10 Cities Where People Are Most Financially Secure (only 4 Are On The West Coast)

If you live in Honolulu or Virginia Beach, you’re probably doing better than someone living in Santa Ana, Calif., Detroit or Miami.

A new ranking shows how residents of major U.S. cities are faring when it comes to their financial health — and reveals a growing racial wealth-divide in America, according to Prosperity Now, a nonprofit public-policy organization based in Washington, D.C.

Prosperity Now ranked 64 cities in the U.S. with populations over 300,000. The ranking is based on income and wealth, business ownership and employment, homeownership rates, access to health insurance and educational attainment in those cities.

“The cities that fall to the bottom and rise to the top in this analysis speak to larger trends in this country about who is succeeding in our current economy,” the authors of the report wrote.

The cities that came out on top were:

Rank	City	Population
1	Honolulu, Hawaii	349,597
2	Virginia Beach, Va.	449,733
3	San Francisco, Calif.	850,282
4	San Jose, Calif.	1,009,363
5	Albuquerque, N.M.	556,859
6	Louisville, Ky.	611,573
7	Seattle, Wash.	668,849
8	Colorado Springs, Colo.	448,759
9	Portland, Ore.	620,589
10	Wichita, Kan.	388,033

And the lowest-ranked were:

Rank	City	Population
64	Milwaukee, Wis.	598,672
63	Memphis, Tenn.	655,857
62	Miami, Fla.	432,622
61	Detroit, Mich.	683,443
60	Santa Ana, Calif.	333,605
59	Cleveland, Ohio	389,165
58	New Orleans, La.	382,922
57	Fresno, Calif.	513,807
56	Baltimore, Md.	621,000
55	St. Louis, Mo.	316,030

The West Coast cities that ranked highest — Honolulu and those in California — have high median incomes (about $77,000 in Honolulu and more than $96,000 in San Francisco), low poverty and high rates of college graduates, according to the report.

The other top-performing cities not located on the West Coast had lower median incomes and rates of college graduates, but tended to have more homeowners, allowing them to score highly in the “housing” ranking. In Virginia Beach, for example, more than 60% of adults are homeowners.

San Francisco and Honolulu had low rates of homeownership, due to expensive housing, but other categories such as educational attainment still put them at the top.

Across the bottom 10 cities, the average annual median income is $37,271, the report found. Almost one in four families in those cities live in poverty and more than 17% have no health insurance. Homes may be affordable in those cities, but homeownership is still low. More than half of renters in those cities spend more than 30% of their incomes on rent and utilities. And unemployment in those cities tends to be high, too.

The cities that ranked the lowest are mostly older industrial cities that have faced “challenges transitioning to the new economy,” the report’s authors said. Other low-ranking cities like Miami and Santa Ana have large immigrant populations who may not be financially stable as they become established in the U.S.

Another major difference between the top- and bottom-ranked cities: Their racial compositions.

While some top-ranked cities, including Albuquerque, San Jose, Honolulu and San Francisco have majority populations of color, the aggregate population of the highest-ranking cities is 51% white and just 7.8% black.

In the 10 lowest-performing cities, the aggregate population is 25% white and 45.9% black. In the top cities, Asian people made up 17.5% of the aggregate population, and in the bottom cities, just 3.9%. The Latino population was more consistent: 17.8% of the top cities and 22.9% of the bottom cities.

The income gap between black and white families has grown since 2000 and worsened since the recession, according to a separate 2016 report by Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia. In 2015, the median income for black households was 59.5% of that for whites — $36,544 to $61,394 — a greater gap than at the end of the Great Recession, when black income was 61.2% of white income, Pew found.