Atlanta residents already know this is the place to be.
From walks along the Beltline to splashing in the pool at Piedmont Park, there’s a lot to do when you live in the city.
Recently, U.S. News unveiled a list of the best places to live through 2022. It analyzed the 150 most populated metro areas to do so.
“To make the top of the list, a place had to have good value, be a desirable place to live, have a strong job market and a high quality of life,” it said.
Sources included the site’s internal resources, data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Labor. The data was categorized into five indexes: job market, value, quality of life, desirability and net migration. They were evaluated using a methodology determined by Americans’ preferences.
“The percent weighting for each index follows the answers from a May 2021 public survey in which people from across the country voted for what they believed was the most important factor to consider when choosing where to live,” the methodology said.
With an overall score of 6.7, the Big Peach scored the highest in job market and net migration.
Although home prices have increased – in 2020, the median home price was $335,080 locally compared to $315,743 across the nation, the average cost of living is still below the national average. And the city has a better value than similarly sized metro areas when comparing housing costs to median household income.
“Atlanta has revitalized some previously declining neighborhoods across the area. This has resulted in the good, like the Ponce City Market, an old warehouse-turned-mixed-use development in the Old Fourth Ward, and the bad – an increased cost of living,” U.S. News wrote.
