No Surprise Here – Portland, Maine Rated No. 6 Among Safest Cities in America
“Maine” and “safe” are, at least to me, synonymous. Regardless of the shenanigans that go on around here, you can’t deny that we are fortunate to live in a fairly sheltered place. A study done by WalletHub upholds this conviction.
The personal finance website ranked 182 cities in America based on safety across 44 metrics, including assaults per capita, unemployment rates, road quality, financial safety, uninsured rates, fraud complaints, and mass shootings, just to name a few. You can see the full list and methodology here.
(Okay, but I'm surprised we made it high on the list if they put "road quality" as an indicator...)
Portland, Maine was ranked as #6 out of 182 cities with a score of 82.98, not far off from the #1 safest city of Columbia, Maryland that has a score of 87.83 (on a scale of 0-100, with 100 representing the highest level of safety).
The data was collected from reliable sources like the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, so this wasn’t just a few guys throwing together a list of places that they perceive as safe - this is the real deal.
Other New England cities that made the cut high on the list were South Burlington, VT (#2); Nashua, NH (#3); Burlington, VT (#9); Manchester, NH (#11); and Worcester, MA (#18). Another Maine shoutout was Lewiston ranked at #42 and our neighbor Boston, MA came in at #54.
Does this mean you should hit the streets at 1 a.m. alone with your guard down? Absolutely not. But, this study does give us Portlanders some bragging rights.