Opportunity vs Risk: Where the Tradeoff Looks Best
Every relocation is a trade. Here is what the two dimensions look like plotted against each other across published city profiles.
Key findings
- Madison, WI records the strongest combination, at 75 for Opportunity and 97 for Physical Resilience.
- Across the 105 cities scoring 60 or above on Opportunity, Physical Resilience runs from 17 to 97: a strong job market tells you very little about hazard exposure (correlation 0.26 across all 351 cities of 100,000 or more).
- 83% of the strong-labor-market cities carry at least one hazard rated elevated or high, against 87% of the rest. The ten in the second table are the extreme end of that spread, chosen for the lowest resilience, so all ten carrying one says where the table starts, not how common it is.
Opportunity and physical resilience are largely independent — a strong labor market says nothing about hurricane exposure. That makes the combination worth looking at directly rather than through a single blended score. Whether a place with strong jobs and higher exposure is a bad trade is a personal judgment, and the second table is there so the trade is visible, not to say it is a bad one.
Strongest on both
| City | Opportunity | Resilience | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|
| Madison, WI | 75 | 97 | 172 |
| Sandy Springs, GA | 84 | 85 | 169 |
| Green Bay, WI | 74 | 95 | 169 |
| Columbia, MD | 73 | 95 | 168 |
| Meridian, ID | 84 | 82 | 166 |
Strong jobs, higher exposure
| City | Opportunity | Resilience | Principal elevated hazard |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Juan, PR | 60 | 17 | Hurricane |
| St. George, UT | 72 | 21 | Wildfire |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 77 | 21 | Inland flooding |
| Sparks, NV | 68 | 22 | Wildfire |
| Reno, NV | 71 | 23 | Wildfire |
| Anchorage, AK | 84 | 23 | Earthquake |
| Miami, FL | 75 | 24 | Hurricane |
| Miami Gardens, FL | 62 | 24 | Hurricane |
| Hialeah, FL | 68 | 24 | Hurricane |
| Santa Clara, CA | 70 | 25 | Earthquake |
Neither table says one city is better than another. They describe a tradeoff, and how much each side of it matters is a personal judgment — Customize Your Score exists for exactly that.
Methodology
The AreaProfile Opportunity and Physical Resilience signals for every published city profile of 100,000 or more residents. The table shows the cities furthest above the line where the two are balanced — that is, the largest sum of the two signals — and, separately, the cities where a strong job market comes with the most hazard exposure.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Local Area Unemployment Statistics (la)
- Federal Emergency Management Agency — National Risk Index (1.20.0)
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (Table-Based Summary File) (2024)
Related
Every figure here is recalculated from the same measurements the profiles use. See the methodology for how the underlying data is collected and normalized, and the editorial policy for how these reports are written.