Note: This story originally appeared on the St. Louis Business Journal.
St. Louis may be among the best cities for launching a startup or eating top-notch food, but, according to one study, that doesn’t mean it’s a good place to raise your family.
In a new study released by Apartment List, St. Louis was found to be the worst city in the U.S. for young families, coming in at No. 474 of 474 cities on the list.
Apartment List identified four factors as being the most important to families: safety, weighted at 35 percent; housing cost, weighted at 30 percent; school quality, weighted at 25 percent; and child friendliness, weighted at 10 percent.
Apartment List used FBI data to rank each city by the number of violent crimes and property crimes, and census data was used to calculate the percentage of the median renter income required to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
For school quality, cities were ranked on high school graduation rates for public school districts from the Department of Education, and child friendliness was rated based on communities with a larger percentage of children, based on census data.
St. Louis received a score of 1.5 out of 100 for crime, an 18.7 child score, a 1.8 education score and a score of 18.2 for housing, which gave St. Louis an F.
On the bright side, O’Fallon, Missouri, came in at No. 7 on Apartment List’s ranking, with an A+. O’Fallon received a score of 94.8 for crime, a child score of 89.8, an 81 for education and a 95.2 for housing.
Other Missouri cities on the list include St. Charles, coming in at No. 68 with an A-, Lee’s Summit at 157 with a B, Columbia at 295 with a B-, Independence at 318 with a C, Springfield at 358 with a C and Kansas City at 372 with a C.
Allen, Texas, came in at No. 1, followed by Fishers, Indiana.
