The 17 best US cities for millennials to live in after coronavirus

Des Moines, Iowa, is one of the best cities for millennials to move to next after the pandemic.f11photo/Shutterstock

• Millenials have recently been moving to places in the South and West region of the US.
• We took a look at where this generation should move to next.
• Business Insider recently ranked the best cities to move to post-pandemic based on various metrics, including economic and housing ones, for each metro area.
• We then looked at which of these metro areas have a larger share of millennials than the average from all metro areas.
• Based on our list, cities throughout the Midwest, like those in Illinois and Iowa, are great cities for millennials to move to after the pandemic.

If you are a millennial looking to live in cities populated with other people in your generation, the following cities are some great places to move to after the coronavirus.

Business Insider came up with the best cities to move to after the pandemic using nine different metrics, such as average weekly commute, ability to work from home, and housing affordability.

You can learn more about our methods and data sets used to create the overall city ranking here.

A recent city migration ranking from SmartAsset found millenials were moving to Southern and Western cities before the pandemic.

We wanted to figure out which cities would be best for millennials to move to based on our overall list. To do this, we looked at the share of millennials in each metro area using data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey in 2018. Because the government agency reports the data by age brackets, we took the shares in ages 20-39 because they are closest to Pew Research Center's cut off point for millennials. We then filtered out from our main list the cities that had at least 26.9% of residents in this age cohort, the average share across all metro areas used in our overall ranking.

As with our overall national ranking, many of the best cities for younger Americans are located in the Midwest. Fargo, North Dakota, took on the top spot, with 34.6% of residents falling in our target age bracket. The city also offers a relatively high share of jobs that can be done from home, high share of educational attainment, and short weekly commute.

It is important to note that our ranking was created using data prior to the pandemic. The economic crisis as a result of the coronavirus may change conditions in a city. For instance, State College, Pennsylvania, was the 16th-best city for millennials to move to. This metro area has a high share of people age 25 and over who have at least a bachelor's degree, one of the metrics Moody's Analytics found that will help a city quickly bounce back from this pandemic. However, this city may have also been negatively impacted by the closure of college campuses these past few months.

Read on to find out the 17 best cities for millennials to move to.