There are many reasons people from around the country are flocking to live in Parkland. One of them: Parkland is the safest city in Florida. The website HomeSnacks ranked Parkland as the safest city in Florida. 2021 marks the highest-ranking Parkland has attained since the rankings were first published in 2013.
HomeSnacks claims to “paint a picture of what’s happening in a region based on ‘Friday Night Science’ — how’d you argue at a bar. To do that, they gather data from around the web to help determine a wide array of factors about where you live, things like safety, desirability, and culture.”
This year’s rankings mark the seventh time the site has published its findings. Parkland has been included on their list each year. Weston was the only other Broward city on the list, coming in at third.
To determine the rankings, researchers reviewed several criteria to give a city its overall score. Cities were indexed and ranked on various crimes, including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, car theft, and arson. Parkland was near the top in the state for every category.
According to the survey, Parkland was the second safest city for violent crimes and the third safest city for property crime. Parkland had 198 total crimes in 2021, which is a rate of 562 per 100,000 people. The low crime rate puts Parkland 77% below the national average.
In addition to Parkland and Weston, the top ten included Marco Island, Longboat Key, Flagler Beach, Sanibel, Indian Harbour Beach, North Palm Beach, Bay Harbor Islands, and Lake Alfred. Parkland’s number-one ranking returned the city to its previous position as an extremely safe place despite the horrible school shooting three years ago. The same study found the most dangerous cities in Florida to be Florida City, Lake City and Opa Locka, in that order.
In HomeSnacks’ broader “Best Places to Live” rankings, Parkland came in at 10th. The city ranked highly for job opportunity, housing, safety, amenities, diversity, and education, with only affordability and commute time dragging down its scores. The study criteria included median home values, median income, population density, unemployment rate, commute time, crime, education levels, health insurance coverage, and poverty rates. It noted that Parkland has a population of 31,454, a median income of $154,844, a median home value of $611,800, and an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent.
