Asking whether Detroit is a good place to live is a reasonable question, and one the national rankings answer in ways that will surprise most people who have not been paying close attention. Detroit carries a reputation largely formed in the years surrounding the 2013 bankruptcy. The mental model has not kept pace with the city. The rankings have.
What follows is a straight look at how Detroit scores across the most credible national measurement systems available, the wins, the honest challenges, and everything in between.
How we did
Detroit appears across two categories of national rankings in this breakdown. The first is WalletHub, a personal finance website that conducts annual city studies across dozens of metrics. Each study grades cities on a 100-point scale and weights each metric to reflect its relative importance to the topic being measured. The full methodology and complete results for each study are accessible through the links in each section title.
The second source is the USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, an annual competition in which a panel of editors and subject-matter experts nominates finalists and the general public votes to determine the winners. These represent what everyday people across the country choose when asked to compare cities directly, which gives them a different kind of credibility than algorithm-weighted scoring alone.
Detroit's story looks different depending on which lens is doing the measuring. Both are worth understanding.
Best Riverwalk in America — No. 1, three years running
The Detroit Riverwalk was voted the best riverwalk in the United States three consecutive years — 2021, 2022, and 2023 — through the USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice competition, beating nominees from Tampa, Boston, Cincinnati, San Antonio, and Indianapolis each time.
The Riverwalk now stretches nearly five miles along the Detroit River, draws 3.5 million visitors annually, and completed the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park addition in October 2025, adding 22 acres of new public space to the west end. The transformation from a largely inaccessible industrial waterfront to one of the most-visited urban riverfronts in the country took roughly two decades and represents one of the more remarkable pieces of public infrastructure investment in any American city of Detroit's scale.
The vote is determined by the public after an expert panel selects the finalists. These are wins driven by real people who chose Detroit over every other city on the list, and kept choosing it three years running.
Best Public Square in America — No. 1, three years running
Campus Martius Park in downtown Detroit has been named the best public square in the United States three consecutive years — 2023, 2024, and 2025 — through the USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, drawing more than 4.5 million visitors annually.
The park hosts more than 1,200 programmed events each year, from free summer concerts and outdoor movies to The Beach, a seasonal installation with 400,000 pounds of sand — to a winter ice rink that earned its own separate national title as the best ice skating rink in America in 2024. Campus Martius served as the primary venue for the 2024 NFL Draft, which drew 775,000 people over three days and set a national attendance record for the event.
Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport adds to the national recognition picture. J.D. Power ranked it the top major airport in North America for customer satisfaction in 2023, and it has held the number two position in both 2024 and 2025, a consistent result that gets very little national attention relative to what it represents for a city that frequently receives unflattering press.
Best Art Museum in America — No. 1, two years running
The Detroit Institute of Arts was named the best art museum in the United States in both 2023 and 2024 through the USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice competition, beating the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago back to back.
The DIA houses more than 65,000 works across more than 100 galleries. For residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, general admission is free. That combination of a nationally ranked collection and free local access is nearly impossible to find anywhere else in the country, and it is exactly the kind of daily quality-of-life fact that does not show up in most livability rankings but matters significantly to families evaluating a place to put down roots in Midtown Detroit, along the Woodward corridor, or in any of the surrounding Oakland County communities within easy driving distance.
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Best & Worst Cities for First-Time Home Buyers — No. 1 in affordability out of 300 cities
Detroit ranks first in the country in home buyer affordability, according to WalletHub's analysis of 300 cities. The study measures affordability by comparing median home price to median household income, and no major American city scores better than Detroit on that metric.
When the full WalletHub index accounts for market attractiveness, quality of life, and additional factors, Detroit places among the top tier for large cities nationally. The practical picture for buyers extends across the entire region. Throughout Oakland County, in communities including Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hazel Park, Berkley, and Clawson, buyers find well-maintained single-family homes with square footage and lot sizes that simply do not exist at comparable price points in Sun Belt markets that have seen dramatic appreciation over the past five years. In established communities across Macomb County and along the Woodward corridor, the value-per-square-foot equation consistently favors buyers willing to approach this market with current information.
In Livingston County, communities including Brighton, Howell, and Hartland offer a distinct version of the same value story, lower density, larger lots, and a quality of life that suburban markets in most major metro areas price out of reach for first-time buyers entirely.
For buyers who have been told they cannot afford homeownership in a major American city, Detroit's first-place affordability ranking deserves serious attention. The question is not whether Detroit is affordable. The data confirms that it is. The more useful question is which specific community and price point fits each household's priorities.
