Not much unites the world, but this year one thing can be said for most people in most places: things are less affordable than they used to be. For a whole host of complex, overlapping geopolitical reasons, costs have gone up across the board, but it’s not all bad – value for money does still exist in a few precious places.
Every year at , we survey thousands of city-dwellers about their hometowns. This year, more than 18,000 people from more than 100 major cities responded, telling us everything from how highly they rate their local nightlife to how affordable life is.
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We asked residents about the priciness of a range of everyday aspects of going out and enjoying the city, including: eating out at a restaurant, going to see a movie, grabbing a coffee, going to see art, going to see theatre or comedy, going to see live music, getting a drink in a bar and going on a night out.
We then took the average percentage of respondents who described each of those activities as ‘affordable’ or ‘free’ and crunched the numbers to figure out the world’s most expensive (and affordable) places to live, all according to locals themselves.
The results? Medellin in Colombia is the world’s most affordable city, and Bogotá, the nation’s capital, came second. Medellin got high affordability scores across the board: 89 percent of people reported that eating out was reasonably priced, 83 percent said the same for grabbing a drink in a bar, and an impressive 94 percent said that going for coffee is cheap. Overall, a very low percentage of respondents across the two Colombian cities described going out in the city as too expensive.
Although you might not generally think of it as being on the cheap side, Beijing came third overall, with 76 percent of its residents saying that eating out is affordable and 73 percent agreeing it’s cheap to see a live performance, like theatre or comedy. Most of the affordable cities identified in our survey are in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or South America, with New Orleans in fourth and Naples in fifth bucking the trend.
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