Nassau County, NY — A new study from personal finance outlet WalletHub has ranked the top small cities in America to start a small business, pitting midsized municipalities against one another for the title of “business’s best friend.” For one Nassau County locale, the title of “king of the county” will have to suffice.
Uniondale, nestled in between Chicopee, MA and Garfield, NJ on the list, was the highest ranking place in Nassau County, receiving relatively high marks for the access to resources and the environment for doing business. Holding Uniondale — and other Long Island municipalities — back was the cost of doing business, a category where it ranked 1,225th out of 1,332 cities surveyed.
For New York on the whole, the picture isn’t too pretty: the highest ranked city in the Empire State in this study was Poughkeepsie, at number 304 out of over 1,300 cities ranked. The top 30 cities in the poll were spread across Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. On the whole, the poll was kind to lower cost-of-living states like the ones listed above, while much of the bottom-hundred rankings are filled by cities in New York and California.
Other Long Island cities featured in the ranking, albeit outside the top hundred cities to do business, were Central Islip, Shirley, Bay Shore, Elmont, Hempstead, Deer Park, Huntington Station, Valley Stream, Coram and Franklin Square. The highest ranking city in New York was Poughkeepsie, while the top city in the whole study was St. George, UT.
As for methodology, the study examined cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 people and evaluated them based on criteria across three categories: Business environment, access to resources and business costs.
The categories break down more specifically with “business environment” constituting things like average commute time, number of startups per capita, average growth in business revenues and the average length of work weeks; “access to resources” covered not only the amount of investors and small business loans in a city, but human resources as well, accounting for things like the number of working-age people in these cities and the percentage of them with at least a bachelor’s degree. Finally, “business costs” covers things like how expensive labor and cost of living is, coupled with other financial metrics like office rent and corporate tax rates.
The full WalletHub survey is available to view here.
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