What makes one area more desirable as a place to live than others? We suspect that if we asked one hundred people that question, we would get at least a hundred different answers.
For decades, people headed west for the scenery, climate, leisure, and economic opportunity of southern California. But over time, those same attractors have led to ever higher crime rates, outrageously expensive housing costs, and ever lengthening commutes. In recent years, many have found the negatives outweigh the positives and have found their way to areas such as north Texas and northern Idaho, seeking a better quality of life – absent the climate.
Cliché as it is, quality of life is really about a complex set of compromises between the necessary and discretionary. For many years, we had a database called “Quality of Life”, which examined just that. After a short hiatus, we are soon rereleasing Quality of Life with our 2022B release next month. To create this database, we look at five major factors, each complex, that in combination determine the livability of any place:
- Employment, income, and cost of living
- Leisure and cultural attractors
- Community factors such as crime and school quality
- Health and happiness
- Physical environment
To build the AGS Quality of Life index, we created over forty individual indexes ranging from economic diversity to urban walkability, each scored individually at the block group level. Many are based on proximity-based models that consider overall accessibility to attractors – so Pasadena, California can be attractive because of the proximity of both ski resorts and beaches.
The map below shows the cost of living across the contiguous United States, with the lighter areas representing a lower cost of living, and the dark grey and black representing a higher cost of living.
The Quality of Life data series can be used in a broad range of applications, but is especially suitable for economic development, where local jurisdictions can highlight their areas of strength in order to attract new businesses and residents, and for residential real estate, allowing potential buyers to evaluate the characteristics of the areas they may be moving to.
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