Arlington Ranks Among Top 10 Best Places For Wellbeing In US: Study

ARLINGTON, VA — Arlington ranked No. 6 in the overall wellbeing of its residents, according to a new study by health information website Great Green Wall.

The study, titled “The 2023 Wellbeing Index: 10 Best and Worst Places for Wellbeing in the US,” analyzed data in 562 communities that are part of metropolitan areas. The study ranked each of them against 34 factors, grouped under three pillars that constitute wellbeing: health, happiness and prosperity.

Among the factors in the health pillar were cancer, kidney disease, diabetes and cholesterol. Under the happiness pillar, the study looked at depression, mental health and sleeping fewer than seven hours a night. The prosperity pillar included several factors, including personal income, unemployment and health insurance.

Arlington ranked the best in the nation in one category among the three pillars: the percentage of its adult residents — 80.6 percent — who visited a dentist or dental clinic within the past year.

Great Green Wall is a Philadelphia-based health information website dedicated to combating unhealthy habits through education.

The researchers sourced the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Department of Health, dating from 2016 to 2023.

The five communities that ranked ahead of Arlington in the wellbeing index were Newton, Massachusetts at No. 1, followed by Sunnyvale, California, Bellevue, Washington, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Santa Clara, California.

The five worst places for wellbeing in the United States, according to the study, were Youngstown, Ohio, which ranked the worst, followed by Flint, Michigan, Corcoran, California, Saginaw, Michigan, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Almost a decade after the water contamination crisis erupted in Flint, an alarming number of the city’s residents are asthmatic (14.6 percent) and every tenth person in Flint suffers from a chronic pulmonary disease, according to the study.

The top three most alarming wellbeing factors in the U.S., according to the study, are obesity, affecting 34.95 percent, sleeping less than seven hours a night at 34.9 percent, and high blood pressure at 31.9 percent.