This Is the Most Family-Friendly City in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 11, 10:30AM EDT

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This Is the Most Family-Friendly City in America — © FOTOGRAFIA INC. / E+ via Getty Images

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual America’s Families and Living Arrangements, 63.1 million children under 18 were living at home in 2020. In 78% of these households, people were married, and 36% of households had only one person. Regardless of household size, many parents want to find family-friendly places to raise their children. While some parents would like to move to these places, many cannot because of income or jobs that require them to live in a certain place.
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The authors of LendingTree’s recently released “Best Large Metros for Families With Children” study acknowledged that it is hard to pin down what a family-friendly city was, based on widely differing wants and needs of parents. However, their analysis was based on seven factors:

Median family income
Median monthly housing costs for homes with a mortgage
The homeownership rate among families with at least one child
The unemployment rate for 25- to 44-year-olds
The percentage of 16- to 19-year-olds not enrolled in school who don’t have a high school diploma or an equivalent degree
The average round-trip commute time
The percentage of households with children

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The researchers made the point that “Though they aren’t all-encompassing, these factors were chosen because each tends to directly impact households with children.” The data was pulled from the U.S. Census Bureau 2019 American Community Survey.

The best city on the list was Salt Lake City. Based on the criteria, it had a high 36.6% households with children, a low commute time of 46.6 minutes and a high median household income of $91.939.

Click here to see which are the 50 best cities to live in.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.