A new ranking released Thursday from Vocativ picked the 35 Best Cities for People Under 35. It includes plenty of cities known to be hipster enclaves, like Portland, Nashville and Austin, plus the more well-known concrete jungles of New York City and oceanside San Francisco.
For their Livability Index, Vocativ used some conventional measurements like lowest average rent, cheapest gallon of gas and lowest cost of transportation and highest public transportation ridership. However, Vocativ had some very unique items they reviewed like most coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, music venues and cheap takeout.
Then there are the more provocative points they considered, like cheapest pack of cigarettes, pint of beer and the lowest price for an ounce of high-quality marijuana.
"We wanted to create a semi-exhaustive, mostly scientific guide to America's most livable cities based on criteria our readers actually care about," said Scott Cohen, CEO of Vocativ. "When you take a look at the data, a picture starts to emerge that can often be surprising. Like, maybe moving to Fresno isn't totally insane."
Vocativ describes itself as a global news site "for the Digital Generation." The company said they combed the Deep Web to compile their ranking, the part of the Internet that's openly available but isn't tagged to search engines, like academic papers and social media posts.