Rancho Santa Margarita Among Best Cities For Young Families: List

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, CA — Good news, Rancho Santa Margarita families! You're living in a great place when it comes to raising your kiddos, according to a new study by NerdWallet. The personal-finance website examined a total of 334 locations across California to compile a list of the best places for young families in the Golden State. Rancho Santa Margarita came in at number 5 on the final ranking.

The organization looked for locales with more than 20,000 residents "that offer the best combination of affordability (based on local incomes, housing and other costs), quality schools, future growth and prosperity, and family-friendliness." In the end, the top locations were mostly clustered in five metro areas: San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. (Click here for more on the methodology and data.)

Small suburbs in California scored many of the top spots on the final list of the Best Places for Young Families in California. In fact, of the top 10 places, eight of them have fewer than 75,000 residents. However, just because these locations may be on the smaller side, don't let that fool you into thinking they are cheap.

"The top places tend to be on the pricier side," NerdWallet said of the results. "Eight of the top 10 places have median home values that are more than the median in the analysis. But the most expensive places don’t score well in the overall analysis: Of the cities with the highest home values, none ranks higher than 103rd out of 334 places."

According to NerdWallet, The top 10 California cities for young families are:

1. San Ramon
2. Cupertino
3. Folsom
4. Beaumont
5. Rancho Santa Margarita
6. El Dorado Hills
7. Fremont
8. Aliso Viejo
9. Dublin
10. Temecula

As for Rancho Santa Margarita in particular, the company says this of their no. 5 choice:

Incorporated on Jan. 1, 2000, Rancho Santa Margarita is one of the newer cities in California and one of two cities in the top 10 in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. The city of 49,000 scores well for family-friendliness, with 34% of households consisting of married-couple families with at least one child younger than 18 (tied for 15th in our analysis) and 3.6% of families with a child under age 5 living in poverty (tied for 283rd).

Click here for the full rankings of the best areas for young families in California.

— Reported By Patch Editor Renee Schiavone / Image via Pixabay