Fortune Well launched its second Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families ranking, which this year showcases the city in each U.S. state where multigenerational families are most likely to have access to critical resources, community support, and financial well-being. Sierra Vista was the top-ranked Arizona city, coming in at No. 25. Two cities, Olathe, KS, and Iowa City, IA, made the list for the second year in a row.
LEARN MORE: The 100 Best Places to Live and Work in Arizona for 2023
This March, a Harris poll conducted on behalf of Fortune found that nearly half of Americans plan to move within the next two years. The Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families list will give those movers a sense of where they may be most likely to thrive. In her introduction to the list, Fortune reporter Alexa Mikhail explains that an uptick in remote work and relocations out of major metropolitan areas during the COVID-19 pandemic have since contributed to an uptick in loneliness. Cambridge, MA, the top ranked city on the list, even incentivizes residents to host block parties and get to know their neighbors.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy confirmed this at the Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in April, stating, “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.”
Mikhail writes: “For those who have recently relocated, finding a better community or area and being closer to support systems were among the most important considerations when choosing where to live. For those who plan to move within the next two years, 79% reported nearby support systems as a top factor.”
Of the 2023 list, Fortune Wellness Editor Jennifer Fields says, “Last year we focused on the 25 places most able to support multigenerational families, regardless of location. This year, as part of Fortune’s ongoing commitment to meeting our readers where they are, we decided to showcase 50, giving working professionals a sense of where their families may be best supported, regardless of their state of residence.”
The top 10 Fortune Best Places to Live for Families—the U.S. cities most likely to feature such support systems are:
- Cambridge, MA
- Portsmouth, NH
- Silver Spring, MD
- Tualatin, OR
- Middletown, DE
- Olathe, KS
- Eastvale, CA
- Wellington, FL
- Greenburgh, NY
- Fitchburg, WI
See all of the Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families here.
Fortune Well is presented by CVS Health.
Methodology for the 2023 Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families List
To select the Best Places to Live for Families in each state, Fortune evaluated nearly 1,900 cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages, and townships that had approximately 20,000 residents across all 50 states in the U.S. This range provided a broad universe of places that offered high-quality amenities in communities with a hometown feel.
To help thoroughly analyze each place, Fortune reviewed more than 200,000 unique data points across five broad categories:
- Education
- Aging resources
- General wellness
- Financial health
- Livability
This ranking focused on multigenerational families, many of whom are shouldering the responsibilities of raising their own children while caring for aging parents. With their needs in mind, Fortune paid particular attention to factors that met the unique challenges of this cohort—such as the quality of local public schools, 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.