The Perna Team can walk you through exactly what your budget gets you across Detroit's communities right now, specific neighborhoods, what is currently on the market, and what the buying process actually looks like from offer to close. Call (248) 494-4698 or visit pernateam.com to start that conversation.
Best Sports Cities in America — No. 27 out of 400 cities
Detroit ranks 27th nationally as a sports city and second nationally as a hockey market, according to WalletHub's 2025 analysis of nearly 400 cities. Detroit supports four major professional sports franchises, and the Detroit Red Wings have won 11 Stanley Cup championships, the most of any American NHL franchise in league history.
WalletHub's evaluation accounts for team performance, ticket affordability, fan engagement, and stadium access across football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Detroit is one of a small number of American cities with active major professional franchises in all four traditional sports, with the Lions at Ford Field, the Tigers at Comerica Park, the Pistons and the Red Wings at Little Caesars Arena, all within a compact downtown and Midtown footprint that makes attending games genuinely accessible without the commute and parking costs that define the experience in larger coastal markets.
For residents who consider live sports access a meaningful part of quality of life, ticket pricing in Detroit remains competitive by any national comparison. That combination of franchise depth, downtown location, and relative affordability is a quality-of-life factor that most national livability rankings do not weight adequately.
Best & Worst Places to Retire — No. 177 out of 182 cities
Detroit ranks 177th out of 182 cities in WalletHub's retirement analysis. Weather is the primary contributing factor, followed by cost-of-living pressures on fixed incomes and healthcare access metrics.
This is a category where the data is not favorable, and it is worth acknowledging honestly. For retirees specifically evaluating the city of Detroit, the factors behind that ranking are real considerations that no amount of context fully overrides.
What the ranking does not fully capture is the experience of retirees who prioritize cultural access and cost-effective homeownership over climate. A world-class free art museum, a nationally ranked public waterfront, a functioning downtown with genuine amenities, and a cost of entry into homeownership that allows fixed-income households to own and maintain a home without the financial pressure that comes with markets that have seen dramatic price appreciation — these are factors no single retirement metric captures cleanly. The ranking is what it is. For retirees who know what they value and have spent real time in the city, the lived experience is consistently more nuanced than the number suggests.
Healthiest & Unhealthiest Cities in America — No. 168 out of 182 cities
Detroit ranks 168th out of 182 cities in WalletHub's 2025 healthiest cities analysis, making it the lowest-ranked city in Michigan. The study evaluates healthcare access and cost, food environment, fitness infrastructure, and green space.
These metrics reflect decades of economic disinvestment in certain Detroit neighborhoods, where limited grocery access, fewer fitness facilities, and higher rates of chronic illness are real and documented challenges. They are not exaggerated, and anyone evaluating this market honestly should not expect the data to say something different than it does.
The ranking applies to the city proper. For any household choosing a specific neighborhood or surrounding community, the health infrastructure picture varies substantially by zip code — and Detroit's continuing neighborhood recovery means that picture is actively changing in areas including Midtown, Corktown, and East Jefferson, where new grocery access, fitness infrastructure, and green space investment have meaningfully changed what daily life looks like compared to a decade ago. [LINK: "what a city-level ranking measures and what any given household will actually experience" → https://www.thepernateam.com/blog/detroit-ranked-among-americas-least-happy-cities-but-theres-more-to-the-story/] is a distinction that matters significantly in a market as varied as Detroit's, and it is where local expertise consistently makes the difference between a good decision and a wrong one.
Driving concerns
Best & Worst Cities to Drive In — Bottom 10 out of 100 cities
Detroit ranks in the bottom 10 of 100 major cities for driver-friendliness according to WalletHub's 2025 study, scoring poorly on road quality and vehicle operating costs.
The ranking accounts for road maintenance costs, insurance rates, traffic congestion, safety, and infrastructure condition. Detroit scores poorly on road quality and operating costs, both of which reflect the combined effect of Michigan's extreme freeze-thaw cycle, among the most damaging in the country for pavement, and the long-term challenge of infrastructure funding at the city and state levels. Anyone who has driven M-10, I-75 through the city core, or residential side streets in Detroit neighborhoods already knows what the data describes.
What the ranking does not measure is commute experience relative to truly congested markets. Detroit's daily commute times remain far more manageable than comparable coastal cities. For households relocating from Chicago, Boston, Seattle, or New York, the adjustment in commute time frequently offsets the road condition frustration in ways that matter meaningfully in everyday life.
Driving improvements
Infrastructure investment is underway across Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, with major corridor resurfacing programs, interchange improvements along I-75, I-96, and M-59, and county road millage investments representing long-term funding commitments that current-condition data does not yet reflect. The scale of regional investment underway will take years to fully show up in national rankings, but the trajectory is clear and the dollars are committed.
