The quality of our local governments matters a great deal. You can live in the most beautiful place in the world, but if it’s riddled with crime, unemployment and financial instability, you won’t get much out of your time there.
With that in mind, WalletHub has taken a look at a number of key metrics of well-run cities and ranked their performance. The credit website’s latest list of America’s best and worst run cities contains some predictable outcomes and a few surprises as well.
Huntington Beach, California hit it out of the park for city services even though it didn’t actually top the list of best run cities. Fremont and San Jose also ranked high for services and Fremont performed well on crime, poverty and income.
On other metrics, though, California’s performance was underwhelming. All cities with the most air pollution were in the Golden State. The same was true of cities with the lowest quality of roads.
No California cities made the top 10 best run cities but San Francisco and Oakland did make it into the bottom ten.
WalltHub only looked at the 150 most populated cities as part of its research. We're confident some of California's smaller locales would have ranked high on the list. You can learn more about the methodology and see the full rankings here.
According to WalletHub, the 5 best run cities in America are:
1. Nampa, ID
2. Provo, UT
3. Boise, ID
4. Missoula, MT
5. Lexington-Fayette, KY
The bottom 5 were:
146. Cleveland, OH
147. San Francisco, CA
148. New York, NY
149. Detroit, MI
150. Washington, DC
Cities were ranked by WalletHub.com. Rankings do not reflect data on all cities.