At Apartment List, we know that people care about a lot of factors when they’re searching for a home. Everyone wants a great apartment at a great price, but families look for different things in a city than young singles.
Last year, we released our list of the best cities for young families; this year, we refreshed our analysis with the latest and greatest data to help you make the best decision for your homebuyers. This report is specifically tailored for Pearland.
The Apartment List methodology
Our analysis centered around the four factors that we identified as being important to families:
- Safety (35 percent): We used FBI data to rank cities by the number of violent crimes and property crimes per 100,000 residents.
- Housing cost (30 percent): We used census data to calculate the percentage of the median renter income required to rent a 2-bedroom apartment.
- School quality (25 percent): Cities were ranked on high school graduation rate for public school districts based in that city. Comparing schools across different states can be challenging, but using high school graduation rate data from the Department of Education gives us a good estimate of overall school quality.
- Child friendliness (10 percent): Communities with a greater percentage of children tend to be more child friendly, so we used census data to score cities based on the percentage of the population that’s under 18.
We weighted these factors using the percentages listed above, and used this index to assign grades and rankings to the nearly 500 cities in our study.
Pearland among top family-friendly cities
Pearland has made a huge jump from last year’s rank of 21st best city, to rank in 2016 as the no. 10 best city for families in the U.S. It got an overall score of 90.2, matching that of Naperville, Ill.
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Pearland’s strongest marks were in its education score, with a graduation rate of 96 percent. Its second highest score was in housing, where renting a two-bedroom apartment requires 24 percent of the median renter income.
This is a 7 percent difference from nearby Houston, where 31 percent of the median renter income is required for renting a two-bedroom.
Yuki Graviet Knapp is a Content Marketing Associate with the Growth Team at Apartment List and is a resident of the Bay Area.