Arlington Named One of the Best Places in the Country to Live

ARLINGTON, VA — Arlington is one of the best places to live in the United States, according to a new set of national rankings that examines crime, schools, jobs and other criteria.

Niche -- a website that helps people looking for good neighborhoods and schools -- released its 2017 Best Cities to Live in America rankings recently, and Arlington came in at No. 3.

Arlington came in just behind No. 1 Ann Arbor, Mich. and No. 2 Naperville, Ill. In fourth was nearby Columbia, Md.

"The goal of our Best Places to Live Rankings is to provide accurate, comparable, and thorough evaluations of places," Niche states in its Methodology section. "To do so, we’ve collected and analyzed dozens of rankings factors from federal and local government datasets. We’ve combined those with proprietary Niche data and community reviews from each area. Read more about where our data comes from.

"All Niche reviews and data are scored and standardized so that each place is comparable. We then assign each place to a cohort based on population and urban clustering."

Niche ranked cities on six criteria: public schools, housing, good for families, crime and safety, nightlife, and diversity.

Arlington scored at least an A in all categories except for crime and safety, which was not graded, and housing, which scored a B-. Overall, Arlington earned an A+ grade.

"After assigning weights, an overall score was calculated for each place by applying the assigned weights to each place’s individual factor scores," Niche states on its website. "This overall score was then assigned a new standardized score. ... This was the final score for each ranking. With finalized scores, we then evaluated the completeness of the data for each individual place. Depending on how much data the place had, we might have disqualified it from the numerical ranking or from the grading process."

Image via Arlington County