Why South Dakota Is on the ‘Best States to Live’ List
Just last week Sioux Falls attained the designation as the Best State to Find a Job. An honorable distinction to be sure, but just as with everything in life, there are always a few conditions.
Now Sioux Falls is making a showing in WalletHub's report on the Best States to Live In. Once again they gather the data to arrive at these rankings from a wide range of places and organizations.
They usually start with the U.S. Census Bureau and go from there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), American Medical Association, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and Environmental Protection Agency, are just a few of the sources they go to for statistics on each state.
This time South Dakota landed in 17th place. WalletHub essentially used 5 qualifying categories to determine the best and worst states to live in. Those categories are:
- Affordability
- Economy
- Education and Health
- Quality of Life
- Safety
Those categories are filled with information on a wide range of subjects.
- Affordability statistics were gathered by considering housing prices, property taxes, median incomes, and more.
- The economic category had numerous subdivisions like unemployment numbers, poverty levels, population growth, job opportunities, foreclosure rates, and food insecurity.
- Education and Health figures came from assessing the public school and hospital systems, high school graduation rates, life expectancy rates, and rate of insured individuals.
- To gather information for the "Quality of Life" category, they considered average hours worked per week, commute times, condition of roads, number of bike trails, parks, museums, movie theaters, fitness centers, and also our weather.
- Safety statistics came from crunching the numbers involving crime rates, traffic deaths, and the number of law enforcement employees.
South Dakota rocked the Economy category in the number 3 position but was only average in the other four categories.
The long (and it really was) and short on the subject is that South Dakota is a pretty good state to live in, compared to South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, and New Mexico, which ended up as the bottom five worst states to live in.
To see the complete report see WalletHub.
Source: WalletHub
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