We’re proud to announce that our beautiful coastal community, Virginia Beach, VA was recently named The Best Metro Area for Families for 2016 (on the East Coast)!
Apartment List, a company dedicated to helping people find the best apartments, receives over two and a half million monthly visits from apartment seekers nationally. They have recently been ranked the 3rd fastest growing company in the San Francisco area and have received venture capital funding from Matrix Funding. In their research effort to find the most family-friendly metropolitan area, they created a formula to rank 30 major cities by four family friendly criteria. VirginiaBeach.com took the national results and filtered them by geographic location (East Coast). The results are listed below.
To rate each metro area, the following characteristics were taken into consideration by Apartment List:
Public safety: Using FBI data, metro areas were rated by the number of violent and property crimes per 100,000 residents. This represented 35% of the total score.
Housing costs: Census data was used to determine median renter income necessary to rent a two-bedroom apartment. 30% of the total score was attributed to this factor.
School and education quality: Metro areas were ranked by the high school graduation rate for public schools as provided by the Department of Education. 25% of the overall scored was based on this metric.
Child Friendliness: Assuming metro areas with a larger percentage of children tend to be more child friendly, Apartment List used census data to score metropolitan areas based on the percentage of popular under 18. This represented 10% of the weighted score.
Here are the Top 10 East Coast family friendly metro areas considered/ranked:
1. Virginia Beach, VA.
2. Charlotte, NC.
3. Bridgeport, CT.
4. Charleston, SC.
5. New York, NY.
6. Providence, RI.
7. Boston, MA.
8. Atlanta, GA.
9. Tampa, FL.
10. Miami, FL.
