The 9 Best Small Cities in America

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New doctors face a wide range of choices when they leave medical school. As they sift through potential job prospects, they have the pleasure â€“ and perhaps burden â€“ of imagining themselves in a variety of locales, from big cities to small towns.

New doctors face a wide range of choices when they leave medical school. As they sift through potential job prospects, they have the pleasure — and perhaps burden – of imagining themselves in a variety of locales, from big cities to small towns.

The consumer finance website WalletHub recently endeavored to create an exhaustive — and I do mean exhaustive — ranking of America’s small cities. For their purposes, “small” cities are those with populations of between 25,000 and 100,000. After compiling a list of 1,268 such cities, the site used a total of 22 metrics, ranging from housing costs, to school quality, to coffee shops per capita, in order to rank the cities.

Coming in the very last place was Bell, CA, a city known to many for the corruption scandal that shocked many in California and beyond. In fact, California in general didn’t fare so well. The bottom 23 cities on the list were in California, although that may have a lot to do with the facts that a) California has many small cities; and b) It’s an expensive place to live.

Aside from that, it’s difficult to draw too many trends. If you’re interested in your own city, you can use the chart below to find it. In the meantime, we’ve pulled out the nine “best” cities, according to the list. They’re presented along with the city’s population, median household income, affordability rank, and quality of life rank (the latter two metrics are out of 1,268).

Source: WalletHub