Study ranks Raleigh No. 2 in "most family-friendly cities" of 2019

If your family is pretty happy here in Raleigh, there is now (more) data to back up your feelings that this area is a great place to raise kids.

Posted 3:11 p.m. Mar 7, 2019 — Updated 4:04 p.m. Mar 7, 2019

Sarah Lindenfeld Hall

, Go Ask Mom editor

RALEIGH, N.C. — If your family is pretty happy here in Raleigh, there is now (more) data to back up your feelings that this area is a great place to raise kids.

This week, Homes.com released its index of family-friendly cities, and Raleigh earned the No. 2 spot, between No. 1 Virginia Beach and No. 3 Charlotte, which held the No. 1 spot in 2017.

Homes.com considered six factors to pull together its rankings of 50 large and mid-sized cities across the country - school quality, park availability, cost of living, safety, childcare availability and commute length. Raleigh earned 4.5 points out of five for every category except for the commute length where it received a 4.

"The top 10 in our current study is dominated by cities in the South," according to Homes.com. "In fact, nine out of 10 of them can be found in this region, and a similar trend is seen in our 2017 results. These top-ranking areas generally received high marks across the six indicators we analyzed, and specifically, all of them have above average schools and low costs of living."

Here's Homes.com's top 10:

Virginia Beach, Va.
Raleigh
Charlotte
Tampa, Fla.
Louisville, Ky.
New Orleans, La.
Orlando, Fla.
Richmond, Va.
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Atlanta, Ga.

Raleigh and the Triangle region regularly top "best" lists.

This week, Livability.com named Raleigh one of the 100 best places to live in the country in 2019. The study, which ranked Raleigh as No. 2, surveyed more than 1,000 millennials across the country on what was most important to them when relocating.

Also this month, NUMBEO, the largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries around the world, listed Raleigh as having the third best quality of life in the world, behind Canberra, Australia, and Eindhoven, Netherlands. (For those keeping score, Charlotte came in at No. 10.)

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