WalletHub ranking highlights Juneau as safest U.S. city, New Orleans least safe

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Juneau tops safest cities ranking

Highlights

WalletHub ranks Juneau as the safest U.S. city in 2024, citing the lowest murder and pedestrian fatality rates and zero terrorist incidents in a decade.
New Orleans ranks lowest overall among 182 cities, with weak home, community safety, and financial conditions dragging down its position.
The report shows city safety rankings hinge variously on crime, financial health, and natural-disaster risk, with Detroit posting the weakest financial safety score.

How the ranking measures city safety

As reported by Business Insider, citing WalletHub, the comparison covers the 150 largest U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populous cities in every state, for a total of 182 locations. The analysis uses 41 indicators across three categories, home and community safety, natural-disaster risk, and financial safety, drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Home and community safety includes measures such as crime rates, traffic and pedestrian fatalities, and the number of emergency responders per capita. Natural-disaster risk is based on city risk-index scores for threats including earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires, while financial safety considers poverty, unemployment, and identity theft complaints per capita.

Juneau leads the ranking overall, helped by the lowest murder rate and lowest pedestrian fatality rate in the group, along with no recorded terrorist attacks or terrorist-related incidents in the past decade. Warwick, Rhode Island, ranks second, and Overland Park, Kansas, takes third place, despite a weaker natural-disaster score than its overall standing.

The rest of the top 10 includes Burlington and South Burlington in Vermont, Virginia Beach in Virginia, Cedar Rapids in Iowa, Casper in Wyoming, Boise in Idaho, and Yonkers in New York. Several of these cities score especially well in financial safety or natural-disaster resilience rather than across every category equally.

Regional gaps show different types of risk

The lowest-ranked cities show a different balance of risks, with weak home and community safety and financial conditions weighing heavily on their overall positions. New Orleans ranks last overall, while Baton Rouge, Baltimore, Memphis, and Philadelphia also place near the bottom of the list.

St. Louis and Cleveland appear among the 10 least-safe cities even though they perform better on natural-disaster risk than on other measures. Houston and Jacksonville rank poorly across multiple categories, while Detroit posts the weakest financial safety result in the comparison.

The results underline that city safety is not defined by crime or disaster exposure alone. In some markets, lower disaster risk supports stronger overall rankings, while in others, poverty, unemployment, and community-level safety indicators have a larger effect on how cities compare.

Our earlier article on rising long-term U.S. borrowing costs explained how 10-year Treasury yields above 5% are pushing mortgage rates higher and tightening financial conditions for households. It also outlined how elevated yields increase federal interest expenses and complicate efforts to curb deficits amid political gridlock, leaving fiscal pressures and affordability risks elevated.

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