Mid Massachusetts News

In this year’s Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families list, the City of Cambridge ranked #1, topping the charts on metrics ranging from quality of healthcare, aging resources, and education, to community connectedness. This year’s ranking also 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.   

For people looking to relocate, a great place to live is more than the resources offered—a strong sense of community is among the top considerations. Cambridge officials are taking note and investing in strengthening their residents’ bonds. Especially noteworthy was the City of Cambridge’s efforts to incentivize residents to host block parties and get to know their neighbors. The City makes it easy to host a block party by eliminating the application fee, offering a $200 cash award toward the party for food, games, and even a DJ.  

“Creating opportunities for residents to gather socially after years of isolation measures became a priority for the City in the last year,” says Iram Farooq, the Assistant City Manager for Community Development in Cambridge. “People miss being in community with each other and we realized the importance of the outdoor streets as part of our public space network.” 

The City also gives block-party goers supplies from its Play Street Kits, which City staff drop off and pick up. The kits contain a variety of games, like Jenga and cornhole, as well as tennis and basketball equipment. Apply here to Host a free Block Party.  

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. Beyond the fun of having neighbors who also serve as friends, having people to lean on is vital for our physical and mental health.  Read more about how community is vital for health. 

Below are the top 10 Fortune Best Places to Live for Families. Link here for entire list. 

1. Cambridge, MA 
2. Portsmouth, NH 
3. Silver Spring, MD 
4. Tualatin, OR 
5. Middletown, DE 
6. Olathe, KS 
7. Eastvale, CA 
8. Wellington, FL 
9. Greenburgh, NY
10. Fitchburg, WI 

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. 

 Additionally, Fortune wanted to highlight places that offered diverse neighborhoods. To that end, Fortune’s staff compared the racial breakdown of each place against state benchmarks, eliminating any place that was 75% less diverse than the state medians. Fortune also incorporated socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic diversity into its data collection process. 

View the complete Methodology for the 2023 Fortune 50 Best Places to Live for Families List 

Original source can be found here.