If you are considering moving out West after the novel coronavirus pandemic, one of these cities could be a good fit for you.
We recently compiled a list of the best cities to live in after the coronavirus pandemic using different economic measures and other factors that may influence someone's decision about where to move. The nine factors we used are the pre-coronavirus unemployment rate, ability to work from home, population density, housing affordability, monthly housing costs, cost of living, average travel time to work, total elementary- and secondary-school spending per student, and share of residents age 25 and over who have at least a bachelor's degree.
After collecting our data from different sources like the US Census Bureau, each measure was rescaled to a uniform z-score so that we could add these values and get an overall index for each metro area.
You can read more about our methods and sources here.
Many of the cities located in the Western parts of the US did not rank highly on our overall list. Of the top 30 best cities, only two were from states in the West region, as defined by the US Census Bureau.
In this article, we ranked the metro areas in the West region that had the best overall index.
These cities are great for people who don't want to live in crowded areas, based on their low population densities, and who want a short weekly work commute.
It is important to emphasize that this list uses data before the coronavirus pandemic, and thus don't capture any of the economic impacts that much of the country has felt in the last few months.
Read on to find out the 17 best cities in the West region of the US to move to after the coronavirus: