It's interesting when you think about the criteria for where you want to live. I think it's fairly rare to have that choice when it's not influenced by a job, school, or family obligation. I don't know how many people have moved as rarely as I have. I started life on "The Ranch", where I lived for the first 18 years of my life. After high school I married and moved to San Luis Obispo where I attended college at Cal Poly SLO for 5 years. After obtaining a BS and MS in Mathematics I moved to Petaluma for my first job in San Rafael. After renting for a few years, we bought a house and moved, then when I divorced I moved again. Rick and I got married, a condo and a house later, and we moved to this one where we've been for over 27 years. Each of those city moves was fueled by a college, job or life change choice. Now that we're retired and considering down-sizing, Rick and I have the luxury of thinking about the criteria we place importance on for this next phase of our life.
So what do we do? Create a spreadsheet of course! We each entered our criteria, then discussed and prioritized it. Then we split up the criteria and set about filling in our spreadsheet. We started with towns in Northern Virginia, since that was the location of our first planned "city shopping" trip. We completed that trip last fall, and I've been meaning to write this blog ever since.
Back to those criteria, one of the first things I learned is that for some of them, it's hard to find a source of information. For instance, one of our top criteria was "good health care". I started by a brute force method of looking at the city on google maps, searching for hospitals in the area, and looking at the ratings for those hospitals. I then consolidated the ratings into a 1-5 "score". Since then, I've found what are likely to be more objective and reliable sources of information. This website covers all sorts of information about health outcomes, not just availability of medical care but categories such as clean air and water, safety, access to healthy food, etc.
As we started the exercise of "city shopping", I expanded our list of categories. For instance, my friend Sue moved to Connecticut after living in Marin County for years, and was disappointed to find that it is much harder to find good quality produce, especially organic produce. That was how I originally found the website above, searching for a quantitative way to evaluate the food quality. Under "diet and exercise" there is a category called "food environment index". According to the website above, this is measured by:
The County Health Rankings measure of the food environment accounts for both proximity to healthy foods and income. This measure includes access to healthy foods by considering the distance an individual lives from a grocery store or supermarket, locations for health food purchases in most communities, and the inability to access healthy food because of cost barriers.
There is strong evidence that food deserts are correlated with high prevalence of overweight, obesity, and premature death as supermarkets traditionally provide healthier options than convenience stores or smaller grocery stores.1-4 Additionally, those with low income may face barriers to accessing a consistent source of healthy food. Lacking consistent access to food is related to negative health outcomes such as weight gain, premature mortality, asthma, and activity limitations, as well as increased health care costs.
The use of this data led to two changes in our spreadsheet. First of all, you have to look up cities according to the county they are in, so I added that column. Second of all, it's hard to evaluate an index unless you have a baseline, so I added Sonoma County. As an example, the town of Leesburg Virginia, which we chose as our home base for our trip there, had a food index of 9.9, compared to Sonoma County, which has a food index of 8.7. Sure enough, when we were there we found a store called Wegman's, which is like a bigger, better Whole Foods. Check!
One of the obvious criteria we had on our list was weather. We're so spoiled in California, with our "dry heat" in the summer and mild winters. I've never lived in a place where it snowed regularly, and though I've experienced humidity on my business travels, I'm usually indoors on a business trip so I can't say I know what it's like to live in a place with humidity. Once again, my search led to the discovery of a cool website. Initially I planned to look up each city and note min and max temps as well as a measurement of humidity, but then I discovered this cool website! With my love of data analysis, I have to give this website high marks for good "infographics".
The example above shows average high temperature, but you can "play it forward" over time and see how that varies across the country. I had a lot of fun playing with this website, you can search on cities, zoom in to see more detail in a specific area, etc. This slideshow shows a few more graphics from Jan 1, including precipitation, snowfall, and number of "comfortable days".
That last one says it all - this is why people live in California, it has the most "comfortable days" of the year! Their definition of comfortable days uses Daily High Temperature between 65°F and 86°F, Daily Maximum Dewpoint Temperature <=65°F, but upon further exploration you can adjust those settings! Definitely will be helpful as we continue our city shopping!
Next up on our city search - crime! Again we are spoiled in this criteria, because while we have some crime in Petaluma it's nothing compared to some of the big cities. I have yet to find a good source of this information. I did find a website called niche.com, this seems to focus mainly on finding good schools but also has an area where you can search on good places to live. According to their website, you can explore the best places to live in the U.S. based on crime, public schools, cost of living, job opportunities, and local amenities. They rank cities and towns based on data from the U.S. Census, FBI, BLS, CDC, and other sources. So according to this, they've done a lot of work for you!
I haven't played around with this a bunch, but I do like the categories they let you filter on. It includes crime ratings, cost of living, who lives there (retirees vs families, etc.), politics, size of city (vs. town, suburbs, etc.), types of housing, etc. I have found that you can easily filter yourself down to nothing, for example if I filter on "town" and an "A" crime ranking, I often don't find anything, I think because they don't have enough data to measure crime ratings. I did find that they rank places to live so you can search on "best places to live" and "best places to retire". We are headed to Colorado next week, so searching on "best places to retire" in CO leads me to this map:
I still need to do some exploring here, but at least it gives me some data and some direction as it relates to a specific state. We have more work to do on filling out our spreadsheet, this city shopping thing is a lot of work!
Whatever you do, don't google "best places to retire". According to the niche.com website, it shows Florida as the best place according to their ranking.
On the other hand, another google link from cnbc claims to be based on health and wellness, safety, affordability and entertainment and shows these states as the top 10. Florida isn't even on the list!
I guess it just depends on what you consider to be important. So, back to the spreadsheet. And what's a retired data analyst to do to come up with a ranking that puts HER criteria in the proper order? Build a scorecard, of course! Katelyn and I did this during her college tours, as a way to judge colleges based on criteria SHE felt were important (food quality, presence of school spirit) compared to criteria I felt were important (co-op programs, safety). Interestingly when we did that, we arrived at the same conclusion for the Boston schools we toured that summer. I guess Rick and I will have to "score" each of these places we are considering and see where that leads us.
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