Balancing the demands of working or running a business, all whilst raising a family is no easy task. Choosing the right city can make all the difference for working parents. This is particular so in the U.S.
A recent CoworkingCafe study has ranked the top 20 U.S. cities that offer the best combination of career prospects, childcare availability, and quality of life.
What an individual’s daily life looks like depends in large part on where they live. How far do we have to travel to get to work and to school? How close are the nearest parks and paediatricians? These are essential questions for many families.
To gather the necessary data, the company focused on U.S. cities with at least 200,000 residents that had data for all metrics analysed. Data points were analysed comparatively with the extreme values within the data pool determining the highest and lowest possible scores for each metric.
Taking these data sets, Coworking Cafe proceeded to examine and then to rank cities on the basis of 10 metrics that were divided into three categories: education, work and health, and environment.
The top ten cities were:
- Washington
- Arlington, Virginia
- Seattle
- San Francisco
- Boston
- Fremont, California
- Jersey City, New Jersey
- Scottsdale, Arizona
- Pittsburgh
- Atlanta
The data reveals that Washington, D.C. topped the ranking with high scores in both the work and health categories, with 25 percent of its workforce being remote and registering 350 paediatricians per 100,000 children.
Seattle, WA, ranked second nationally due to its high share of remote workers at 27 percent of the total workforce, on top of 80 percent of the jobs here being office-related.
Coming third on the list, Arlington, VA, features relatively high due to a strong work environment, also recording a 27% share of remote workers out of the total workforce, as well as an 85 percent share of office jobs.
In terms of cities demonstrating key advantages in specific categories, the survey finds that Plano, TX, led in the affordable childcare category with only 10 percent of the median household income spent on childcare.
On a different measure, Miami, FL, ranked first in terms of accessible educational facilities, logging more than 400 public schools per 100,000 children. Overall, the West stood out with eight locations in the top 20, while the South closely followed with seven.
