Asheville Ranks Fifth on America’s Best Small Cities List

Resonance Consultancy has released its list of America’s Best Small Cities in 2020, and Asheville came in at number five! The list is a ranking of the top-performing small cities with metro populations ranging between 100,000 and 500,000.

The Resonance Best Cities rankings quantify and benchmark the relative quality of place, reputation and competitive identity for the principal cities with metropolitan populations of 100,000 or more. They are lauded as the world’s most thorough city rankings, based on original methodology that analyzes key statistics as well as user-generated reviews and online activity in channels such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.

“The Best Cities rankings are composed of experiential factors that people consider most important in choosing a city to live and visit, as well as empirical factors that business decision-makers consider important in choosing where to invest,” says Resonance Consultancy President & CEO Chris Fair.

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As a result, Resonance’s Best Cities rankings don’t just consider cities as places to live, work or visit—they take a more holistic approach using a wide range of factors that show positive correlations with attracting employment, investment and/or visitors—ranging from the number of culinary experiences, museums, and sights and landmarks each city offers, to the number of Fortune 500 corporations, direct flight connections and mentions each city has on Instagram.

And why a ranking of the nation’s best small cities now?

“America’s small cities have never mattered more to the future of the country,” says Fair. “The nation’s small cities face particularly pivotal months ahead. Small-center urban growth was already rising before the pandemic. Now with millions of workers increasingly able to work remotely, many may choose to move to these smaller cities,” says Fair. ”At the same time, we expect travel to drive-to destinations to recover first. As American travelers hit the road, they’ll likely look to small cities to satisfy their travel desires.”

In other words, the demand for America’s small cities—from travelers, investors and families looking to settle down—will likely grow over the next 12 months. This ranking is their playbook for where to consider next.

Based on each city’s performance for the 23 factors analyzed, these are America’s Top 10 Small Cities in 2020:

1. Reno, NV
2. Naples, FL
3. Santa Fe, NM
4. Savannah, GA
5. Asheville, NC
6. Anchorage, AK
7. Boulder, CO
8. Trenton, NJ
9. Myrtle Beach, SC
10. Ann Arbor, MI

The full list of America’s Top 100 cities is available at ResonanceCo.com/Reports and BestCities.org.