The new year is the time to finally get your art projects off the ground or to at least cut off your man bun. Maybe it’s also a time for you to give up on your New York City dreams and move somewhere less existentially painful all the time. While we’re NYC loyalists through and through, we get that chasing low-paying jobs to cover your high-cost apartment may not be for everyone. But where else should you go?
Financial advice site Nerdwallet has released its 2017 list of the best cities for job seekers and New York is …. 78th, which yeah makes sense. The actual No. 1 best city to move to for jobs is sunny, taco-filled, pun-loving Austin, according to their data. Hey Austin is pretty cool! And being rapidly gentrified, so you’ll feel right at home. Following Austin are Denver, Nashville and Seattle, all which have some pretty good qualities (legal weed, legal drinking in the streets) of their own. Shit wait, should we all leave New York City this year?
To create the list, Nerdwallet factored in each city’s October 2016 unemployment rate with the increase in the working-age population from 2010 to 2015. The list includes the unemployment rate in each city along with the median income and the average rent — it’s $1,139 in Austin compared to $1,317 in New York, for instance.
You can also drink cheap Lone Star beer there and swim in Barton Springs (but don’t try to do both at the same time — trust me on this) and rail against condos, just like this tip jar we spotted in May:
New York is low on the list, but of course such data-driven lists don’t factor in things like cultural and population diversity, street life and drag queen story hours and the like. At the very bottom of the list is poor Fresno, Calif., a place you would have very little reason to visit ever.
If we’re ever going to survive gentrification/future presidential elections, it’s probably a good idea for some of us to start moving out of New York City anyway.
Here are the top 15 best cities to move for job seekers in 2017, see the full list and the rest of the data here.
1 Austin, Texas
2 Denver, Colorado
3 Nashville, Tennessee
4 Seattle, Washington
5 Durham, North Carolina
6 Atlanta, Georgia
7 Minneapolis, Minnesota
8 Lincoln, Nebraska
9 Irving, Texas
10 Raleigh, North Carolina
11 Fremont, California
12 Boston, Massachusetts
13 St. Paul, Minnesota
14 Orlando, Florida
15 Miami, Florida
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