Time Magazine: Hillsboro is the 39th best place to live in America

Publications love to put out lists of the best cities, because people from those cities click on them and link to them. I will now add to the problem.

Money, a property of TIME magazine, ranked Hillsboro the 38th best place to live in America. From the blurb:

Residents of Hillsboro, a suburb 16 miles west of Portland, know how to keep busy: Activity options on a given day might include the symphony, a baseball game, a 60-voice choir performance, an air show, the county fair, or a wine tasting. No need to leave town for any of it.

You won’t necessarily need to leave town for work, either. Nike, Intel, and IBM all have major corporate offices in Hillsboro. (Residents have relatively modest commutes, averaging 23 minutes.)

Hillsboro is the only city in Oregon on the list.

So how was this list compiled? You can read about the methodology here, but here’s a quick quote:

To create MONEY’s Best Places to Live ranking, we looked only at places with populations of 50,000 or greater. We eliminated any place that had more than double the national crime risk, less than 85% of its state’s median household income, or a lack of ethnic diversity. This gave us 583 places.

We then collected more than 135,000 different data points to narrow the list. We considered data on each place’s economic health, cost of living, diversity, public education, income, crime, ease of living, and amenities, all provided by research partner Witlytic. MONEY teamed up with realtor.com to leverage its knowledge of housing markets throughout the country. We put the greatest weight on economic health, public school performance, and local amenities; housing, cost of living, and diversity were also critical components.

As with any such list the use of statistics makes this seem objective, but choosing which metrics to prioritize is an entirely subjective decision. But whatever, our city made the list.