If you ask me, there are thousands of great places to raise kids in the tri-state area, but Wallet Hub didn't ask me and wasn't looking at all the great small towns in our living space either.

As usual, they looked at the 180 biggest cities in the U.S. trying to sort out which of them were better places to raise kids than others. With that in mind, this is what they were looking for.

They started with five categories; A) Family Fun, B) Health & Safety, C)Education & Child Care, D) Affordability, and E) Socio-economics.

Within those categories, they examined things like:

  • The  weather
  • Number of playgrounds, ice rinks, skate parks
  • Number of attractions like zoos, museums, theaters, etc.
  • Air & water quality
  • Availability of healthy foods
  • Crime
  • Quality of hospitals
  • School system quality
  • Graduation rates
  • Cost of living
  • Unemployment rates
  • A lot more

When all the statistics were gathered, the results for our biggest tri-state cities were:

  • Cedar Rapids was 23rd
  • Sioux Falls came in 24th
  • Minneapolis was 37th
  • St. Paul is 55th
  • Des Moines came in 75th
  • Rapid City was 83rd

The top 5 best cites overall were:

  1. Fremont, CA
  2. Overland Park, KS
  3. Irvine, CA
  4. Plano, TX
  5. South Burlington, VT

The 5 worst cities were:

  1. Cleveland, OH
  2. Memphis, TN
  3. Detroit, MI
  4. Birmingham, AL
  5. Newark, NJ

You can see the complete report at Wallet Hub.

13 Times Sioux Falls Made it into a 'Jeopardy!' Question

If the world was divided into Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune people, I would be down for Jeopardy! all the way. It's a lot more fun, it makes me feel smart because I can retain lots of trivia, and I am a horrible speller. So Wheel is out, no whammies.

Recently I discovered (I mean wasted a lot of time on) a website that is an archive of clues that have been on Jeopardy!.

While digging around the archive, I wanted to find out how often Sioux Falls came up in a question (Answer) on the show. Since 1990 Sioux Falls has been part of a question or an answer 13 times.

Source: j-archive.com