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The Best Places For Veterans 2014

This article is more than 9 years old.

You might not think of Pittsburgh, PA as the most promising place for a veteran to live after leaving the service. The rust belt city isn’t known for having a big military base or a major defense contractor. But it has other attributes that make it an attractive spot for vets. The metro area has a growing population of nearly 2.4 million,  but median home prices have stayed at an impressively affordable $113,500. Median rent for a two-bedroom dwelling is just $800. While the city’s unemployment rate of 5.9% is on par with the national average, a number of Pittsburgh employers make hiring vets a priority, including Alcoa, Heinz, FedEx (its ground service division is based in Pittsburgh), PNC Bank and managed health care giant Wellpoint. There are also three well-regarded universities, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne and University of Pittsburgh and an art school, the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

These advantages land Pittsburgh in the No. 1 spot on a new list of best places for veterans to live, released today in anticipation of Veterans Day by USAA, a San Antonio financial services company that caters to members of the military, veterans and their families. USAA worked with a Chamber of Commerce Foundation program called Hiring Our Heroes, an initiative started in 2011 to help veterans and their spouses find jobs, and with Sperling’s Best Places, a website that puts out ratings on the country’s best places to live according to measures like affordability, services for children and safety.

For the first time this year, USAA is releasing three different lists, one it calls “Starting Out,” another “Mid-Career,” and a third called “Military Retirement.” I’m focusing on the Starting Out list, since 80% of veterans leave the service after just one term lasting four to six years. Only about 5% of enlisted active duty members hold a bachelor’s degree and while separate degree statistics aren’t available for younger vets, it’s safe to say that an even lower percentage of that group have earned degrees, which is why USAA weights the list in favor of educational opportunities. Another reason education is important to this group is that the Post-9/11 GI Bill pays the equivalent of 100% of a four-year in-state college or university or up to $20,000 per academic year of a private school.

To be considered for the Starting Out list, cities had to rate above a baseline: the unemployment rate had to be less than one percentage point above the national average, the median cost of living less than 10 percentage points above the national average, and the violent crime rate below the top 2% for all metro areas. Once cities made the initial cut, they were evaluated based on the following:

-          Number of military skills jobs like information technology and health care

-          Recent job growth

-          Population growth

-          Health resources

-          Presence of colleges and universities

-          Colleges’ presence on the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges for Veterans list

-          GI Bill enrollment

-          Certification/license transfers (Iowa, North Dakota, Nebraska and Nevada don’t give credit for all military education, training  and experience)

About unemployment and job growth: I think these numbers are key because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans aged 18-24, face a 21.4% unemployment rate, versus 14.3% for the general population. The numbers are better for the 24-34 age group of post-9/11 veterans, at 9.5%, but they are still higher than the 7.3% for that age group among the general population.

One more note about unemployment rates:  USAA used yearlong averages as of March 2013 when the national unemployment average was 7.4% and the average in Pittsburgh was 6.8%. In the slideshow above I’ve converted the unemployment rate figures to the most recent numbers. The national rate is now 5.9% and as of August, the most recent month for which figures are available, Pittsburgh’s is also 5.9%. I’ve done this so that readers aren’t thrown by high unemployment rates like St. Louis’s yearlong average back in March of 7.2%. The rate there has come down to 6.6% as of August.

USAA rates the best places for veterans by metro area rather than city. See the slide show above for the top ten metro areas for vets who are starting out as civilians after one tour of duty. To see all three lists on USAA’s website, click here.