Insights—Best Cities for Nature and Walking

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Walkability and nature are factors that are very important to many movers. While the United States is not generally known for its walkability, as compared to smaller and denser regions like Europe, cities such as New York and Boston are walkable enough to not require a car. New York City also has made a massive commitment to city parks, putting too many to number on nearly every street corner. But nature can be absent from many cities, and that's a dealbreaker for the outdoorsmen and -women out there.

Let's first take a look at the best cities for nature and walking. We have two metrics, one for the presence and accessibility of nature in a city, and another for walkability. We simply average the two to get an overall score for nature and walking. Here are our top ten winners:

Honorable mentions: Boston and Berkeley.

The top ten are devoid of Southern cities (unless you count DC as Southern—we won't even wade into that time-honored debate) so we need a special ranking for cities south of the Mason-Dixon line. Here it is:

While we're on the subject of the South, walkable cities tend to be northerly cities, as the first list in this section convincingly shows. What if you want walkability, nature, and warm weather? Let's screen for only cities with January lows above 45 degrees, a criterion that eliminates about 80% of American cities.

Here are the winners:

Nothing against Florida and California, but they may not be to some folks' interest. Let's exclude these states and take another look.

There's another thing that jumps out about our initial unfiltered list of winners. It includes San Francisco, Boston, and the New York metro area. Those are all really expensive places. And walkability is usually associated with higher desirability and higher cost, while suburban schlock has negative associations and lower prices. So let's take a look at some of the affordable areas with great walkability and nature. Here we'll cut off home prices at the median, or $412,000.

Again, the cold North is heavily favored here, and particularly the Midwest, which is not known for its walkability. Let's do a combination query: good walkability and nature, good affordability, and warm weather! We'll cut winter weather off at a 40 degree January low. There are only four results with a nature/walkability score above 60:

Want a list of cities to move that you can filter by nature proximity and walkability as well as other factors? Take our quiz!