North Texas Suburbs Fare Better Than the Rest of Texas in Top 100 Livable Cities

Another livability study is out and it bodes well for North Texas.

McKinney ranked 18th, Plano 29th, and Denton 83rd in Livability.com’s Top 100 Best Places to Live in the U.S. in 2022.

That’s it.

As vast as Texas is, only three cities made the website’s top-100 list — and they’re clustered. McKinney is 44 miles from Denton, Denton is 37.5 miles from Plano, and McKinney and Plano are 16 miles apart.

No mention of Austin, Houston, or San Antonio suburbs or small cities. No Waco. No Abilene. No Sherman. No Amarillo.

These kinds of studies are fodder for real estate agents brokering for people looking to relocate. Or they can be used to make residents feel a sense of pride in their city. This year’s list is sponsored by eXp, a virtual real estate brokerage.

To come up with its list, Livability.com considered more than 2,300 mid-sized cities (defined as a city with a population of 500,000 or fewer people based on more than 50 data points grouped into eight categories, measuring a city’s economic stability, housing, amenities, infrastructure, demographics, social and civic capital, and health care.

Also, more weight was given to “measures of diversity and inclusion to reflect what millennials are looking for in the cities they choose to call home,” Liviability.com editor Amanda Ellis said.

By partnering with a brokerage that has been fully remote since its founding in 2009, the study also leaned into the idea of people choosing a lifestyle over a work location.

“Gone are the days of having to live in the same city where you work, and that’s really changing the dynamics of how people decide where to buy a home,” said Dawn Conciatori, eXp Realty’s vice president of Referral Generation.

What is Livability.com: Franklin, Tenn.-based Livability.com is a resource for users looking for the best places to live, work and visit — especially small to mid-size cities.

Report review: The report doesn’t have dynamic data tables or anything like that. It’s just a list of 100 cities with links to deeper dives into each city’s qualities. Data was taken from public and private data available from the U.S. Census Bureau, Lightcast, and Esri. Here’s the methodology. Unless you’re shopping for a new residence, it’s a three-bunny rabbit hole. 🐇 🐇 🐇.

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Correction: Mid-sized cities are considered cities with populations of 500,000 or fewer people. A previous version of this post incorrectly stated populations were 500,000 or more.