Top tier Tea ranked as second best place to live in SD

Residents in Tea have a reason to pat themselves on the back for keeping up their community. The city earned a high ranking as ‘One of the Best Places to Live in South Dakota’ on a website that specializes in these types of community rankings. HomeSnacks.net ranked Tea as the #2 spot in South Dakota to live

According to HomeSnacks’ website, HomeSnacks has been professionally ranking cities, neighborhoods, counties, and states across America for over three years and has 57 categories that are utilized for rankings.

HomeSnacks’ website has the following statement, “HomeSnacks combines recent data from the Census, FBI, OpenStreetMaps, and dozens of other sources into bite-sized studies to help you understand what it’s like to live in different communities across the country.”

The site was founded by Chris Kolmar and Nick Johnson and has been featured on major news outlets such as CBS, NBC, and ABC News and a variety of news and radio stations, newspapers, and websites across the country. The analysis that Tea was featured in was written by Kolmar and was released on December 8, 2018. According to the analysis, this is the fifth time that HomeSnacks has ranked the best places to live in South Dakota.

Tea made its way into the list as HomeSnacks broke down data from around the state. First, the HomeSnacks’ analysis started by breaking down locations into three categories: cities with populations over 2000, towns with populations between 1000 and 2000, and small towns with populations below 1000. 34 cities, 37 towns, and 239 small towns in South Dakota were then compared to each other to determined HomeSnack’s top winners.

The criteria looked at by HomeSnacks were: median home values, median income, population density, unemployment rate, commute time, crime, education leaves, health insurance coverage, and poverty rates. In addition, data sourced from from the 2017 Census data plus FBI crime data was used in the analysis.

(Photo by Michael Bauman)