Story at a glance
- San Francisco was ranked the healthiest city in the U.S. in a new WalletHub analysis.
- Brownsville, Texas came in last place in the ranking.
- San Francisco earned the title of healthiest city in part due to its population’s low obesity rate and easy access to green spaces.
Most Americans are unhealthy, but location matters when it comes to just how unhealthy.
A new WalletHub analysis of 182 of the largest cities in the U.S. and found that San Francisco, Calif. Is the healthiest city in the country.
WalletHub analysts compared the cities across four areas — healthcare, food, fitness and green space — to come up with their ranking.
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Did all the people that had health problems get priced out of San Francisco due to medical bills?
Being a highly walkable city due to all of the public transportation options versus much of the rest of the country helps a lot too.
Folks have no idea how useful BART is until they try it and find they don’t need to drive a car in one of the hilliest cities in the country, which also makes biking tough. It’s a walkable city out of necessity.
It’s essentially a measure of income and race. San Francisco has high incomes, and high Asian population. Obviously richer people live longer, and Asians have lower rates of obesity and longer lives in average.
Brownsville is much poorer, and pretty much entirely Hispanic. Obesity and poverty rates probably much higher.
It seems like it was intentional by the authors not to control for it, which I think is fair depending on what you are trying to show, but it’s irresponsible not to mention it.
SF has healthcare for all residents.
It comes from a finance writer from a site littered with paid adverts. Of course it is gonna hype one of the least affordable cities to live as the healthiest. Surely they’re financed in some way by real estate interests. The writer failed to get opinions from people who lost their housing there due to the monstrous speculative housing prices or those who struggle to make a living from the silicon valley induced precarity there.
That’s true, but I also know people who are struggling who make it by sharing spaces. The prices in SF are high, but honestly not that different from the rest of the bay area.
Plus the notorious existence of unhoused people in SF. I wonder if the unhoused people are included in this data.
SF is also just one of the most walkable cities in the US, and has two huge parks inside the city as well as many smaller ones.
Brownsville, Texas came in last place in the ranking.
Man, the writers for this season of reality are getting lazy.
I wonder if they counted the health of the homeless in their determination.
Super anecdotal but I was there a few months ago and holy shit healthy is not a word I’d have used to describe that place. Except I guess they don’t count the hundreds of unhoused and people suffering from addiction, just the ones working in the high rises who can afford the $14 smoothies and $28 poke bowls.
I do wonder how they tracked this metric. Like yeah, SF has health food places on just about every corner and it’s easy to get by without needing to have a car so most people walk if they are able to, but the people out on that street range from neo-hippy yoga bunnies to individuals permanently confined to a mobility scooter. If they are only looking up medical information for people who can afford to both live in San Francisco and go to the doctor to get things like a BMI done so that the results could be collected, then the results are probably going to be wildly skewed towards the healthy, fit, energetic techbros and other such people who are able to afford that kind of healthy lifestyle in spite of the extreme cost of living.
You can read the methodology: https://wallethub.com/edu/healthiest-cities/31072
The methodology is spelled out really clearly on the wallethub source for anyone curious.
