According to a WalletHub study, Houston is the most diverse city in America.
Houston ranked 31st in cultural diversity, 53rd in religious diversity, 96th in socioeconomic diversity, 125th in economic diversity and 136th in household diversity, according to the study.
The rest of the top ten ranking is: No. 2 Jersey City, New Jersey; No. 3 New York; No. 4 Dallas; No. 5 Los Angeles; No. 6 Gaithersburg, Maryland; No. 7 Silver Spring, Maryland; No. 8 Arlington; No. 9 Long Beach, California; and No. 10 Danbury, Connecticut and Chicago (tie).
Each city was categorized according to population-size guidelines.
Large cities: More than 300,000 residents, midsize cities: 100,000 to 300,000 residents and small cities: Fewer than 100,000 residents.
Wallet Hub evaluated the five factors using 13 following metrics: Household-income diversity, educational-attainment diversity, racial and ethnic diversity, linguistic diversity, industry diversity, worker-class diversity, marital-status diversity, age diversity, household-type diversity, household-size diversity and religious diversity.
Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, a score of 100 equates to the most diversity.
To determine the most diverse city in the United States, WalletHub compared 501 of the most populated cities — each state had no more than 10 cities each — across five key factors: 1) socioeconomic diversity, 2) cultural diversity, 3) economic diversity, 4) household diversity and 5) religious diversity. Wallet Hub used the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index method, which is a commonly accepted measure of market concentration that also works effectively as a general-purpose measure of diversity (e.g., race/ethnicity, occupations, languages, nationalities).