Below is their methodology. Aside from the "Amenities" categories which seems arbitrary, criteria ranking is based on state averages.
What Makes a Jersey City Better than the Rest?
New Jersey’s motto may be “liberty and prosperity,” but for our study, we needed a few more criteria to determine just which cities were the best. So we settled on the following seven criteria:
•Amenities per person (pizza places, bagel shops, and diners / person)
•Amenities total (total pizza places, bagel shops, and diners)
•Cost of living (percent above or below state average)
•Crime (percent above or below state average)
•Education (high school degree attainment rate compared to state average)
•Median Income (city’s average compared to state average)
•Home value (percent above or below state average)
We started with a list of the 50 most populous municipalities (cities, towns, villages, Census Designated Places) in New Jersey, then gave each city a rank from one to 50 in the individual criteria above based on the data, with one being the best possible score.
As far as amenities go, we chose pizza places, bagel shops, and diners as three amenities that clearly represent New Jersey. From there, we decided to break this category up into both amenities per person and the total number of amenities per city, because while we recognize that it’s great to have a range of choices for each person, we didn’t want to dock cities points just because they have larger populations.
After we rated each city, we averaged the criteria together and gave each city an overall score. The lower this number was, the higher the city ranked.
For a complete ranking of all 50 cities in our study, jump to the bottom of the post. [shown above].