How to Read a Boom Town Score Before You Move

Punch up two counties on this site and you can get whiplash. Robeson County, North Carolina sits at a Boom Town Index of 99.8 — almost a perfect score, near the very top of every county we track. Santa Clara County, California — the heart of Silicon Valley — scores a 0.2. Rock bottom.

If you read that as "Robeson is a better place to live than Silicon Valley," the index just misled you. That's not what the number means. And once you see what it actually measures, you'll read every score on this site more carefully — and make a sharper relocation call because of it.

The score answers one narrow question

The Boom Town Index isn't a livability grade, a prosperity meter, or even a population-growth score. Under the hood it's a machine-learning model pointed at one specific thing: whether a county's home prices are likely to rise faster or slower than the national rate over the next stretch. We rank every county by that predicted outperformance and stretch the result across a 0-to-100 scale.

So a 99 is the model saying "this county's home values look positioned to climb faster than average." A 2 is "this one looks likely to lag." That's the whole claim. It says nothing, directly, about schools, safety, paychecks, or whether you'd actually enjoy living there.

Momentum and level are two different measurements

Here's the distinction that makes the whole site easier to read. Every county carries two kinds of numbers:

• Momentum — which way things are heading. The Boom Town Index, the price forecast, recent job and building-permit trends. A bet on change.
• Level — where things stand today. Median income, the share of adults with a college degree, life expectancy, access to healthcare. A snapshot of now.

A place can score high on one and low on the other. And across our data, the two tend to pull in opposite directions — with surprising consistency.

Why the top-scoring counties start from a lower base

Take every county with at least 50,000 people, sort them by Boom Town Index, and split them into ten equal groups. Now compare the "level" numbers in the top group against the bottom group:

This isn't just a quirk at the two extremes — the gradient is smooth. Walk down the deciles from highest score to lowest and the education, income, and longevity figures climb steadily the entire way. The counties our model likes best for future price growth are, on average, today's lower-income, less-degreed places. The ones it likes least are the established, affluent metros — Santa Clara, King County (Seattle), Denver.

Why would that be? The honest version is "the model found this pattern, and here's the most likely reason." The model is trained to predict relative price growth — how much a county beats or trails the national average. Places that are already expensive and built-out have less room left to run; places starting from a lower base have more of it. That's a familiar idea in economics — convergence, catch-up, mean reversion, pick your term — and it's an interpretation of the pattern, not a dial we set by hand.

How to actually use this before you move

None of this makes a high score bad or a low score good. It makes the score specific. A relocation decision needs both readings, because they answer different worries:

• Chasing appreciation, or a cheaper entry point with upside? Momentum is your number. A high Boom Town Index is the model's bet that prices here have room to climb — handy if you're buying and want the value to grow underneath you. Our most-undervalued-housing ranking is built for exactly that reader.
• Optimizing for daily life — schools, hospitals, a career ceiling? Those are level questions. Read the income, education, and health numbers on the county's own page, not the headline score.

The mistake is collapsing the two into a single verdict. A 99 is a forecast about a housing market. It is not a promise that the county has strong schools or a deep job market today — and a 5 doesn't mean an established metro has stopped being a fine place to build a life.

We've watched this exact split play out on other dimensions, too. When we lined the top-scoring counties up against safety data, nearly half graded C or worse — strong price momentum, mixed livability. And the counties that turn out calmest for retirees often carry the weakest price forecasts, because "quiet" and "booming" are usually different addresses. Momentum and level, pulling apart yet again.

Quick questions

Does a high Boom Town Index mean a county is growing fast in population? Not necessarily. The score forecasts home-price growth relative to the national rate. Some top-scoring counties had flat or even shrinking populations last year.

Is a high score a good place to live? It's a good price-growth forecast. Whether it's a good place to live depends on the level metrics — income, schools, health, jobs — which each county page lists separately.

Why do wealthy metros like Silicon Valley score so low? The model predicts which counties will beat the national price trend, and places that are already very expensive tend to have less room left to outperform. A low score is a comment on future momentum, not on the quality of the place.

Bottom line: treat the Boom Town Index as one reading on a two-dial gauge. It tells you which way a housing market might be heading — nothing more, nothing less. Pair it with the level numbers before you pack a single box.