Beyond the rankings
Not every Detroit strength shows up in a WalletHub study, and several of the city's most distinctive qualities require a different kind of accounting.
"Detroit's transformation into a nationally recognized travel destination" → has been documented by major editorial travel publications, which placed Detroit among their top must-visit destinations for 2024 and named it a top 10 global travel destination in 2023. These are editorial selections by professional travel journalists, not reader votes or algorithm-weighted scores, and they reflect a city whose revitalization, including the completed renovation of Michigan Central Station in Corktown and the continued expansion of the Riverwalk, has created an experience that most of the country is still in the early stages of discovering.
Detroit is the birthplace of techno music, a genre that shaped global nightlife culture and continues to define the sound of clubs in Berlin, Tokyo, and Ibiza. The Movement Electronic Music Festival, held every Memorial Day weekend at Hart Plaza on the Detroit Riverfront, is one of the most respected electronic music gatherings in the world and draws an international audience each year. For a city of Detroit's scale, that kind of global cultural identity is rare and genuinely distinctive.
"Detroit's restaurant scene has been building serious national momentum" → with James Beard Award nominations for Detroit-area chefs becoming a recurring feature of the national culinary conversation. The food landscape spans Detroit-style pizza — which earned the city back-to-back national rankings as the best pizza market in the country in 2022 and 2023, to a diverse dining corridor in Dearborn that draws food travelers from across the Midwest, to a growing collection of chef-driven restaurants in Midtown and Corktown that would hold their own in any American food city.
Eastern Market, operating continuously since 1891 in the Eastern Market district just northeast of downtown Detroit, is the largest outdoor farmers market in the United States. It draws tens of thousands of visitors each Saturday across six sheds and hundreds of vendors representing local farms, butchers, flower growers, specialty food producers, and artisans from across Michigan. For residents who prioritize access to local food and genuine community, it is one of the most remarkable urban market experiences anywhere in the country.
The bottom line
Detroit is a city of real contrast. The things that show up in a national ranking and the things that make daily life here genuinely good are not always the same list.
On paper, the wins are real. First in the country for first-time buyer affordability. Three consecutive national titles for best riverwalk and best public square. Two consecutive national titles for best art museum. Four professional sports franchises. A cultural identity that draws visitors from around the world. These are not promotional talking points, they are competitive results with sources attached.
The challenges are also real. Road quality falls below the national average. Health outcomes at the city level reflect genuine inequities that are not resolving quickly. The retirement ranking for Detroit proper is not a selling point. Acknowledging these things directly is more useful to anyone seriously evaluating this market than minimizing them.
What the full picture suggests is that the gap between Detroit's national reputation and its current reality has arguably never been wider. For buyers and families willing to approach this market with current information rather than assumptions formed a decade ago, that gap represents a persistent and meaningful opportunity.
The Perna Team has worked with buyers, sellers, and families across Oakland, Wayne, Macomb, and Livingston counties for more than two decades. If you want a straight, experienced answer about which Detroit-area communities, price points, and neighborhoods best match your specific situation, the conversation starts at (248) 494-4698 or pernateam.com.
Key Takeaways
- The Detroit Riverwalk was voted the best riverwalk in the United States three consecutive years (2021, 2022, 2023); Campus Martius has been named the best public square in the country three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025); and the Detroit Institute of Arts earned the national title of best art museum two years running (2023, 2024). All three are USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice wins determined by public vote.
- Detroit ranks first nationally in housing affordability for first-time home buyers, according to WalletHub's analysis of 300 cities, making it the most favorable major American city on that specific measure.
- Detroit supports four major professional sports franchises and ranks second nationally as a hockey market, with the Detroit Red Wings holding 11 Stanley Cup championships — the most of any American NHL franchise.
- The city of Detroit ranks 177th out of 182 cities in WalletHub's retirement analysis and 168th out of 182 in the healthiest cities ranking. Both reflect city-level conditions that vary significantly by neighborhood and surrounding community.
- Road quality places Detroit in the bottom 10 of 100 major cities nationally. Commute times remain substantially lower than most comparable coastal markets, and infrastructure investment along I-75, I-96, M-59, and county corridors is underway.
- Detroit is the birthplace of techno music, home to one of the world's most respected electronic music festivals, the site of the largest outdoor farmers market in the United States at Eastern Market, and a destination named among the top must-visit cities globally by major editorial travel publications for 2024.
