These Are the 10 Best American Cities for Cats, According To OneVet

We all know it's simply your cats' house that they allow you to also occupy. (Someone's gotta clean the litter box.) But if cats truly ran the world—rather than manipulate us as their fleshy puppets—where would they want to live?

Pet health subscription service OneVet might have found the answer, at least when it comes to United States cities. Measuring American cities on their kitty accommodations—the abundance of pet-friendly rental housing units, veterinarians, cat cafes, cat adoptions, and pet stores—OneVet ranked the top 10 best cities for cats as well as the 10 worst.

Here are the top 10:

10. Riverside, Calif.

9. Tampa, Fla.

8. Minneapolis

7. Denver

6. Atlanta

5. Cincinnati

4. Pittsburgh

3. Salt Lake City

2. Orlando

1. Miami

Miami earned the top spot with its high adoption rate (642 adopted cats per 100,000 people last year) and plentiful pet stores, OneVet wrote. Florida cities make up one-third of the top 10, making it very similar to a list of the 10 best cities for dogs we wrote about recently. Florida must be the place for not only retirees but pets as well.

In the top 10, Denver led the way for cat adoptions at 1,342 per 100,000 people in 2020. Salt Lake City had the fifth-highest adoption rate at 981 per capita.

Atlanta, Orlando, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh each made the 10-best list for their number of cat-friendly rental homes (a pretty big factor if you want to own a cat and also have a place to live). Somehow, Austin, Texas, made the lists for both high cat adoptions and available housing but couldn't crack the overall top 10. Must need more cat cafes!

(It was nice to see Kansas City, Mo., rank No. 8 in cat adoptions per capita. Shoutout to two of those adoptees, my cat cousins Buzz and Harley Earl.)

OK, we've seen the best. Now it's time for the worst cities for cats, according to OneVet.

10. Virginia Beach, Va.

9. Houston

8. San Francisco

7. Detroit

6. Los Angeles

5. Phoenix

4. Jacksonville, Fla.

3. New Orleans

2. Memphis, Tenn.

1. New York

Start spreading the news: New York isn't great for cats, according to this model. The city so nice they named it twice scored a hilariously low 5.93 on the 50-point scale. It only recorded 187 adoptions per capita and 17.3 cat-friendly rental units per capita, OneVet says. Youch.

Plus, only New York, Houston, and LA even have cat cafes, so the other seven were never going to do very well in this exercise.

But the bottom line is this: These cities might not have the most available housing or cat-friendly resources nearby, but as a committed cat owner, you'll still be able to find everything your cat needs to be happy and healthy. We're sure of it.