LendEDU – an online marketplace for private student loans and student loan refinancing – has crunched the numbers and concluded that among the 3,000 communities it studied, Cranberry Township is the only one in Western Pennsylvania to make the top 250.
The study looked at income, average monthly home cost including mortgage, house market values and property tax rates. Then it assigned a score for each community. In Cranberry’s case, the median individual earnings from income after taxes, as determined by the Census Bureau, is $51,560 with an average home market value of $236,600 and an average monthly cost of $1,567.
California, where monthly expenses typically exceed $3,000, came in with the highest number of communities in the LendEDU list, largely because of the potential for reselling already-expensive houses for even higher prices. Yet the Number One community on its list – Seal Beach, California – had a median home value of just under $300,000. And Hurricane, West Virginia as well as two towns in Louisiana where the monthly costs are all under $1,000, also made the list.