Birmingham named ‘Best City in America’

—

January 2, 2015

Fireworks above Regions Field in downtown Birmingham

We’ve already rung in the new year here in the Yellowhammer State, but it looks like there’s one more thing to celebrate from 2014.

Movoto, a real estate website well known for making research-based city-rankings, has named Birmingham its “Best City in America” for 2014, after compiling data from a wide variety of categories.

Here’s how they came to that conclusion:

We looked back at the year and examined the times we ranked the 100 most populated cities in the U.S. We only used rankings where the cities we listed were the same, and only used rankings we produced this year to find the best of the best. Those rankings were:

1. Most Caring Cities
2. Most Stressed Cities (using the least stressed cities)
3. Most Boring Cities (using the least boring cities)
4. Snobbiest Cities (using the least snobby cities)
5. Cities With The Most State Pride
6. Best Cities For Cats (for fun!)

Come on— the Internet loves cats, right?

Looking at these lists, we took numbers from the Big Deal Scores and ranked them all from 1 to 100. Then we averaged each place’s rankings into a final Big Deal Score, and the place with the lowest number for that score became our top city of 2014.

Birmingham stood out overall because all of its rankings in the above categories were in the top 40 nationally. The Magic City was “the eighth most caring, the 18th best for cats, and the 29th least boring.”

But state pride is where it really shined.

“This city loved Alabama so much that they had the third most state pride out of the places we looked at,” said Movoto’s Laura Allan. “All that meant that this spot’s average ranking was 20.83. Way to go, Birmingham!”

Here’s Movoto’s list of the 10 Best Cities in America for 2014:

1. Birmingham, AL
2. Tucson, AZ
3. Rochester, NY
4. Pittsburgh, PA
5. Cincinnati, OH
6. Buffalo, NY
7. Denver, CO
8. Baton Rouge, LA
9. Austin, TX
10. Las Vegas, NV (tie)
10. Raleigh, NC (tie)