What Is the METRO Score? The City Health Index Created by Seyi Fabode

You can feel when a city is off. The bus that never comes. The water notice taped to the door. The neighbor who moved away and wasn't replaced. But you can't take that feeling to a city council meeting.

That's why I built the METRO Score. In the book, I put it this way: "You need numbers. You need a framework that translates the off vibes into hard, measurable indicators that can be used to diagnose problems, track progress, and hold leaders accountable."

Why another city score?

There is no shortage of city rankings. Most of them measure one thing at a time: the economy, the cost of living, the transit system. The problem is that cities don't fail one system at a time.

Take a resident I call Gabriel. Whether he can buy healthy food depends on whether there's a grocery store nearby. If there isn't, it depends on transportation. If he has no car and the buses don't run, it depends on whether he has neighbors who will drive him. And if he doesn't have a job, none of the rest matters much, because he can't pay the bills.

Food, transit, community, jobs, utilities, climate risk: they are one system. Existing rankings measure them separately, or not at all. The METRO Score was built to measure the connections. It covers the economic indicators that dominate most rankings, plus the social, environmental and institutional ones that decide whether a city is thriving or merely surviving.

How the METRO Score works

METRO stands for Municipal Evaluation of Trends, Resilience, and Outcomes. It is built on 15 metrics, organized into three tiers by how much each one weighs in the final score:

• Tier 1: Critical (18%–10% weight each). The vital signs. If they fail, they can bring the whole city down.
• Tier 2: Important (8%–5% weight each). Systems essential to long-term health that may not trigger an immediate crisis.
• Tier 3: Supporting (3%–1% weight each). Important dimensions that are less immediately critical.

The score then gets a reality check from the bond market. A Market Confidence Factor blends in General Obligation bond ratings from agencies like Moody's and S&P, and yield spreads from actual municipal bond trades. The final formula is:

METRO Score = 85% × weighted score of the 15 metrics + 15% × Market Confidence Factor

Cities without traded municipal debt (mostly smaller ones) keep their score from the 15 metrics alone.

Every city ends up in one of five categories:

What 1,499 cities revealed

We ran the METRO Score across 1,499 of the largest cities in the US. The results should concern every infrastructure investor and policymaker in the country.

The median city scores 48.5 out of 100. Only about 8% of cities break above 60, and the 90th percentile sits at just 57.2. Fewer than 30 cities in the entire dataset score above 70.

When we grouped cities by their infrastructure DNA instead of their size or region, five types emerged:

Only 28% of cities are strong on both infrastructure and fiscal capacity. Nearly three-quarters of American cities are in some form of structural misalignment. And the cities at the top of the scale, places like Lexington, Massachusetts and Los Gatos and Menlo Park in California, score above 80 while cities ten times their size struggle to break 55.

Infrastructure performance is not primarily a function of how much money you spend.

It is a function of how well a city's soft systems (governance, regulation, community engagement, fiscal management) enable its hard systems to deliver for residents. The cities at the top don't have more money than New York or Los Angeles. They are better governed, better regulated and better integrated. That's the soft-system risk investors keep missing.

Why a credit rating can't see this

Some of the most revealing results are the paradoxes.

Virginia Beach has a Revenue Base Stability score of 98.03 and a AAA credit rating. Its overall METRO Score is 49.42: Distressed, because of the climate and infrastructure challenges that sit alongside its fiscal strength.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard and MIT, is exceptionally well managed, with a Governance Effectiveness score of 72.49 and the highest possible credit ratings. Its Emergency Response Capacity is 17.82.

Denver's economy is running hot, with a Revenue Base Stability of 91.38. Its Water Infrastructure Viability is 7.90.

At the other end, Cape Coral, Florida scores 36.01, deep in the Intervention range, with a Capital Replacement Index of 0.00 and high hurricane and flood exposure. Saginaw, Michigan scores zero on capital replacement, governance and water infrastructure at once.

When we tried to predict a city's bond market standing from its 15 METRO metrics, the models found no relationship at all. The two measure different things. That is the core finding: the bond market prices a city's ability to pay. It does not see whether the city's soft systems are about to fail.

Who the METRO Score is for

"The METRO Score isn't an academic exercise and it's designed to be used by residents, by community organizations, by journalists, and by city leaders." It's also for investors and developers deciding where infrastructure money will work and where it will be wasted. A city of 100,000 scoring 45 when similar cities reach 62 has a 17-point gap. Closing even half of it would transform how livable, competitive and investable that city is.

A score is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis is only useful if it leads to treatment. The rest of Your City Sucks! is the treatment plan.