The best small city in the state of Florida is Boca Raton, according to a recent study by WalletHub, which looked at over 1,200 U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 and analyzed them based on 33 “key indicators of livability” within five general categories.
Due to the massive sample, they ranked the cities based on percentile. The five categories were Affordability, Economic Health, Education and Health, Quality of Life, and Safety.
Nineteen small cities ended up sharing a 99-percentile grade, with five of those cities hailing from Massachusetts. We mapped Florida’s eight highest ranking cities overall (with the percentile in parenthesis) and below are some additional highlights from the study:
- Sarasota topped the entire nation in the ‘Quality of Life’ category
- Florida’s lowest ranked cities were Deltona, Kendall, and Lauderdale Lakes.
- The ‘Highest Homeownership Rate’ is The Villages
- North Miami Beach, Lake Worth, and North Miami brought up the rear in ‘Lowest Percentage of Insured Population’
- ‘Most Restaurants Per Capita’ featured Miami Beach and Fort Myers among the six leaders
- The ‘Fewest Coffee Shops Per Capita’ medal was awarded to Kendall