Putting down roots
Popular Dallas suburb tops list of America's best places to raise a family
When choosing where to raise a family, economic stability, safety, and opportunities for children are at the top of the list. And according to a new study, Plano checks all of those boxes and more.
Personal finance website WalletHub compared 182 U.S. cities to determine which are the best and worst places to raise a family in 2019. Plano places at the very top of the list — No. 4 overall — making it not just the best place in Texas to raise a family but one of the best in the nation.
Each city was graded across five major areas: family fun, health and safety, education and child care, affordability, and socioeconomics.
Plano shines brightest as the second-best in the country in socioeconomics, a category that measures a city's share of two-parent families, separation and divorce rate, share of families living in poverty, unemployment rate, and other factors.
It also earns high marks in health and safety (No. 3) and affordability (No. 7) and performs better than most in education and child care (No. 40). But the family-fun department could use some improvement, it seems, as Plano comes in at No. 101.
The city is no stranger to praise from WalletHub, having just been named the least-stressed city in Texas and earning the title of the happiest city in America earlier this year.
But where does the rest of Texas rank when it comes to raising families? Austin is No. 24 in the U.S., and second-best in Texas, followed by Fort Worth (No. 72), San Antonio (No. 110), Dallas (No. 133), and Houston (No. 140). Four other DFW suburbs appear on the list, but much lower than Plano: Grand Prairie (No. 61), Arlington (No. 83), Irving (No. 101), and Garland (No. 116).
A few spots up the list from Plano is Overland Park, Kansas, the best place in America to raise a family. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Detroit, the worst place in the country to raise a family right now.