The 20 Best Cities for Trick-or-Treating

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The perfect recipe for stellar trick-or-treating? Safe streets, easy walking, and, of course, bucketloads of candy. That’s the criteria real estate site Zillow.com used for its annual “Trick or Treat Index,” which ranks the 20 best cities for hoarding Halloween loot. Topping the list for the fourth year in a row is San Francisco, followed by L.A., Chicago and Philadelphia. “We wanted to surface the places where a savvy trick-or-treater could get as many candy bars as possible (meaning they can hit a lot of homes in one night) and get really good candy bars, as well as the cities where parents can actually enjoy their walk and feel the family is safe,” Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow, tells Yahoo Parenting. So Zillow used four equally weighted variables: population density, median home value, walkability, and crime rate. “San Francisco really shines in the wealth factor—the median home value is just under $1 million—so that population can afford quite a few 100 Grand Bars.”

Kids in Columbus and Las Vegas can rejoice—these cities are new to the list in 2014. “Las Vegas’s median home value grew more than 16 percent over the last year, compared with a national growth rate of 6 percent,” Olsen says. And with that increase in home value should come a boom in candy offerings. Miami, Buffalo and Cincinnati, on the other hand, all dropped off the list this year.

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But no matter where you live, get ready to bust out the broomsticks and skeleton suits, and tell your kids to start working up an appetite—there’s candy to be had!