Everybody knows that tiny towns are filled with some of the friendliest, most welcoming, and all around caring people in the whole entire world—most of whom wear bow ties, crisp suits, or long bell-shaped skirts, and hand out cookies to children in between their charity work and cancer research.
C'mon, we've seen the movies.
But what about those places that're slightly larger? Are they just as caring, you ask?
At the Movoto Real Estate Blog, the same questioning has been plaguing them, so they decided to put an end to their sleepless nights (and yours too), and create a list of the 10 most caring small cities in the U.S.
Here they are, starting with our winner and all around most caring place, Petaluma, CA:
1. City of Petaluma, CA
2. City of Marietta, GA
3. Town of Chapel Hill, NC
4. City of Georgetown, TX
5. City of Charleston, WV
6. Village of Hempstead, NY
7. City of Harrisonburg, VA
8. City of Bradenton, FL
9. City of Oak Park, IL
10. City of San Rafael, CA
Interestingly, when they checked out the most caring bigger cities in the U.S., nearly all of them could be found in the South. Now don't freak out, but if you haven't noticed already this list of smaller cities includes not just California (twice), but Florida, Illinois, and even New York.
To find out just how they came up with this list, keep reading. Then they will go over what makes the people in each of these places so caring. Yes, Georgia, even the Yankees.
Methodology
Just like our other Big Deal Lists, we wanted to rely on facts and figures rather than our own, perhaps slightly biased opinions (this author is from the South, y'all). So we started by making a list of all the small cities in the U.S. with populations between 50,000 and 60,000, which gave us 140 places total.
We then used sources like the 2010 U.S. Census, the 2012 FBI Uniform Crime Report, and business listings to look at each place in terms of the following criteria:
Student-counselor ratio
Crimes per 100,000 people (the lower the better)
Pet shelters and rescue per capita
Community services per capita
Mental health counselors and therapists per capita
Percent of workers who carpool (caring for the environment)
From there, we ranked each place with scores from one to 140, where the lowest scores were the most caring places. We then averaged each city's rankings into one overall Big Deal Score, where again, the lowest score went to our most caring place.
