Is Sioux Falls Really a Great Place to Raise Kids?

I've lived in Sioux Falls for most of my adult life. With the exception of finishing college in Spearfish and starting my career in Rapid City and a brief and ill-conceived move to Denver, this area has always been my home. I knew I always wanted to live here but never wondered if it was the greatest place to raise kids. As it turns out, it is.

SmartAsset.com did a study to find what is the best city to raise kids in America. They compared a bunch of different factors including percentage of the population who are children, housing costs as a percentage of income, concentration of children’s entertainment establishments, high school graduation rate, daily average air pollution, child poverty rate, percentage of the children without health insurance and violent crime rate.

Out of the 200 largest markets studied, Sioux Falls ranked number six on their list. In SmartAsset's summation of the city:

The Sioux Falls, South Dakota metro area’s population is 22.1% children, the 19th-highest rate for this metric in the study. The area has a child poverty rate of 8.1%, which is the eighth-best across all 200 metro areas overall. The percentage of children without health insurance – at 4.01% – ranks within the top half of the study, 98th out of 200 metro areas.

It's no surprise to any of us living here that most of the top ten all came from the upper Midwest. The top two cities went to Appleton and Green Bay, Wisconsin respectively. Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa came in third and fourth, Fargo was fifth, and then Sioux Falls at sixth.

The rest of the top ten was Madison, Wisc., Provo, Utah, Kennewick-Richland in Washington, and Ogden, Utah.