CA Cities With Best, Worst Quality Of Life

Everyone can agree that having a high quality of life is a good thing. That’s easy. Pegging what exactly goes into it is a bit trickier. Fortunately the folks at Numbeo did it using data and put together a list of cities in North America that have the highest quality of life.

Raleigh has the highest quality of life in North America, according to the index. The North Carolina city scored 215.24 overall and ranked 2nd in buying power, 5th in safety, 6th in pollution and 14th in property price to income ratio out of 59 cities. Raleigh also ranked 15th for health care, 19th in climate, 29th in traffic commute time and 34th in cost of living.

Here in California, six cities made the list. San Diego topped the Golden State cities that made the cut, with an overall 'quality of life' score of 191.87. Los Angeles, which was the sixth-ranked and last California city on the list, scored 113.30.

The California cities on the Numbeo chart were ranked as follows (click on city name for more about each):

• San Diego
• San Jose
• Sacramento
• Oakland
• San Francisco
• Los Angeles

And here are the top 10 cities nationwide on the index:

1. Raleigh, NC
2. Madison, WI
3. Charlotte, NC
4. Ottawa, Canada
5. Columbus, OH
6. Victoria, Canada
7. Austin, TX
8. San Diego, CA
9. San Jose, CA
10. Quebec City, Canada

Detroit ranked dead last on the index with a score of 132.83. Michigan’s largest city was the least safe of all cities and had the single worst commute time, even ahead of Los Angeles. Detroit was also among the worst in the nation for buying power, health care and pollution.

New York City had the second-lowest quality of life on the index, followed by Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto, all in Canada. Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Las Vegas were the next-lowest.

Click any of the following links to see how the metrics were calculated: purchasing power (including rent) index, pollution index, property price to income ratios, cost of living index, safety index, climate index, health index and traffic index.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

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