SUGAR LAND, Texas – Sugar Land, Texas, is included on a new ranking by Fortune -- the city is No. 17 on its list of 25 Best Places to Live for Families.
Fortune Well launched the inaugural Fortune 25 Best Places to Live for Families ranking on Wednesday, highlighting areas in the U.S. where multigenerational families are most likely to have access to critical resources, community support, and financial well-being.
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The top 25 best places to live for families, according to the listing, are:
1. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Washtenaw County, Population: 122,004
2. Wylie, Texas, Collin County, Population: 56,463
3. Olathe, Kansas, Johnson County, Population: 144,144
4. Mason, Ohio, Warren County, Population: 35,564
5. Morrisville, North Carolina, Wake County, Population: 27,774
6. Clearfield, Utah, Davis County, Population: 34,322
7. Gaithersburg, Maryland, Montgomery County, Population: 68,282
8. Leesburg, Virginia, Loudoun County, Population: 48,047
9. West Chicago, Illinois, DuPage County, Population: 25,968
10. Novi, Michigan, Oakland County, Population: 63,489
11. West Windsor, New Jersey, Mercer County, Population: 30,038
12. Tustin, California, Orange County, Population: 84,021
13. South Portland, Maine, Cumberland County, Population: 26,076
14. Woodbury, Minnesota, Washington County, Population: 77,278
15. Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey, Morris County, Population: 54,295
16. Brookline, Massachusetts, Norfolk County, Population: 60,383
17. Sugar Land, Texas, Fort Bend County, Population: 123,222
18. Iowa City, Iowa, Johnson County, Population: 75,399
19. Maryland Heights, Missouri, St. Louis County, Population: 28,655
20. San Marcos, California, San Diego County, Population: 93,995
21. Walla Walla, Washington, Walla Walla County, Population: 34,182
22. Sarasota, Florida, Sarasota County, Population: 56,115
23. Fountain, Colorado, El Paso County, Population: 31,539
24. Statesville, North Carolina, Iredell County, Population: 27,667
25. Mauldin, South Carolina, Greenville County, Population: 25,972
To select the top 25 Best Places to Live for Families, Fortune said it evaluated nearly 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 with 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 said it 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 the 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.
“Where our data comes from to build this ranking, Fortune worked with several critical data partners—including Caring.com, CVS, Healthgrades, ShareCare, and Witlytic—that helped provide information over 160 separate data categories on each place used in our comprehensive evaluation process,” a news release read. “Fortune also sourced data from America’s Health Rankings, ATTOM Data Solutions, the Council for Community and Economic Research, the School Finance Indicators Database, Everytown Gun Law Rankings, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation, Integrated Postsecondary Education System, Johns Hopkins University Data Archive, Kaiser Family Foundation, Realtor.com, SchoolDigger, and STI: Popstats. In addition to private-sector data, Fortune relied on information from federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Education.”