These Are The 10 Best Places To Live In Maine

Between eating some really fantastic seafood and enjoying beautiful scenery, Maine residents have a pretty sweet place to live. But which spots are really the sweetest?

Do you know of a place where you can spot a moose in the wild while you’re drinking Moxie soda? A home state that inspired both poets Longfellow and E.B White? Where you can find almost all of the nation’s blueberries and most of the nation’s lobster? As one of the state slogans suggests: It must be Maine.

Basically, Maine is great. Which places in the Pine Tree State are really the ones to pine for, though?

Here at Movoto Real Estate, we’ve been busy as the state insect—the honeybee—trying to figure out which locations in the state are simply the best. We collected the numbers, analyzed the data, drooled over pictures of lobstah, and found the 10 top places in Maine. Drumroll, please… that list of places is:

1. City of South Portland
2. Town of Scarborough
3. Town of Brunswick
4. Town of Cumberland
5. Town of Topsham
6. Town of Freeport
7. City of Portland
8. Town of Hampden
9. Town of Kennebunk
10. City of Westbrook

Now, hold your horses (or maybe moose… mooses?) before getting upset that your hometown isn’t on the list. It still could have scored very well, and you can find out by looking at the table at the bottom of this post. First, though, lets talk about how exactly we got this rating.

Figuring Out The Maine Event (How We Got Our Results)

So, how did we manage to figure all this out? Well, it’s not like a little birdy told us. Even the state bird, the Chickadee. It’s all about the numbers for us. As with past lists, like Oklahoma and Missouri, we collected a list of the biggest places in Maine with over 5,000 population, which was 51 places. We then  looked at seven specific criteria in different categories. These were:

• Total amenities
• Quality of life (cost of living, median home price, median rent, median household income, and student-to-teacher ratio)
• Total crimes
• Tax rates (sales tax and income tax)
• Unemployment
• Commute time
• Weather (temperature and air quality)

We took those numbers, ranked them from 1 to 51 for each category with 1 being the best possible score, and then combined them to get an overall Big Deal Score for every place. After all that, we found that South Portland was simply the highest ranked across the board and was thus No. 1. Let’s take a look at it as well as the other fantastic cities that make up the best of Maine.

To see the full article, please visit http://www.movoto.com/blog/top-ten/best-places-to-live-in-maine/.