the town and surrounding area, including bars, restaurants, museums, sports complexes, and green spaces.
• Ease of living — based on commute times, weather, and other factors.

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