If you are considering moving to a new place after the novel coronavirus pandemic, you may want to consider one of these 30 cities.
Recent polling has suggested that many Americans are thinking about moving. A survey from Harris Poll reported by Axios shows about one-third of Americans are thinking about moving to less densely populated places, and recent research from Moody's Analytics found that places with a high share of jobs that require a bachelor's degree or higher and are less densely populated are likely to recover first from the economic impact of the pandemic.
During the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the virus, more and more Americans have transitioned to working from their homes. A Gallup analysis shows that share increasing over time. According to that polling, 62% reported they were working from home in a survey from March 30-April 2, compared to 31% of respondents from March 13-March 15.
New Gallup Polls show that even after stay-at-home orders lift and people can return to the office, some people are thinking about still working remotely, at least part of the time. In a Gallup survey from April 13-19, 53% of respondents said they would work remotely as much as they can, while 47% said they would return to the office as much as they previously did.
Business Insider decided to find out which cities could be the best places to live in after coronavirus for those Americans seeking a new home and planning to continue remote work.
To do this, we used nine different economic, educational, and demographic metrics from government data sources and academic research that we think people might consider when moving and that could help a metro area to recover more quickly from the economic effects of the coronavirus.
These measures are the pre-coronavirus unemployment rate, ability to work from home, population density, housing affordability, monthly household costs, cost of living, weekly two-way work commute, total elementary and secondary school spending per student, and share of residents age 25 and over who have at least a bachelor's degree.
Each measure was re-scaled to a uniform z-score, allowing us to add the values together to get a final overall index for each metro area which we then used to rank the 30 metro areas at the top of the list.
You can read more about our method and the metrics we used here.
Here are the 30 best cities to live in after coronavirus based on our analysis: