I live in Denver now but did a bit of analysis off of census and economic data:
1. Move somewhere where college graduates choose to move (this is a proxy for restaurants, arts, high paying jobs)
2. Move somewhere where desired incoming levels have net population increases (immigration)
3. Move somewhere within the major metropolitan statistical areas with continuous growth (city populations are funny, MSA is more informative for my case)
4. Scrape user profile locations off multiple websites to determine "Online participation" as a proxy for more modern citizens
5. Scrape job sites by the keywords in my field, full time, non-contract
I made a information map of MSA (Metropolitan statistical areas) and then linked it to common names for those areas and sites such as reddit.com/r/cincinnati and then scraped the online users over time. There was a bit more to it though around sentiment analysis because some cities higher on the MSA are really in decline, but have increasing populations of very low wage workers with decreasing high wage workers.
The cities on the top of the list were not surprising given my very limited scope (San Francisco, New York, Denver, Seattle, Boston etc).
The one that ranked highest that was most surprising was Minneapolis, they are fairly strong in almost all the metrics I was looking at.
Good question - the flip side is, if I cover those bases, then I have time to do the things I like because I am not worrying about them. With Denver I ended up with skiing, hiking, Christmas tree / pumpkin farms, city amenities etc
1. Move somewhere where college graduates choose to move (this is a proxy for restaurants, arts, high paying jobs)
2. Move somewhere where desired incoming levels have net population increases (immigration)
3. Move somewhere within the major metropolitan statistical areas with continuous growth (city populations are funny, MSA is more informative for my case)
4. Scrape user profile locations off multiple websites to determine "Online participation" as a proxy for more modern citizens
5. Scrape job sites by the keywords in my field, full time, non-contract