I feel like I've been lucky to live in Missoula in 2020. Yes, there's a pandemic going on, and yes, a lot of aspects of normal life still aren't the same. We haven't had big concerts and the Griz didn't play this year... but compared to so many other parts of the country, we really figured out ways to connect in spite of all that.

We had Centerfield Cinema and all kinds of outdoor, socially-distanced events at Ogren Park this summer; Logjam Presents is slowly bringing back live music with The Wilma Cabaret shows; and we've seen people come together to support each other, with vital services like the Missoula Food Bank still helping people in their time of need.

So when I saw this list that WalletHub put together of the best small cities to live in throughout the US, I just naturally assumed that Missoula would be somewhere near the top. They looked at over 1200 US cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 for this study - so where did Missoula rank?

Well, not as good as I thought, but still pretty high up there - they averaged together the ranking for "Affordability," "Economic Health," "Education and Health," "Quality of Life," and "Safety," and found that Missoula placed in the 74th percentile of all the cities. (For context, the 99th percentile represented the top 1 percent of all cities in the study, so 74th is still a solid place to be.

However, looking deeper into it, check out our ranking on Quality of Life: we were number 38 out of 1200! That's pretty darn impressive, so I'll take that as a win.

Do you think Missoula should rank higher on this list?

10 Smallest Towns in Montana

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