Falls Church, Virginia, earns top spot in 2024 Healthiest Communities rankings
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Key takeaways:
- Falls Church, Virginia, finished as the top healthiest community for the second time since 2018.
- With four each, communities in Virginia and Iowa occupied eight of the top 20 spots in this year’s rankings.
U.S. News & World Report released its 2024 Healthiest Communities rankings, with Falls Church, Virginia, taking the No. 1 spot.
Los Alamos County, New Mexico, placed second after having been first for the past 3 years, with Douglas County, Colorado, coming in third.
“Evaluating community health is crucial as we consider the well-being of citizens across our country,” Julia Haines, U.S. News data editor, said in a press release. “The Healthiest Communities rankings examine which communities offer the greatest opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.”
Haines added that the rankings also show “that even the ‘healthiest’ communities struggle in certain areas.”
The rankings are based on an analysis of around 2,800 communities nationwide. They use 92 health and health-related metrics to rate communities across 10 main categories, including food and nutrition, economy, population health, education, environment, housing, infrastructure, public safety, equity and community vitality.
The 2024 rankings also feature new measures added to “better reflect health-related challenges facing communities and continual efforts to achieve gender parity,” according to the release.
These measures include a community’s food insecurity rate, the size of its gender wage gap and its mortality rate tied to COVID-19, influenza, influenza and pneumonia.
Falls Church was ranked as the top healthiest community in the country for the second time since 2018. It achieved top 20 results in five of the 10 categories — including first place in education, fourth place in population health and sixth place in economy — but finished outside the threshold for top-performing communities in the equity and housing categories.
The top 10 healthiest communities in the country are:
- Falls Church, Virginia
- Los Alamos County, New Mexico
- Douglas County, Colorado
- Sioux County, Iowa
- Hamilton County, Indiana
- Dallas County, Iowa
- Ozaukee County, Wisconsin
- Carver County, Minnesota
- Bremer County, Iowa
- Morgan County, Utah
Northern Virginia and Iowa were both home to four of the top 20 healthiest communities in this year’s rankings. Meanwhile, five of the top 10 communities with the longest life expectancy are in Colorado, according to the release..
The full list of the 2024 Healthiest Communities rankings can be seen here.