L.A. Looks Nothing Like America (and That's Fine With Us)

This election season feels like a disaster movie trailer voiced by the late, great Don LaFontaine. 

In a world where we discriminate by religion, deport 11 million residents and think any judge who isn't white is suspect, there's one city where you can find solace. Welcome to Los Angeles …

Yep, L.A. is its own place, often set apart from the rest of America, or at least from the really lame parts.

A new analysis of Metro Areas That Most & Least Resemble the U.S. by personal finance website WalletHub finds that L.A. ranks low — 359th overall out of 379 cities.

L.A. (actually the L.A.–Long Beach–Anaheim metropolitan statistical area) also ranked near the bottom (50th out of 52) for big cities, the site found.

WalletHub looked at several metrics, including age, race, gender, income and even “tenure” in each town. 

Los Angeles highlights include our bottom ranking, 379th, for tenure. Thanks, Hollywood. We ranked low (348th) for race. Thanks, Latinos. We also ranked fairly low (132nd) for our horrific “wealth gap” between rich and poor. Thanks, Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Here are some breakout stats for L.A. that were given to us by a WalletHub spokeswoman:

124th – Age
348th – Race
166th – Household Makeup
290th – Percent of Population with Health Insurance Coverage
379th – Housing Tenure (Renter-to-Owner Ratio)
100th – Household Income
132nd – Wealth Gap
304th – Percent of Households Receiving Food Stamps
183rd – Educational Attainment 

If you want to move to a city that looks most like America, Indianapolis is the place. So go. Please. (L.A.'s getting kind of crowded.)

Credit: WalletHub

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