BOSTON (WHDH) - Massachusetts sweeps away the competition when it comes to small-city living, a new study from WalletHub has found.
A whopping seven of the top 20 small cities in America were in Massachusetts, the most of any one state in the study. Although Lancaster, Pennsylvania topped the list, Lexington came in at the fourth spot, Melrose took the sixth spot, Needham came in eighth, Milton in 11th, and Arlington, Burlington and Newton in 17th, 18th and 19th, respectively. The only other New England city that made the top 20 was Portland, Maine, at number nine.
Other Bay State cities that ranked high on the full list include Randolph, Medford, Reading, Belmont and Wellesley. The full list can be found here.
To compile this list, WalletHub compared 1,319 cities across five dimensions: affordability, economic health, education & health, quality of life and safety. For this study, a small city counted if it had between 25,000 and 100,000 residents.
Lexington, the top Massachusetts city on the list, earned high marks for education & health, as the fourth-best city on the list, and safety, as the seventh-best city. It didn’t score as relatively well on affordability or quality of life.
Despite their high rankings, none of the New England cities earned top scores for housing costs or homeownership rates.
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