Found a feature on the Money magazine site this morning that ranks cities according to several criteria. The main thrust of the exercise appears to be to rank the country’s “Best Places to Retire,” though the site allows you to sort the rankings by criteria like affordability, leisure activities, weather and access to health care.
San Diego ranked fifth in the Best Places to Live: Best Big Cities category. Click here to get to the feature’s home page, then click on “Winners” in the top left corner of the page to open the window that shows San Diego in fifth place.
Here’s the page with more San Diego-specific details. San Diego ranks below Colorado Springs, Colo., Austin, Texas, Mesa, Ariz. and Raleigh, N.C. for the best big cities.
The country’s most affordable city, though it didn’t make the “Best Places to Retire” list, is Reading, Pa., with a median home price of $42,850. That’s less than 10 percent of the median home price in San Diego which, according to the Money database, is $493,000.
(There’s a lag in the data used by Money – it looks like they used August 2005’s median price. This week’s DataQuick Information Systems data pegged the median price for all homes down 2.2 percent from that number to $482,000 last month.)