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The safety of the area or city is a big determining factor for buying a home. In a recent report, WalletHub, a website that provides credit scores and credit reports, compared more than 180 American cities including the 150 most populated U.S. cities for safety across three key dimensions–home and community safety, financial safety, and natural disaster risk.
Nashua, New Hampshire was ranked as the safest city in the U.S followed by:
- South Burlington, Vermont
- Warwick, Rhode Island
- Columbia, Maryland
- Gilbert, Arizona
- Fargo, North Dakota
- Lewiston, Maine
- Plano, Texas
- Portland, Maine
- Brownsville, Texas
The cities that fared worst in terms of overall safety included:
- Fort Lauderdale, Florida
- St. Louis, Missouri
- San Bernandino, California
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
In addition to breaking down the safest cities overall, WalletHub also looked at areas that scored particularly high in the areas of home and community safety. WalletHub based this category on a number of factors that included presence of terrorist attacks, murders and non-negligent manslaughters per capita, assaults and rapes per capita, thefts per capita, law-enforcement employees and active firefighters per capita, and EMTs and paramedics per capita. Cities that ranked highest in terms of safety based on these factors included:
- Columbia, Maryland
- Warwick, Rhode Island
- Aurora, Illinois
- Nashua, New Hampshire
- Cape Coral, Florida
The cities that were at the bottom of the home and community safety rankings included:
- Chattanooga, Tennessee
- Irvine, California
- Memphis, Tennessee
- Detroit, Michigan
- Cincinnati, Ohio
According to the report, cities that were least prone to natural disasters included:
- Dover, Delaware
- Brownsville, Texas
- Corpus Christi, Texas
- New Haven, Connecticut
- Grand Rapids, Michigan
Cities with the highest natural disaster risk levels included:
- Riverside, California
- Santa Clarita, California
- Moreno Valley California
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
In terms of Financial Safety, the report found the lowest unemployment rate in Austin, Texas, the lowest percentage of uninsured population in Pearl City, Hawaii and the highest percentage of households with emergency savings in Fargo, North Dakota.
To read the full report, click here.
