Brentwood named fifth-best small city in U.S. by WalletHub

Cole Villena, Nashville Tennessean
·2 min read
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Williamson County residents are accustomed to their homes winning annual praise from "best places to live" lists from national publications.

Add another honor to the list. WalletHub named Brentwood the fifth-best small city in America. It's the highest ranking for any Southern city.

Franklin, Brentwood's neighbor to the south, also scored highly at No. 31.

The survey, conducted by WalletHub, a personal finance website, ranked 1,319 cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 residents on five broad aspects: affordability, economic health, education and health, quality of life and safety. The categories were then divided into 43 individual factors.

Brentwood earned strong marks for affordability, which considered median household income, cost of living, homeownership rate, housing costs and the percent of households with severe housing cost burden. It was also among the top performers for economic health, which measures factors including job growth, unemployment and poverty rates.

Brentwood's lowest score?

Quality of life. The category factored average commute time and a variety of entertainment infrastructure-related questions, including movie theaters, museums and restaurants per capita.

Cities that scored well were generally located near well-known metro areas. And, not in the southeastern U.S.

Carmel, Ind. (ranked No. 2) is about a half-hour's drive north of Indianapolis, and Fair Lawn, N.J. (No. 3) is about the same distance from Newark and New York City. Two of the next-best Southern cities, Apex (No. 16) and Wake Forest (No. 28) are suburbs in North Carolina's Research Triangle area.

Brentwood, located just south of rapidly growing Nashville, fits into the trend.

A notable exception was the top-ranked Lancaster, Penn., best known as the hub of Pennsylvania's Dutch Country.

Williamson County was recently named one of America's healthiest counties, according to a U.S. News & World Report's 2022 county ranking. The Middle Tennessee region ranked 19th out of 500 scored communities, bolstered by strong scores in the economic, population health, and community vitality categories.

Here's the top ten best small cities in the U.S., according to WalletHub.

  1. Lancaster, PA

  2. Carmel, IN

  3. Fair Lawn, NJ

  4. Lexington, MA

  5. Brentwood, TN

  6. Melrose, MA

  7. Zionsville, IN

  8. Needham, MA

  9. Portland, ME

  10. Westfield, IN

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Brentwood named fifth-best small city in US by WalletHub