The 10 Best Cities to Move to in 2014

If you aren’t planning to move to a new city, you’re going to want to after reading about these ten metropolises.
(Metropoli? Metropolisises? I don’t know.)

My troubling semantics and grammar belies the amount of analysis, research, and hard-boiled number crunching that went into developing this list.

We drew information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and facts from Forbes.com in order to come up with the our criteria for our best cities to move to in 2014.

If you want to be bored to death by a lot of dry jargon explaining how we came up with this list, including the criteria that we used, read on. If you’d like to just skip to the good part – the list itself – click here.

Criteria and Selection Process

We used the following four criteria to judge the largest 150 cities in the United States:

Unemployment

To be considered, a city must currently have an unemployment level less than the national average of 6.5%.

Best city for unemployment: Salt Lake City, Utah, at 3.4%.

“Worst of the top 10” for unemployment: Tampa, Florida at 6.4%.

Median Income

To be considered, a city must currently have a median income of at least the national average of approximatly $44,000 per year.

Best city for median income: Seattle, Washington at $61,000 per year.

“Worst of the top 10” for median income:
4-way tie – Tampa, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Houston, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah, all at approximately the national average of $44,000.

Projected Home Value Growth over 3 Years

To be considered, home values in a given city must be predicted to grow greater than 20% over the next three years, as judged by Forbes real estate analysts.

Best city for projected home value growth:
Phoenix, Arizona at a whopping 41%. This means that if you bought a home in Phoenix at the city average home price of $196,000, you should be able to sell it three years down the road for no less than $276,000 – an increase of nearly $80,000!

“Worst” of the Top 10 for projected home value growth:
Houston, Texas at a still-impressive 24%. This means that if you bought a home in Houston at the city average home price of $191,000, you should be able to sell it three years down the road for no less than $236,840.

Home Affordability

For this criteria, we compared each city’s median income to that city’s average home price. The math is simple: higher incomes and lower home prices make buying a home more affordable!

Best city for home affordability: Tie – Fort Worth, Texas and Boise, Idaho, both with an “affordability index” of approximately 0.303 ($51,000 median income divided by $168,000 average home price).

“Worst” of the Top 10 for home affordability:
Salt Lake City, Utah, with an “affordability index” of approximately 0.186 ($44,000 median income divided by $236,000 average home price).

Did our rankings get your mouth watering for a move? If so , have you considered using moving labor instead of a traditional moving company? On average, our services are $200 less expensive than a local moving crew, and vastly more convenient than a national van line. Plainly put: if you need moving help of any sort, you’ve already found the very best company on the planet.
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