Score
General Quality
Balanced livability composite from safety, population size, cultural vibrancy, healthcare, affordability, climate, environment, economy, education, wellbeing, transportation, outdoors, and taxes.
Higher values rank better for this score.
How It's Calculated
The latest published score is normalized to a 0-100 scale. The method below explains what the score rewards, with technical source metadata available for audit.
How the ranking is built
General Quality is a broad livability baseline that rewards places with strong safety, population size, cultural vibrancy, healthcare, affordability, climate, environmental, economic, education, wellbeing, transportation, outdoor, and tax signals.
- 1
The score is a weighted average of already-published 0-100 component scores.
- 2
Weights are 13% Safety, 12% High Population, 7% Cultural Vibrancy, 10% Healthcare Access, 10% Housing Affordability, 8% Comfortable Climate, 6% Clean Air, 6% Natural Disaster Safety, 4% Climate Resilience, 7% Job Market Strength, 5% Education Score, 5% Mental Health / Wellbeing, 3% Car-Light Living, 3% Outdoor Access, and 1% Low Tax Burden.
- 3
The scorer fails fast if component weights do not sum to exactly 1 within a tiny floating-point tolerance.
- 4
If a component is unavailable, it is imputed as a neutral 50 rather than treated as positive evidence, and the scorer still requires at least 80% component-weight coverage.
- 5
The intake flow uses this as a default smoother so rankings do not ignore broadly important quality-of-life factors the user did not explicitly mention.
Technical details
Read from the current master score table for this criterion.
The top 10 below ignore your blended relocation weights and sort only by General Quality.
What This Score Means
General Quality is a broad livability baseline that rewards places with strong safety, population size, cultural vibrancy, healthcare, affordability, climate, environmental, economic, education, wellbeing, transportation, outdoor, and tax signals.
Statistics Feeding This Score
- SafetySource: Published score components
Published composite safety score from violent crime, property crime, and homicide risk.
- High PopulationSource: Published score components
Published canonical population-size score on a log scale.
- Cultural VibrancySource: Published score components
Published coolness and everyday-energy proxy from dining, nightlife, gay scene, walkability, transit, population, and education components.
- Healthcare AccessSource: Published score components
Published healthcare access score from hospital, emergency care, primary care, mental-health provider, dental, and specialist access.
- Housing AffordabilitySource: Published score components
Published affordability score blending rent, rent burden, home values, and home values relative to income.
- Comfortable ClimateSource: Published score components
Published climate comfort score from NOAA station-normal heat, cold, and mild-weather inputs.
- Clean AirSource: Published score components
Published air-quality score from EPA AirData PM2.5, ozone, and AQI inputs.
- Future and current hazard riskSource: Published score components
Published natural disaster safety and climate resilience components.
Source Data
Known Limits
- This is a broad livability prior, not a personalized recommendation by itself.
- It inherits the limitations of each underlying published component score.
- The weights are intentionally conservative starting weights and may need tuning as user behavior and ranking quality teach us more.
- Population size is a simple proxy for hard-to-measure benefits, but it can over-credit places that are large for historical, commuting, or boundary reasons.
- Because it includes affordability, safety, healthcare, climate, and economic components, it can still favor already well-resourced places unless the user's budget and lifestyle weights are added on top.
Top 10 Locations
Ranked by General Quality.