Arlington residents appear to be taking a forget-your-troubles-c’mon-get-happy approach to life, at least according to a new data analysis that places the county #2 among the nation’s largest urban areas in terms of overall happiness of the population.
“To uncover the happiest places in America, we analyzed the 200 largest cities, 164 of which had available data,” noted SmartAsset, which last week detailed its findings. “We looked at 13 different metrics across three categories: personal finance, well-being and quality of life.”
(Full details on the methodology can be found at https://smartasset.com/data-studies/where-americans-are-happiest-2022. And yes, Arlington technically is not a city but often finds itself counted as one for the purposes of these types of rankings.)
California locales dominate the top 10. While cities like Sunnyvale and Fremont offer the some of the highest earnings for individuals, they also score high in the quality-of-life category. Specifically, top-10 California cities had lower percentages of people living in poverty, higher marriage rates and lower violent-crime rates.
Sunnyvale, Calif., which led the pack, had the highest percentage (62.5%) of residents earning $100,000 or more, low crime and just 5 percent of its residents earning less than the federal poverty level.
Arlington made it to second best on the ranking by scoring high in all three major category areas, ranking highest in the personal-finances section. Nearly half of county residents earn $100,000 or more, while living costs gobble up less than 35 percent of median household income.
Arlington also has the lowest amount of personal-bankruptcy filings in the survey. The county is an outlier in one sense – it is the only member of the top 10 where less than half the adult population is married.
Also in the top five on the survey: Bellevue, Wash. (#3), which scored highest in the quality-of-life ranking and had the lowest cost of living compared to income; Fremont, Calif. (#4), which offered high incomes, a low rate of poverty, a low cost of living compared to income and a high marriage rate; and Frisco, Texas (#5), which was tops for marriage rates and had the lowest percentage of residents living below the poverty rate.
Two other Texas cities – Plano and Roseville – were #6 and #7, with the top 10 rounded out by the San Jose, Santa Clarita and Irvine areas of California.
The county in which Roseville is located also has the 15th-lowest number of personal-bankruptcy filings study-wide.
Birmingham is the least happy on the survey. The Alabama city ranks in the bottom five across metrics such as personal bankruptcy filings per capita, life expectancy and the percentage of residents living in poverty.
Newark and Memphis follow as the second and third least-happy cities.