This WI City Is Among The 10 Best Places To Live For Families: Fortune

WISCONSIN — Just one Wisconsin city this year made it on Fortune's list of the 50 Best Places to Live for Families, and it might not be where you'd expect.

Fitchburg, a suburb of Madison in Dane County, earned a spot at No. 10 for Fortune's 2023 ranking. The ranking comes as loneliness increased nationwide during the pandemic, making strong support systems imperative as a growing number of Americans seek new places to live, Fortune explained.

Fortune said the pandemic caused elevated levels of loneliness and social isolation, with the increase in remote work and the exodus of people from large cities — away from their support systems. When deciding where to relocate, the quality of the school system is important, but so are health services, including mental health and resources for older relatives — all of which can be an antidote to loneliness and build social ties.

For this year’s ranking, Fortune said it looked at data like affordability, walkability, and a city’s well-being index in 1,900 cities across the country.

The magazine said its analysis “resulted in a ranking of cities where people can weave themselves into the fabric of the community by accessing a myriad of resources in the town and surrounding areas.”

With a population of nearly 30,000, Fitchburg has a median household income of just under $85,000 annually and a median home sale price of $373,000

A Harris poll conducted for Fortune earlier this year found that nearly 20 percent of Americans had moved in the past year, and almost half said they planned to move in the next two years. Having nearby support systems was an important factor for those planning on moving, the poll found.

Earlier this spring, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic, and said it poses health risks as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and costing the health industry billions of dollars annually.

“The pandemic has had a number of invisible costs in our country, and the increase in loneliness, the increase in mental health strain, these are part of those costs,” Murthy said in April at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in Marina del Rey, California.