- The gap between Detroit's national reputation and its current reality represents a genuine opportunity for buyers who approach this market with current information rather than assumptions formed a decade ago.
People Also Ask
Is Detroit a good place to live in 2025 and 2026?
Detroit ranks first nationally in home buyer affordability and has earned national titles for best riverwalk, best public square, and best art museum. Road quality and city-level health rankings present real challenges. The overall experience depends significantly on which specific neighborhood or surrounding community a household chooses.
What national rankings has Detroit won?
Detroit has earned national titles for best riverwalk three consecutive years, best public square three consecutive years, best art museum two consecutive years, and best ice skating rink. Detroit ranks first nationally in home buyer affordability and second nationally as a hockey city. Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport ranked first in North America for customer satisfaction in 2023 and second in 2024 and 2025.
Is Detroit affordable for first-time home buyers?
Yes. WalletHub ranks Detroit first in the country in housing affordability, measuring median home price against median household income, among 300 cities analyzed nationally. That affordability extends into surrounding Oakland, Macomb, Livingston, and western Wayne County communities where buyers consistently find more value per square foot than in comparable Sun Belt markets.
What are the best suburbs to live near Detroit?
Communities along the Woodward corridor including Birmingham, Royal Oak, and Ferndale offer walkable environments with strong dining and retail. Macomb County communities including Shelby Township and Rochester offer strong school systems and housing value. Novi, Northville, and Canton in western Wayne County are consistently cited among Michigan's most desirable family communities. Livingston County communities including Brighton and Howell offer lower density and larger lots at competitive price points. Oakland County suburbs including Bloomfield Hills and Troy, are recognized for top-ranked school districts.
Is Detroit a good place to raise a family?
Detroit and its surrounding Oakland County suburbs include several of Michigan's highest-rated school districts. The region offers access to four professional sports teams, a nationally ranked free art museum, extensive parks and greenway infrastructure, and housing affordability that makes family-scale homeownership achievable across more income levels than most comparable American metros.
How does Detroit compare to other Midwest cities for quality of life?
Detroit leads comparable Midwest metros in first-time buyer housing affordability and sports market depth. Cultural institutions including the Detroit Institute of Arts and Eastern Market hold national rankings. Road quality ranks below most comparable Midwest cities. Health outcomes at the city level trail Columbus, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. The overall comparison depends significantly on which specific Detroit-area community is being evaluated.
What is Detroit's sports scene like?
Detroit supports four major professional sports franchises. WalletHub's 2025 analysis of nearly 400 cities ranked Detroit 27th nationally as a sports city and second nationally as a hockey market. The Detroit Red Wings have won 11 Stanley Cups, the most of any American NHL franchise. The Lions, Tigers, Pistons, and Red Wings all play within a compact downtown and Midtown footprint, with ticket pricing that remains competitive compared to coastal markets.
Is Detroit a good place to retire?
Detroit ranks 177th out of 182 cities in WalletHub's retirement ranking, with weather and healthcare access as primary factors. For retirees who value cultural access, cost-effective homeownership, and a four-season city with genuine urban amenities, the lived experience in Detroit and its surrounding communities is more nuanced than that number implies.
What is Detroit's cultural scene like nationally?
Detroit is home to the nationally ranked Detroit Institute of Arts, the largest outdoor farmers market in the United States at Eastern Market, and the Movement Electronic Music Festival held in the birthplace of techno. Major editorial travel publications named Detroit a top must-visit destination for 2024. James Beard Award nominations for Detroit-area chefs have become a consistent feature of the national culinary conversation.
How are Detroit's roads and what is being done about them?
Detroit's roads rank in the bottom 10 of 100 major cities nationally according to WalletHub, driven by infrastructure underfunding and Michigan's extreme freeze-thaw cycle. Significant investment is underway along I-75, I-96, M-59, and county corridors across Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. Daily commute times in Detroit remain substantially lower than in comparable coastal markets.
What improvements has Detroit made in recent years?
The Detroit Riverwalk completed its westward expansion with the opening of the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park in October 2025. Michigan Central Station completed its renovation after decades of vacancy. Downtown Detroit has added significant hotel inventory, restaurant development, and public space programming. Detroit's population grew by an estimated 12,487 residents in the year ending May 2025, a notable shift following decades of decline.
What do major travel publications say about Detroit?
Editorial travel outlets including Conde Nast Traveler and AFAR placed Detroit among their top must-visit destinations for 2024. Travel Lemming ranked Detroit among the top 10 places to travel globally in 2023. These are editorial selections by professional travel journalists evaluating Detroit's revitalization, infrastructure investment, and cultural depth.
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