Fortune Well Announces Inaugural Fortune 25 Best Places to Live for Families Ranking
Ann Arbor, Michigan, takes the top spot, followed by Wylie, Texas, and Olathe, Kansas
NEW YORK, Sept. 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Fortune Well launched the inaugural Fortune 25 Best Places to Live for Families ranking, highlighting areas in the U.S. where multigenerational families are most likely to have access to critical resources, community support, and financial well-being.
Fortune ranks the following cities as The Top 10 Best Places to Live for Families:
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Wylie, Texas
- Olathe, Kansas
- Mason, Ohio
- Morrisville, North Carolina
- Clearfield, Utah
- Gaithersburg, Maryland
- Leesburg, Virginia
- West Chicago, Illinois
- Novi, Michigan
View the complete Fortune 25 Best Places to Live for Families here.
Nearly half of Americans who are raising children under the age of 18 are also shouldering the responsibility of regularly caring for their aging parents in some capacity, according to a survey of some 1,200 respondents conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of Fortune in August.
This so-called "sandwich generation" is the target population of the Fortune Well ranking. Location can make all the difference when Americans are managing caregiver roles. High-quality schools, reliable health care, ample senior support, and safe neighborhoods help bolster the well-being of multigenerational families and mitigate stress for caregivers.
Fortune found that seven in 10 Americans with at least one living parent say they expect to help their aging parents regularly in the future, with 88% of millennials planning to care for their baby boomer parents. Read more here.
With data provided by Caring.com, CVS, Healthgrades, Sharecare, and Witlytic, Fortune evaluated some 2,000 cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages, and townships that had between 25,000 and 750,000 residents across all 50 states in the U.S. in order to determine the best places to live for families within this category. Fortune found that communities in the West, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic were more likely to offer better access to quality hospitals and doctors, solid public schools, and support for older residents compared with communities in the Southeast, and at more affordable rates than most coastal metros like New York City and Los Angeles.
Fortune Well is presented by CVS Health.
To select the top 25 Best Places to Live for Families, Fortune evaluated some 2,000 cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages, and townships that had between 25,000 and 750,000 residents across all 50 states in the U.S. This range provided a broad universe of places that offered high-quality amenities in communities that had a hometown feel.
To analyze each place, Fortune collected more than 215,000 unique data points across five broad categories:
- Education
- Aging resources
- General wellness
- Financial health
- Livability
This ranking focused on families, particularly the subset of Americans who are shouldering the responsibilities of raising their own children while caring for aging parents. With their needs in mind, Fortune put extra emphasis on factors that met the unique challenges of this cohort—such as the quality of local school districts, graduation rates, nearby college affordability, the number of quality nursing homes, assisted living communities, home health care agencies, risk of social isolation among older residents, and access to solid health care providers.
To ensure the winning places were cities and towns where residents could afford to buy homes without breaking the bank, Fortune eliminated locales with home sale prices that were more than twice as high as the state median and/or more than 2.75 times higher than the national median.
Additionally, Fortune wanted to highlight places that offered diverse neighborhoods. To that end, the editors cut any town where more than 90% of its population is white, non-Hispanic. From there, Fortune compared the racial breakdown of a place against state benchmarks, eliminating any place that was less diverse than either state or national medians.
To provide a broad range of options, the editors determined there could be no more than two places per state among the top 25 places and no more than one winner per county or major metro area within a state.
View the complete methodology here.
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