Sustainable development cities focus on the three E's of sustainability, i.e., economically prosperous, socially equitable, and environmentally sustainable. In this paper, we studied the problem of constructing an evaluation index system for evaluating the level of sustainable development cities. Concretely, we constructed an evaluation index system for evaluating the sustainable development cities under three first-layer attributes, i.e., economics, society and environment, and selected thirteen alternative second-layer attributes for these three first-layer attributes, then we presented a correlation analysis method to select the optimal second-layer attributes, and finally determined ten optimal second-layer attributes.