Let’s take a walk old timers.
Evelo compiled a list of the nation’s 100 largest cities and ranked them based on six criteria.
The criteria include:
- A city’s walkability
- A city’s bikability
- Average temperatures (favoring mild climates over extreme highs and lows)
- Park acreage per capita
- Clean air and water (using data from AARP’s livability index)
- Healthcare (also using the AARP index)
This is an interesting list because it filters out the little retirement havens and accounts for retirees wanting to keep things urban. (Not that there is anything wrong with the small town retirement life)
For context, and coincidently, San Bernardino, CA was America’s 100th largest city as counted by the last Census, it had a population of 209,924 in 2010. Any smaller city was not considered by Evelo.
Ok, enough context, list time.
11 California cities made the top 50, with Los Angeles, Long Beach, Sacramento, Anaheim, San Diego, San Jose falling shy of the top 10.
The first California city in the top 10 is San Francisco at #7, which actually has the top overall healthcare ranking, and second overall for walkability and bikability (just avoid those hills). Parks was where SF suffered, but anyone with a brain knows Golden Gate Park is a treat and not difficult to get to.
Fremont sneaks in at #4 and with strong scores across the board, the list paints Fremont as a solidly above average city to retire to. A 4th overall parks and 8th healthcare scores also helped.
Oakland does the same at #3, skipping up the east bay, where Fremont excels in parks, Oakland makes up for with walkability, and while the list doesn’t have a criteria for “things to do,” Oakland definitely has a ton of unique scenes to sink your teeth into.
Number One also went to a California City. Irvine, California being the winner of this list. Not really a shocker, but Irvine was above average on every category and only lost to San Francisco for healthcare.
You can see the full list by Evelo here.