Worcester Named in the Top 10 by Forbes

Did you know that Worcester was named on Forbes List of Most Livable Cities in April?  Worcester ranked number 9 in a list of 15 US metro areas.  It was 1 of 3 Massachusetts areas that were represented.  Cambridge came in at Number 7 and Peabody came in at number 14.  New England was also represented by Portland, ME which came in Number 1 and Stamford, CT which came in Number 4.  5 out of 15 for New England is a pretty impressive showing.

So what was the criteria?  Forbes calculated the standings based on:

To form our list, we looked at quality of life measures in the nation’s largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas–geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We eliminated areas with populations smaller than 500,000 and assigned points to the remaining metro regions across five data sets: Five-year income growth per household and cost of living from Moody’s Economy.com, crime data and leisure index from Sperling’s Best Places, and annual unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Specifically they identified Income Growth, Cost of Living Index, Culture Index, Crime Statistics and Unemployment.

Worcester stands out due to:

• Decent Income Growth
• Low Cost of Living
• High Culture Index
• Relatively Low Crime Rate

So take it in stride Worcester and feel free to walk a little taller!