Lofty position

Austin crowned the world’s No. 1 city to move to in global ranking

Austin aerial skyline with bridges and Lady Bird Lake

According to this ranking, the Capital City is capital for people across the world in search of a new home.

Ryan Conine/Getty Images

Move over, London. Austin is the new kid on the block for people seeking to relocate.

British personal finance platform money.co.uk ranks Austin the No. 1 city in the world for people hunting for a new place to live. Earlier this year, polling results released by the Boston Consulting Group and The Network, a recruiting alliance, placed London atop the list of the world’s best spots for relocating workers.

No one seems to agree on the planet’s best cities to live in, though. For example, Condé Nast Travelerhands that honor to Auckland, New Zealand, while the Time Out Index anoints San Francisco the world’s top city to live in. Vienna, Austria, continually grabs the top spot in an annual quality-of-living ranking for global cities published by consulting giant Mercer.

How did Austin, in the eyes of money.co.uk, become the relocation capital of the world? The website examined eight factors: home prices, cost of living, average salary, weather, number of restaurants, number of green spaces, internet speed, and life expectancy.

After crunching the numbers, money.co.uk awarded Austin a relocation score of 6.02 out of 10. The platform gave Austin high marks for internet speed (87.5 megabits per second), average temperature (68.7 degrees), and average monthly salary ($5,501).

As determined by money.co.uk, here are the top 10 cities for people wanting to relocate:

Austin
Tokyo
Charleston, South Carolina
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Los Angeles
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Miami
Muscat, Oman
San Francisco
Las Vegas

In all, 84 cities appear in the ranking. Except Austin, none of those cities are in Texas. Ten of the 84 cities are in the U.S. — Austin (No. 1 overall), Charleston (No. 3), Los Angeles (No. 5), Miami (No. 7), San Francisco (No. 9), Las Vegas (No. 10), Washington, D.C. (No. 13), Chicago (No. 17), New York City (No. 21), and Boston (No. 67).

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At the top for rooftops

Austin suburb raises the roof with biggest housing boom in the nation

City of Kyle/Facebook

Kyle is one of several cities in Hays County that's experienced tremendous housing growth.

If you live in or have driven through Hays County, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. You’ve seen thousands of new residential rooftops pop up in the past decade.

In fact, Hays County ranks as the primary U.S. metro county with the most growth in new housing units (57.4 percent) from 2010 to 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released November 2. Among those housing units are single-family homes, condos, townhomes, and apartments.

The number of housing units in Hays County rose by 34,117 from 2010 to 2020, the Census Bureau says.

One of the Austin metro area’s four other counties makes the top 10 on that list, too.

Williamson County saw the number of housing units shoot up by 46 percent from 2010 to 2020, the Census Bureau says. Among primary metro counties in the U.S., Williamson ranks fifth in that regard. Williamson County added 74,907 housing units during the 10-year period.

Three other Texas counties show up in the top 10 among primary metro counties:

Third-ranked Comal County, part of the San Antonio metro area — 48.5 percent (22,831 new housing units).
Seventh-ranked Fort Bend County, part of the Houston metro area — 41 percent (80,880 new housing units).
10th-ranked Rockwall County, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — 36.8 percent (10,280 new housing units).

The Austin metro area also claims one spot on the bureau’s list of the 10 “outlying” metro counties with the most growth in housing units from 2010 to 2020. The bureau defines outlying counties as those outside a region’s “urban center.”

Bastrop County, ranked eighth on that list, saw the number of housing units go up 25.1 percent from 2010 to 2020 with the addition of 7,367 units.

Four other Texas counties appear on the same list for “outlying” counties:

No. 1 Denton County, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — 36 percent (92,136 new housing units).
No. 2 Montgomery County, part of the Houston metro area — 34.2 percent (60,842 new housing units).
No. 3 Kaufman County, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — 33.7 percent (12,906 new units).
No. 5 Kendall County, part of the San Antonio metro area — 30.4 percent (4,275 new housing units).

“The number of occupied housing units grows when new housing is built or previously vacant homes become occupied. It decreases when housing units become vacant, are demolished or are converted into other uses,” the Census Bureau explains.

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