NOV 2013 – City News by Council Member Jon Harrison

We’ve always known it, but it seems now the rest of the country is in on the secret. Redlands is one of the best places there is to live.

This month, the City of Redlands was named one of the Top 100 Best Places to Live by Livability.com, a national website that ranks quality of life amenities of America’s small and mid-sized cities.

Livability.com produces monthly lists of the top college towns, foodie towns, spring break destinations and others. But this is the first year that the website has produced a list of the Best Places to Live and Redlands made the list right out of the gate.

To produce its inaugural list of Top 100 Best Places to Live, Livability.com partnered with Richard Florida’s Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank specializing on the role of location, place, and city-regions in global economic prosperity, to conduct a months-long study of more than 1,700 U.S. cities and the factors that make them the best places to live, work and play.

The data collected for the ranking were weighted based on an exclusive survey conducted for Livability by Ipsos Public Affairs, a leading global market research firm. Respondents were asked about factors that make their communities better places to live, as well as the factors they would consider in selecting another city. Those factors were narrowed down to eight categories – economics, housing, amenities, infrastructure, demographics, social and civic capital, education and healthcare – that were used to determine each city’s LivScore.

Livability also used data from Esri to measure things like crime, voter participation, the amount of time people spend partaking in community activities and church membership. Cities with low crime and high involvement scored best. The average score across all the cities measured was 49.

Redlands ranked high for education and demographics.

See the entire list at Livability.com/top-100-best-places-to-live.