[ad_1]
Nowhere are Americans living, laughing and loving more than these metropolitan areas.
A new report has ranked the 20 happiest cities in the US — and the findings show a stark contrast between the satisfaction levels on the East versus West Coast.
According to a study by Miami-based personal finance company WalletHub — which analyzed the nation’s 180 largest cities based on such measures of contentment as sports participation, work hours and income growth — the San Francisco Bay Area city of Fremont is the merriest in the land.
The 227,000-some person California metropolis had the highest indicators of happiness across 29 key measures, including the lowest separation and divorce rates, the third lowest depression rates and the highest share of households with an income over $75,000.
“Studies have shown that increasing your income also increases your happiness up to $75,000 but not beyond,” WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe said. “Therefore, cities where a lot of people make at least $75,000 per year are more likely to have maximized their happiness.”
Taking the silver for America’s second happiest urban area is Overland Park, Kansas, which is a populous suburb of Kansas City, Missouri — and has the nation’s lowest poverty rate (4.2%).
Overland — which is Kansas’s second largest city — also brags near-record low rates of unemployment and food insecurity, and residents also reportedly get more sleep than residents of other cities, according to WalletHub.
In third place, back on the West Coast, there’s San Jose, California, which has such happiness credentials as the longest average life expectancy in the country and very low comparative rates of suicide.
Not a single city in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or Connecticut ranked in the top 20 — but five other California cities and Seattle made the cut.
That said, New York came in 86th, shortly behind Miami (84th), Chicago (83rd) and Pittsburgh (79th).
As for final three, with the lowest scores across the various happiness measurement tools, there’s Montgomery, Alabama, followed by Cleveland and, in dead last, Detroit.