NerdWallet claims Arlington is best city for young adults to start a business Arlington is the best city in the country for a young adult hoping to start a business, consumer blog NerdWallet says. NerdWallet's list of the best cities for young entrepreneurs left off cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York. Not a single city in California made the top-20 list. Instead, Arlington (which actually is a county, not a city) came in first, and D.C. ranked 14th. The Midwest made a strong showing, including second-place Madison, Wis.; third-place Lincoln, Neb.; and fourth-place Minneapolis. Texas appeared three times: Austin in 7th, Plano in 9th and Lubbock in 11th. NerdWallet used several equally weighted factors to determine its list, released Tuesday. First was the value of loans to small businesses, certainly important in making a city friendly to entrepreneurs. The overall health of the local economy, measured by its income and its unemployment rate, mattered too, as did the cost-of-living, since those new businesses need to keep expenses in line. Plus, NerdWallet took into account the sort of people with whom new business owners will be networking. Cities are better places for entre­pre­neur­ship if those entrepreneurs can meet people ages 25 to 34 and people with bachelor's degrees, the blog reasoned. Arlington paled in comparison to many other cities when it comes to business-specific factors. Banks in 2013 gave Arlingtonians $193.01 per capita in commercial and industrial loans under $250,000 - less than a quarter of the amount loaned per capita in Madison or Lincoln. D.C. residents received less than those in any other city on the top-20 list, just $18.66 in small-business loans per capita. Arlington and D.C. also had the two highest cost-of-living index scores of any city on the list. But Arlington's per-capita income of $64,298 put it well ahead of all other cities in the top 20 - the closest was Seattle, at $45,029. It also had far more young adults than any other city on the list - 27.8 percent of the population. The closest was D.C., at 22.4 percent, then Denver with 21.9 percent. Arlingtonians are also staggeringly well-educated. Among residents 25 and older, nearly three-quarters have a bachelor's degree. Only four other cities on the list (including D.C., at 55 percent) can say that even half of their adults have college degrees. What this list really proves, then, is perhaps not that Arlington is the best place to be a young person starting a business. What it proves is that if you are a young, educated person in Arlington, you'll have lots and lots of peers.