What makes a city great?

Most great cities have access to quality education, a variety of public transportation choices, disaster preparedness, and affordable housing options, to name a few factors.

For a new report, PricewaterhouseCoopers evaluated the “greatness” of 30 global cities.

The firm analyzed third-party data to rank the cities using 67 different factors across 10 categories — intellectual capital and innovation; tech readiness; city gateway; transportation and infrastructure; health, safety and security; sustainability and the environment; demographics and livability; economic clout; ease of doing business; cost.

The world’s “greatest” cities:

1. London

2. Singapore

3. Toronto

4. Paris

5. Amsterdam

6. New York

7. Stockholm

8. San Francisco

9. Hong Kong

10. Sydney

It was the first time in the study’s seven-year history that New York didn’t make it into PwC’s top five greatest cities. The Big Apple and San Francisco were the only two US cities that even made it into the top 10.

“The truth of the matter is it’s about balance. So you take Amsterdam, which doesn’t lead in any of our categories but it scores well in all of our categories. New York scores well in economic clout, being a financial hub, but it’s in 29th out of 30th place in terms of personal tax rate,” PwC partner Mitch Roschelle told Yahoo Finance.

High tax rates had an impact on other US cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, and not just New York’s.

What Brexit?

Despite the Brexit vote hurting the public perception of the UK and its economic health, London ranked No. 1 in PwC’s study.

Roschelle says the firm considered ditching the entire study because it seemed erroneous to publish a report that cited a city clouded with uncertainty as the greatest metro in the world.

But ultimately, PwC decided to go ahead with the report because a city’s greatness isn’t determined over the course of a day, year, or even a decade, according to Roschelle.

“We looked at all 67 attributes again and while the Brexit vote happened overnight, the things that made London a great city happened over the course of a generation. The will of the electorate on a specific day isn’t really going to change overnight those things that truly make a city great,” he says.

The infrastructure issue

Another major reason the US has underperformed against its European counterparts is its lagging infrastructure.

Specifically citing a lack of direct transit to a major airport in New York City, Roschelle points out that you can take the Heathrow Express in London or the bullet train in Tokyo.

“There are these infrastructure elements that literally take 20-30 years to develop. The US just isn’t competitive with peer cities around the world. I think we focus too much on being a financial center and a business center, but not the other qualities of life [like how innovative, safe and tech savvy a city is],” he said.

Ultimately, the PwC study is simply one way of pitting cities against each other, but Roschelle says it should be a wake-up call to the US government and citizens to put themselves back on the map.

Melody Hahm is a writer & reporter at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, innovation and technology. Follow her on Twitter.

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