Dallas, Fort Worth Don’t Always Get Love in Livability Rankings

Once again, Dallas-Fort Worth’s suburbs earned high rankings in a liveability list. In Niche’s recent rankings of its 2021 Best Cities to Live in America, Dallas and Fort Worth didn’t exactly dominate.

Dallas ranked 84th out of 228 cities. Fort Worth ranked 115th.

Conversely, Plano ranked seventh and Richardson 12th. Irving is 41st, Denton 54th, and Arlington 80th. Nationally, the top city is The Woodlands, a 28,000-acre master-planned community north of Houston.

Niche, which helps people choose schools and places to live, generates its rankings by poring through data from the U.S. Census Bureau, FBI, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And if that isn’t enough, they sift through millions of reviews from residents.

Niche considers factors such as affordability, the housing market, neighborhood diversity, public schools, and walkability.

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Niche 2021 Dallas-Fort Worth Area Rankings

• Best Cities to Live | Best Places to Live
• Best Places to Raise a Family | Best Places to Buy a House
• Best Public Schools | Best for Young Professionals
• Best for Retirees | Lowest Cost of Living
• Healthiest Places | Best Cities for Outdoor Activities
• Most Diverse Places to Live

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In a 2019 Bloomberg CityLab report, Feargus O’Sullivan writes that rankings have a curious anti-urban slant in assessments of urban qualities.

“The result is still that rankings often end up assessing cities in terms of a small band of citizens for whom almost all of such metrics are relevant. They assess, broadly, how much potential a city possesses when seen from a privileged point of view: that of a straight, affluent, mobile, and probably white couple who works in something akin to upper management and has children.,” O’Sullivan wrote.

“City rankings are thus a window onto the projected tastes of a highly specific elite — even if the cities that suit this elite would also suit other people well enough, should they manage to get there.”

Metro areas the size of Dallas and Fort Worth are fractured into multiple neighborhoods with varying demographics and cultures. In most cases, the suburbs have unique identities but aren’t as diverse.

Dallas graded low but passing in housing (C+). Fort Worth graded low in public schools (C+). Both cities graded a C in crime and safety. On the upside, both cities ranked A+ in diversity with Dallas ranking 20th and Fort Worth 23rd in Niche’s most diverse cities list.

Interestingly, in other Niche rankings, Dallas and Fort Worth missed the top 6,000 list in places with the lowest cost of living (Dallas was 8,600th, Fort Worth 6,566th), best places to retire (Dallas 6,411st, Fort Worth 7,187th), and best places to raise a family (Dallas 7,043rd, Fort Worth 8,212nd).