Rogers Park Is Named Best Neighborhood In Chicago In New Rankings

By Mae Rice in News on Apr 6, 2016 7:10PM



Rogers Park, via Stephanie Barto/Flickr

Rent has already firmly established that we should measure our lives in love, but lately, we've all moved onto the next frontier of measurement: measuring our neighborhoods. According to real estate website Redfin, we should measure them in "hotness," which is extremely abundant in Ukrainian Village. According to lesser-known real estate website AptAmigo, we should measure neighborhoods by cost of living (but only if they're really close to the Loop—otherwise we should just skip them).



Real estate website Trulia recently made its own contribution to the neighborhood-measuring conversation, suggesting we measure neighborhoods by their Live Well Index. This index, which Trulia created in-house, essentially measures quality of life, and seems geared towards families with young kids. It rewards neighborhoods with quiet streets and low traffic, play amenities (like playgrounds, parks, and "indoor bounce houses"), and widely available "care" (both medical services and day care).

Trulia used this index to rank a total of 877 neighborhoods across the country—and the highest ranked Chicago neighborhood was Rogers Park, coming in at #11 nationwide. Apparently, fully half of Rogers Park's streets qualify as quiet, and it has 6.5 "play-centric amenities" per square mile.

The top 10 Chicago area neighborhoods to "live well" in, according to Trulia, were:

1. Rogers Park (#11 nationally)

2. DePaul (#21 nationally)

3. Uptown (#58 nationally)

4. West Town (#65 nationally)

5. Forest Glen (#68 nationally)

6. Ravenswood (#71 nationally)

7. North Center (#77 nationally)

8. Edgewater (#80 nationally)

9. Lincoln Square (#91 nationally)

10. Edison Park (#93 nationally)

Take this with a grain of salt, though. This index is solid, but it also skips many key quality of life indicators, like proximity to public transportation; number of bars per square mile; and availability of tacos and/or donuts at four in the morning, which is when we all need them most.