San Ramon Is Best CA City For Young Families: Study

SAN RAMON, CA — Good news, San Ramon 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. San Ramon came in at number 1 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 San Ramon in particular, the company says this of their no. 1 choice:

Home to the headquarters of global energy giant Chevron, the city of San Ramon sits on the east side of the San Francisco Bay in the region known, appropriately, as the East Bay. The city of 75,000 scores well for family-friendliness, with 44.% of households consisting of married-couple families with at least one child younger than 18 (second-highest in the analysis) and just 2.4% of families with a child under age 5 living in poverty (tied for 300th out of 334). Schools are also strong, with a score of 93.41 out of 100, good for 14th-highest in our analysis. On the other hand, San Ramon was one of the least affordable of all of the places analyzed, with a median home value that ranks as the 34th highest and median selected monthly owner costs that are the 18th highest on the list.

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

— Reported By Patch Editor Renee Schiavone / Image via Pixabay