Planning your next move, but can't fathom the idea of leaving the North Coast? The New York Times has a new tool just for you.
The Times on Tuesday released an interactive that allows readers to find their city's "twin," or the city most similar to that in which they currently live, based on information from the employment search engine Indeed.
In order to find the most similar pairings, the Times compared job mixes reflecting the cities' local advantages and history (like coal or great universities) and local demand (like a young population that needs teachers or an older population that needs nurses).
The Times then ranked similarities on a 100-point scale, where zero means completely non-overlapping distributions of job postings and 100 meant completely overlapping.
And, boy, were some of the results interesting.
With a ranking of 85 points, the most similar pairing of American metropolitan areas according to the Times' formula was Dallas and Atlanta, both of which have high concentrations of property accountants, security consultants and front office managers.
Compare that with other pairs that scored above 80, many of which were located close by each other or in the same state, such as Miami and Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego, and New York and Boston.
This brings us to Cleveland, whose twin is a little more than 100 miles down the road.
Cleveland paired closest with Columbus, thanks to the cities' unusually high numbers of job postings for state tested nursing assistants (at least 15.4x normal), intervention specialists (4.5x normal), and kitchen team members (2.8x normal).
If you're looking for something a little further away, but still within your comfort zone, Cleveland also ranked closely with Pittsburgh; Portland, Oregon; Nashville; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Cincinnati.
Not only did the Times figure out the most similar cities, it also compared the most similar metro areas. In Cleveland's case, Columbus ranks highest again (82), followed by Cincinnati (81), Akron (80), Milwaukee (79), Indianapolis (78), Kansas City, Mo. (78), St. Louis (78), Detroit (77), Nashville (77), and Minneapolis (77).
