Compare places through climate, cost, and daily-life data.
WhyThere is built for one specific question: not just where is good, but why there? We help you compare cities, browse meaningful lenses, and understand the tradeoffs behind a move without relying on real-estate hype.
Start Here
If you landed here from Google, these are the fastest on-ramps into the product.
Compare Cities
Start with a direct head-to-head comparison across climate, cost, schools, parks, and daily life.
Explore With Filters
Browse places by comfort, sun, housing costs, walkability, altitude, and other practical signals.
Browse Collections
Use WhyThere’s themed lenses like No Real Winter, Surprisingly Soggy, or The Altitude Hack.
Try a Starter Path
If you are not sure where to begin, these are easy first clicks that show how WhyThere works.
Seattle vs Denver
Clouds, sun, altitude, and the shape of daily life.
Miami vs Phoenix
Humidity, dry heat, cost, and what “warm” actually means.
Browse Comfort First
Start with WhyThere’s broad climate lens, then narrow from there.
No Real Winter
A fast way to understand the climate-led side of the product.
A relocation tool built around tradeoffs, not marketing copy.
A lot of place content is either travel promo, real-estate sales, or vague “best places” listicles. WhyThere is trying to be something narrower and more useful: a way to compare real climate, housing, geography, and daily-life signals in one place.
That means you can move between direct comparisons, open-ended browsing, themed collections, and editorial lenses without leaving the same system.
Independent by default
We do not take money from agents or tourism boards to rank or promote places.
Global when the data supports it
WhyThere is not U.S.-only by design. Some of the best fits may be across a border.
Transparent about the inputs
If a score exists here, it should be explainable, inspectable, and grounded in real datasets.
Good First Lenses
These are good examples of how WhyThere thinks: not generic categories, but decision lenses that explain why certain places keep showing up.
No Real Winter
Places where winter barely asserts itself, with low snow and an easy year-round climate profile.
Walkable Cities With Lower Rent
Cities that still let you get around on foot without forcing big-coastal housing costs.
The Altitude Hack
Cities where elevation quietly rewrites the climate, keeping warm latitudes and sunny interiors milder than they should be.
A Few Memorable Ideas
These editorial pieces tend to click with new readers because they feel like extensions of the product, not detached content marketing.
The Sun Tax: How Much You Really Pay for Perfect Weather
San Diego, Phoenix, and Miami offer year-round sunshine. We break down the exact mathematical premium you pay to never see snow.
The Altitude Hack: How Some Sunny Cities Stay Strangely Mild
Quito, Mexico City, Medellín, and a handful of highland cities feel cooler and steadier than their latitude suggests. Altitude is the trick.
Rainier Than Their Reputation: The Sunny Cities That Quietly Out-Rain Seattle
Charleston, Houston, and New Orleans are not famous for drizzle. But by annual rainfall totals, they quietly outrun Seattle while keeping much brighter personalities.
Our Data Sources
Transparency matters. These are some of the main public and specialist datasets behind city pages, the compare matrix, collections, and editorial analysis.
Demographics & Economics
Median Age, education levels, remote-work rates, population density, and median household income are sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates.
Real Estate & Housing
Median home values and median rent are sourced from Zillow datasets including the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) and Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI).
Climate & Environment
Historical sunny days, rainfall, and temperature patterns are processed from Open-Meteo historical climate records, with current atmospheric conditions layered in from OpenWeather where needed.
Safety & Crime
U.S. city safety now prefers agency-level violent-crime data from the FBI's Crime Data Explorer. International safety and crime indices are supplemented with Numbeo quality-of-life data, and Numbeo remains the fallback when a U.S. city cannot be matched cleanly to an FBI reporting agency or the FBI source is temporarily unavailable.
Walkability & Transit
Walkability and transit metrics are sourced from Walk Score, reflecting pedestrian friendliness, transit usefulness, and neighborhood-level infrastructure density.
Connectivity & Infrastructure
Broadband and fiber availability are assembled from public ISP reporting and city-level infrastructure datasets, then normalized into city-level connectivity signals.
Risk & Disaster Resilience
Flood and wildfire risk indicators are built from FEMA National Risk Index data and related hazard modeling sources.
Education & Schools
School ratings are imported offline from official state accountability and report-card systems, then joined to city pages using NCES school directory data. These are sourced state metrics rather than heuristic placeholders.
Current official-state coverage: PA, OR, NY, WA, CA, TX, FL, NJ, NC, GA, MA, SC, TN, VA, IL, OH, WI, IN, KY, AR, MS, MI, AL, OK, LA, CO, UT, AZ, KS, IA, NE, MN, MO, NV, RI, DE, ID, CT, MD, VT. Methodology still varies by state, so the 1-10 scale is directionally useful but not perfectly uniform across every state yet.
Support WhyThere
WhyThere is still a small independent project. If the site has been useful and you want to help fund more data coverage, editorial work, and product improvements, you can support it on Ko-fi.