A family watches and waves during an Independence Day parade as people gather to watch from the side of the street on July 4, 2021 in Brighton, Michigan. (Photo by Emily Elconin/Getty Images)
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (FOX 2) - On Wednesday, two cities in southeast Michigan were named to the inaugural 25 best Places to Live for Families, a new list assembled by Fortune Well.
The list, which highlights areas in the United States where multigenerational families are most likely to have access to critical resources, community support, and financial wellbeing.
Across the entire country, Ann Arbor was ranked as the top places to live for families, beating Wylie, Texas and Olathe, Kansas, for the top spot. But AA wasn't the only one that made the top ten.
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Novi was ranked the 10th best place, the only other Michigan city in the top 25.
Fortune Well said these are the best cities for Americans who are raising children under 18 while also caring for aging parents in some capacity. This is called a ‘sandwich generation’ and is the target population for the rankings.
Fortune found that seven in 10 Americans with at least one living parent say they expect to help their aging parents regularly in the future, with 88% of millennials planning to care for their baby boomer parents.
Fortune used data from Caring.com, CVS, Healthgrades, Sharecare, ad Witlytic to evaluate 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.
Communities in the West, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic were more likely to offer better access to quality hospitals and doctors, solid public schools, and support for older residents versus the south and southeast. It's also more affordable than in coastal areas like New York City and Los Angeles.
Methodology
To analyze all of the 2,000 communities, Fortune studied education, aging resources, general wellness, financial health, and livability.
To ensure that the top cities were affordable, Fortune eliminated areas with home sale price that was more than twice as high as the state median or 2.75 times higher than the national average.
Fortune also wanted to highlight diverse neighborhoods and cut down areas with more than 90% of its population was white.
There could also only be two cites per state in the top 25 to provide a broad range of options.