Rockford Ranked 437 Out of 474 Cities on This National List

Rockford did terrible on this new national list.

My heart is broken again. I hate to hear these things about a city that I have grown to love.

Rockford received a 'D' ranking on a list put together by Apartment List. According to their ranking, Rockford is not a good place for young families.

The ranking was determined by four different criteria: Safety, Housing Costs, School Quality and Child Friendliness.

According to Apartment List, here is the breakdown of criteria:

• Safety (35%): We used FBI data to rank cities by the number of violent crimes and property crimes per 100,000 residents.
• Housing Cost (30%): We used census data to calculate the percentage of the median renter income required to rent a 2-bedroom apartment.
• School Quality (25%): Cities were ranked on high school graduation rate for public school districts based in that city. Comparing schools across different states can be challenging, but using high school graduation rate data from the Department of Education gives us a good estimate of overall school quality.
• Child Friendliness (10%): Communities with a greater percentage of children tend to be more child friendly, so we used census data to score cities based on the percentage of the population that’s under 18.

Believe it or not, Rockford's ranking on safety wasn't what put Rockford so far south on the list.

It was the fact Rockford has a very low school graduation rate.

Sometimes I think that the websites and people who develop these lists have never been to half of these places before.

It's really easy to judge a book by it's cover if you have never read the book, but I see where others would say, data doesn't lie.

One Illinois city did rank highly on the list. It was Naperville, which ranked at #9.