Movoto, one of the web’s most-read real estate blogs, today released a list of what they consider to be “the 10 smartest cities in Alabama.”
“We started with a list of places to look at,” Movoto’s Randy Nelson explained. “In this case, they were all the places in Alabama with a population over 10,000. That left us with 61 places to study.”
Nelson said they then used the following criteria to rank the 61 cities against each other:
- Colleges and universities per capita
- Libraries per capita
- Museums per capita
- Percentage of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher
- High school graduation rate
- Average K-12 class size
“For colleges, libraries, and museums, we only considered those physically located within each place’s borders and used resources including publiclibraries.com and collegestats.org for our totals,” Nelson said. “The rest of our data came from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey.”
“Each place was scored from 1 to 61 based on these criteria, lower being better, and those individual scores were ultimately averaged into one overall Big Deal Score,” he continued. “The lower this score the better, as well, and Fairhope beat out its closest rival by half a point.”
Here are the rankings that Movoto ultimately came up with:
1. Fairhope
2. Chelsea
3. Helena
4. Homewood
5. Calera
6. Vestavia Hills
7 (tie). Huntsville
7 (tie). Irondale
9 (tie). Muscle Shoals
9 (tie). Montgomery
For more details on each city, visit Movoto’s complete list HERE. The full rankings for all 61 Alabama cities with over 10,000 residents can be found below.
What do you think? Is this list accurate? How did your city score? Let us know in the comments below, or by tweeting @YHPolitics.
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