So.... the real estate website Movoto has ranked the Best-Dressed small cities in America, and Boca Raton has come in at #2 on the list -- beating even Miami! It's not because of your grandma's pink flamingo-print Lily Pulizer ensemble, but because of cold, hard real estate statistics.
So, thanks Tory Burch, for putting your retail store in the Town Center Mall instead of, like, Coral Gables.
America's Best Dressed Small Cities By Movoto Real Estate
The writers say that they used the following criteria:
-- High-end fashion stores per capita -- High-end shoe stores per capita -- High-end jewelry stores per capita -- Tailors per capita -- Dry cleaners per capita
Once we had our criteria, we created a list of 153 small cities with populations between 99,999 and 75,000 to research. We surveyed each city to determine how many of each type of store or service they have using Yelp, and in the case of clothes, shoes, and jewelry, we only counted the highest-priced results. The cities were ranked on a per capita basis for each criteria, with 1 being best and 153 being worst for fashion. Then, using the magic of Saturday Night Science, we averaged out the individual category results to come up with our Big Deal Score. The city with the lowest Big Deal Score was the winner.
The Top Ten included hotspots like Albany, NY and Evanston, IL. And Santa Monica (huge outdoor mall!) topped the list:
They only ranked cities with a population between 75,000 and 99,999:
1. Santa Monica, CA 2. Boca Raton, FL 3. Newport Beach, CA 4. Westminster, CA 5. San Mateo, CA 6. Santa Barbara, CA 7. Albany, NY 8. Evanston, IL 9. Mission Viejo, CA 10. Miami Beach, FL
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