Yahoo Finance Boise is ... a cheap place to live? New (absurd?) study makes the claim. Here are details
It’s not often that you hear “Boise” and “cheap” in the same sentence nowadays.
We spend most of the time hearing (or complaining) that our houses are too expensive, rents are mostly too high, you have to earn a good chunk of change to live alone, and you need to spend in the six figures to raise a child.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to be frustrated.
A new study from ConsumerAffairs examined the cost of living in the United States’ 100 largest cities and other factors, such as income and tax rate.
Boise was ranked as the ninth-cheapest city in the country of those analyzed, and the cheapest of cities west of the Rocky Mountains. Other regional cities in the study included Salt Lake City (54th), Spokane (69th) and Portland (74th).
How did Boise rank so well?
The study ultimately weighed four factors to determine the cheapest places to live: a cost of living index, state and local tax burden per capita, median income and unemployment rate.
The cost of living index used data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, which in turn analyzed six factors for each city:
Cost of groceries
Housing
Utilities
Transportation
Health care
Miscellaneous goods and services
The index’s baseline was 100, meaning a score above that was more expensive than the national average, while a score below 100 was cheaper than the average.
Other data, such as the median household income and unemployment rate, came from sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
So how did Boise perform, and why was it ranked so high?
Boise’s cost of living index was 106.1 — making it more expensive than the average city — but a median household income of $81,425, tax burden per capita of $5,402 and unemployment rate of 1.9% helped the city shoot into the top 10.
“Boise, Idaho, has the lowest unemployment rate (1.9%) of all 100 cities included in our analysis,” ConsumerAffairs wrote. “The city is actively looking for more workers, especially those with trade experience in the construction industry, according to reporting from the Idaho Business Review.
“Boise has comparatively expensive housing costs and high transportation expenses,” it continued, “but it has low utility costs and the second-highest median household income in our top 10 list.”
Boise received an overall score of 35.94 — not far behind top-ranked Knoxville, Tennessee.
What other cities ranked highly?
If you’re looking to move to the West, Boise appears to be your cheapest option, according to this study. Otherwise, nine cities ranging from places such as Texas and South Dakota to Appalachia rounded the top 10. Here they were, along with their overall score in parentheses:
Knoxville, Tennessee (38)
Chattanooga, Tennessee (37.6)
Sioux Falls, South Dakota (37.5)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (37.2)
Austin, Texas (37.1)
Amarillo, Texas (36.9)
Nashville, Tennessee (36.4)
Huntsville, Alabama (36.1)
Boise, Idaho (35.9)
Raleigh, North Carolina (35.8)
