We could say a lot of positive things about our home state: great weather much of the time, great place to start a business, beautiful landscapes, abundant recreation options. One thing we don’t rarely hear much about is whether or not it’s a good place to raise a family however.
This Monday we ran a piece about a WalletHub survey that showed Scottsdale as the ideal place to be seeking a job. Well now we have another WalletHub survey, but this one is significantly less rosy. It has ranked Arizona in the bottom 10 states to raise a family, AT THE #41 spot.
As we stated with the job-seeking ranking, the methodology that is used is critical to understanding the value of the survey. After all, such rankings could easily be swayed with weightings of any categories. Much like the job-seeking survey, this one has many, many different criteria, but they are all within five different categories: family fun, health and safety, education and child care, affordability, and socioeconomics.
For family fun, Arizona was ranked at #10, but that’s where the good news ends. While near the middle of the pack in the socioeconomic category, it ranks at #40 and below for the other three categories, with a paltry #48 ranking for both education and child care and affordability.
For education, our public schools’ issues and low ranking here shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone; despite attempts to increase funding we still sit 3rd-to-last on a per-pupil spending basis. Daycare quality and costs also weigh heavily into the rubric.
As for the affordability category, anyone who has lived here long enough can tell you that the days of Arizona being cheap are long, long gone. That said, the majority of the metrics have less to do with cost of living and more with items such as debt levels and healthcare costs. Does that invalidate their importance? Not necessarily, but items like collective mortgage debt do speak to the difficulty of homeowning for young families in what has been an extremely robust housing market.
That said, if these sorts of items don’t necessarily apply to you, if you make a good income, don’t have outrageous debt, and are in a good school district or have the means for a great private school, then feel free to disregard and expand your family!