Which cities are most like SLO? This New York Times interactive has the answer

What does San Luis Obispo have in common with Kansas City, Sacramento and Houston?

Well, according to The New York Times, more than you might think.

The national newspaper published an interactive on Wednesday that allows you to see which cities across the nation are the most similar to your city, based on the mix of jobs represented and local demand.

For example, both Sacramento and SLO have higher-than-average concentrations of police officers, clinical laboratory scientists and courtesy associates. According to the New York Times, Sacramento is the most similar city to SLO — it just has more people.

What Southern city is most similar to SLO? That would be Houston, which also has about three times the average amount of lecturers and associate professors, thanks to 40 colleges in the Houston area.

What about a city like SLO, but with a higher number of people who voted for Trump? That's Jacksonville, Florida, which has a lot of aircraft mechanics and health center managers, just like us.

Maybe you want to move to the Midwest or the Northeast, but keep livin' the SLO life. Your best chances of that are in Kansas City, Missouri, or New Haven, Connecticut. Kansas City has a high concentration of clinical laboratory scientists and para-educators, while New Haven has a high concentration of para-educators and physician assistants.

However, the top 10 metro areas with the highest similarity to SLO are almost all in California; topping that list are Sacramento, Salinas, Santa Rosa, Santa Maria and Oxnard.

According to the interactive, our neighbors in the Santa Maria and Santa Barbara areas could find similar job prospects in San Diego (culinary managers and manufacturing technicians), Chicago (school psychologists and nurses), Boston (behavioral therapists) and Miami (revenue managers and private bankers).

You can check out the interactive (and search for other cities) at this link.

This story was originally published April 3, 2018 at 4:32 PM with the headline "Which cities are most like SLO? This New York Times interactive has the answer."