Alexandria, LA

Reading the Alexandria Life Score

Alexandria's composite score of 56.4 out of 100 — earning a grade of C- — places the metro at rank #104 of 387 in the national file, inside the top 73%. The composite is a weighted roll-up of seven dimensions: Cost of Living (20%), Wages (20%), Rent (15%), Safety (15%), Schools (10%), Childcare (10%) and Environment (10%), each normalized to a 0-100 percentile scale. The strongest inputs are Cost of Living (97/100) and Rent (93/100), which pull the composite upward, while Environment (2/100) and Wages (6/100) drag it downward. Because the weights are fixed, a metro that scores high on the 20%-weighted cost and wage dimensions can absorb mediocre scores elsewhere and still land a high composite — and vice versa.

Under the cost layer, BEA Regional Price Parities read 85.7 for Alexandria — 14.3% below the U.S. average, with rent-specific RPP at 53.7. BLS wage records do not match this metro in the latest OES cycle. HUD's 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent for the metro comes in at $994/mo (studios $728/mo), the figure that governs housing-choice voucher payment standards and anchors the rent sub-score.

Safety is scored from FBI UCR at the state tier (LA), which reads 410 violent crimes per 100,000 residents and 1773 property crimes per 100,000 — state-level crime always overstates rural-county risk and understates urban-core risk inside a single metro, so the safety score should be read as a regional baseline, not a street-level reading. School quality rolls up from NCES at 18.6:1 statewide student-teacher ratio with 11.3% charter share — a structural signal, not a performance measure. Childcare uses DOL center-based infant cost of $7,396/yr, a line item that can shift a household's real cost-of-living picture more than headline RPP. Environment draws on EPA records including 29 Superfund sites tracked for LA. Compared against ranks #101 through #107 in the table below, Alexandria's position is driven by the dimension weights above — not by any single metric — which is why the radar and sub-scores are worth more attention than the composite.