Here's How Missouri's Big Cities Rank For Raising A Family

ST. LOUIS, MO — A new study on the best places to raise a family has ranked two Missouri cities — and apparently Nebraska has better cities than any of ours. The apartment-finding service Zumper ranked America’s largest cities earlier this month based on 10 key factors, including price per additional room, median household income, commute and even dropout rate.

Two Missouri cities made the list, with Kansas City coming in at number 67 and St. Louis a little farther down the list at 83. Kansas City ranked fairly well for monthly housing costs, though its scores were middling in other categories. St. Louis did poorly across the board, with particularly low scores in crime and household income stats.

Here’s the complete breakdown:

St. Louis

• Overall rank: 83
• Price per additional room: 3.2
• Percent of income spent on rent: 6.1
• Monthly housing costs: 5.5
• Median household income: 1.7
• Current unemployment: 6.3
• Child care costs: 6.6
• Percent of population under 45: 3.9
• High school dropout rate: 2.7
• Average commute time: 4.8
• Violent crime rate: 0.6
• Score: 50.4

Kansas City

• Price per additional room: 7.6
• Percent of income spent on rent: 2
• Monthly housing costs: 8.2
• Median household income: 4.8
• Current unemployment: 4.2
• Child care costs: 6.6
• Percent of population under 45: 3.3
• High school dropout rate: 3.7
• Average commute time: 7.1
• Violent crime rate: 1.2
• Score: 59.2

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The best place to raise a family is apparently Madison, Wisconsin, the state’s capital and home of the University of Wisconsin. The city has a lot to offer families, the study found, including the lowest dropout rate of any city in the rankings. Residents often have low commute times, about 19 minutes — take that, New Yorkers! — and about 69 percent of the population is under 45 years old. The unemployment rate currently sits at just over 2 percent.

“Thanks to a large population of younger adults, a strong local economy, and low crime high school dropout rates, Madison scored well above the other cities in our rankings,” the authors wrote.

Here are the top 10 cities for raising a family:

1. Madison, WI
2. Lincoln, NE
3. Lexington, KY
4. Boise, ID
5. Tallahassee, FL
6. Raleigh, NC
7. Omaha, NE
8. Des Moines, IA
9. Austin, TX
10. Lubbock, TX

Zumper, based in San Francisco, created the rankings by looking at the 100 cities in its monthly rent reports. That list was then narrowed down to 95 cities becasuse several either had incomplete data or overlapped with one another in the census data. The key factors in the rankings were each equally weighted and then normalized to determine a final score.

Click here to see the full rankings and methodology.

Patch national reporter Dan Hampton contributed to this article.

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