IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

How can you find your town’s sister city?

Answer: the Peer City Identification Tool

The relationship between “sister cities” can seem somewhat arbitrary. But a new interactive map is “like a DNA test for civic data,” and shows where American cities truly are similar or divergent in the hopes that policymakers and other officials can understand a city in the context of its peers.

The Peer City Identification Tool was developed by the Community Development and Policy Studies division of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and uses four vectors: equity, resilience, outlook and housing. The data comes from the American Community Survey and historical Decennial Census records, and includes 300 cities that had a population of at least 50,000 in 1960 and that now have a median of around 100,000.

Users input a city or locate it on the map and select one of the four vectors to find where its sisters are in that vertical. For example, in terms of equity (racial and socio-economic composition), Sacramento, Calif., is similar to San Antonio, Texas, and Providence, R.I. But for housing statistics it is more like San Diego and Portland, Ore.