It depends on what's important to you. I recently moved to a city without any connections or jobs lined up but with a car and $10,000 in savings I was able to find a place to live, find a good job and figure things out relatively easily. The things I looked at in order of importance is below.
- Unemployment rate (bls.gov) (the lower, the better) The LAUS provides the best rate imo but there's also the ACS and CPS as well.
- # of jobs available in your field, and within a 50 mile radius of the city (looking on indeed.com, craigslist, monster.com, etc)
- Compare the # jobs available to the # of unemployed people and rank each city based on this number (from the LAUS database above, you can get the # of unemployed people in cities with a population over 25,000 each month of the year).
- After that and in no particular order I looked at crime (crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov), poverty level, demographics (age & race) (data.census.gov), type of climate, weather (average # of sunny days in a year, summer highs, winter lows, average humidity), availability of hobbies/ things to do (mountains for snowboarding, ocean for surfing, rivers for fishing, etc.), and the cost of living index (bestplaces.net)
Hope this helps and good luck!
It depends on what's important to you. I recently moved to a city without any connections or jobs lined up but with a car and $10,000 in savings I was able to find a place to live, find a good job and figure things out relatively easily. The things I looked at in order of importance is below.
1. [Unemployment rate](https://www.bls.gov/lau/) (the lower, the better) The LAUS provides the best rate imo but there's also the ACS and CPS as well.
2. # of jobs available in your field, and within a 50 mile radius of the city (looking on indeed.com, craigslist, monster.com, etc)
3. Compare the # jobs available to the # of unemployed people and rank each city based on this number (from the LAUS database above, you can get the # of unemployed people in cities with a population over 25,000 each month of the year).
4. After that and in no particular order I looked at [crime](https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/home), [poverty level, demographics (age & race)](https://data.census.gov/cedsci/), type of climate, weather (average # of sunny days in a year, summer highs, winter lows, average humidity), availability of hobbies/ things to do (mountains for snowboarding, ocean for surfing, rivers for fishing, etc.), and the [cost of living index](https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/)
Hope this helps and good luck!
(post is archived)