Seattle ranks 2nd in America in Bloomberg Top 50

Bloomberg Business Week recently released its rankings for the top 50 cities in America. Seattle came second only to San Francisco, and Portland was fifth.

While rating cities can sometimes feel like comparing apples to oranges and is often a matter of personal taste, Businessweek.com and Bloomberg Rankings teamed up to look at the same data points across the board for 100 of the nation’s largest metro areas — leisure, education, economy, crime, and air quality in addition to major pro sports leagues. Based on these metrics, Seattle’s numbers come out as follows:

Bars: 219
Restaurants: 2,307
Museums: 29
Libraries: 42
Pro sports teams: 4
Park acres per 1,000 residents: 9
Colleges: 8
Percent with graduate degree: 16.8
Median household income: $90,303
Percent unemployed: 7.2

With a population of just over 624,000 and more than its share of rain, Seattle is still considered “the nation’s spiritual home for coffee and personal computing,” according to Business Week.