10 Safe As Home Cities To Live In US in 2013

When you consider a rating of anything, you have a lot of factors to take into consideration and the same thing applies when rating cities.

Some consider cities to be places with more than 25,000 inhabitants; others think that real cities are bigger than that. In the case of safety, you have several criteria by which you could rate it, for instance there several law enforcement agencies usually involved in the cities; the information from just one of these agencies may not be a true picture.

For the rankings in this report I have therefore used one set of terms. The first one being that these are what are considered major US cities, which is generally accepted as being cities with around 250,000 inhabitants or more. Second, as a safety factor I refer to violent crimes linked with fatal car accidents and compared to every 100,000 people.

Obviously, these factors can change from one year to the next and so no assurances can be given for 2013, as it is, or at least most of it, is still in the future. To allow for fluctuations that may occur in the current year, an average of the three years 2010 to 2012 were used to compile this top 10 list.

01: Plano, Texas

Plano, Texas – Population-269,776. 70^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 6.7%.

02: Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon – Population – 587,865. 29^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 14.4%.

03: Honolulu, Hawaii

Honolulu, Hawaii – Population – 340,936. 55^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 9.1%.

04: San Jose, California

San Jose, California – Population – 967,487. 10^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 8.9%.

05: Omaha, Nebraska

Omaha, Nebraska – Population – 415,068. 43^rd most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 15%.

06: New York City, New York

New York City, New York – Population – 8,244,910. The most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 18.2%.

07: Santa Ana, California

Santa Ana, California – Population – 329,427. 57^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 17.6.

08: Anaheim, California

Anaheim, California – Population 341,361. 54^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 13.1%.

09: San Diego, California

San Diego, California – Population 1,326,179. 8^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 14.4%.

10: Glendale, Arizona

Glendale, Arizona – Population 230,482. 87^th most populous city in the US. Poverty rate 14.3%.

Forbes magazines maintain that the safest cities are reliant on wealth, citing that four of the cities on this list have a higher per capita earning rate than most other cities. If that was the case though, wouldn’t this list mirror the list of the wealthiest cities in the US?

Others would cite the ethnic divide of the city or the poverty rate but none of these match perfectly. Rather than speculating with preconceived ideas, shouldn’t unbiased surveys be carried out to try and ascertain what the factors really are? Perhaps it is down to education standards or road safety, perhaps even density of population. Whatever it is, it seems to be somewhat consistent as; year after year the same cities always appear to be in similar places on the list, which indicates that these top cities are certainly doing something right.