Between NYC’s towering piles of trash, endless rat sightings (though NYC surprisingly is not the rattiest city in America), and dirty subway air, the average city dweller would think that NYC is the dirtiest city in America. But believe it or not that’s apparently not the case!
In fact, out of the dirtiest cities in America New York City isn’t even in the top ten.
A recent study done by LawnStarter recently updated their “Dirtiest Cities in America” ranking. And as for the dirtiest one, that title went to Houston, Texas (kicking out Newark, New Jersey from the top spot). And though New York City dodged taking the crown it landed itself in 12th place–which is still higher up than us New Yorkers would like to be!
To conduct the study, LawnStarter gathered publicly available data for each of the 200 biggest U.S. cities on various factors such as median air quality index, population density, share of homes with mold, tons of waste in landfills, and share of residents who find the city dirty and untidy.
Those factors were then grouped into four categories: Pollution, Living Conditions, Infrastructure, and Consumer Satisfaction. Weighted scores for each city’s category were then determined to find the average score for each city.
New York City received an overall score of 46.19, 9.18 points less than Houston, with a score of 102 for pollution, 1 for living conditions, 62 for infrastructure, and 13 for consumer satisfaction.
And though NYC’s air quality isn’t always the best–and hazy NYC skies due to Canadian wildfire smoke is likely to become the new norm–all top five spots for cities with the worst air quality went to California.
The top 10 dirtiest cities in America:
1. Houston, Texas
2. Newark, New Jersey
3. San Bernardino, California
4. Detroit, Michigan
5. Jersey City, New Jersey
6. Bakersfield, California
7. San Antonio, Texas
8. Fresno, California
9. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
10. Yonkers, New York
The full ranking can be found here.