Compare Orange County cities for families
Pick up to three of the thirty ranked cities and read them measure by measure. Every bar runs 0 to 100 on the same scale the ranking uses. Longer is better on every row above the line.
Cost sits below the line, outside the score. Whether a city is affordable depends on your income, which no ranking can know.
Where these numbers come from
Childcare is the California Department of Social Services licensed centre directory. Schools and test scores are the California Department of Education. Crime is CA DOJ OpenJustice. Parks are OpenStreetMap. Street connectivity is the EPA Smart Location Database. Housing, income and commutes are the American Community Survey. Housing permits are the state RHNA progress report. Full method and the ranking of all thirty cities.
What this cannot tell you
These eighteen measures describe what a city provides: licensed childcare places, how many children can walk to a school, park acreage, how connected the streets are, the air, the reported crime. They do not describe what a family experiences. A city can score well on all of it and still not suit you.
Every figure is a city-wide value, so it hides variation inside the city. A large city with one dense, well-served district and a sprawling underserved one lands in the middle on most rows, which is arithmetically honest and practically useless if you already know which part you would live in.
Cost deliberately sits outside the score. Whether a city is affordable depends on your income, which no ranking can know, and folding price into a “best for families” number quietly turns it into a ranking of wealth. The permit row is included for the same reason: a city that provides a great deal and builds nothing is making a different offer to a family arriving now than to one that arrived twenty years ago.
Saktoo does not score schools on test results alone, and does not rank neighborhoods by who lives in them. The reasoning for both is on the about page.