Falls Church, Virginia, was rated the healthiest community in the United States in Tuesday’s U.S. News & World Report Healthiest Communities Rankings.
Several other communities in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area made the top 25, including Fairfax County, Virginia; Fairfax City, Virginia; Arlington County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. The District of Columbia did not make the top 500 healthiest communities list.
Over 3,000 communities were ranked using 10 main categories, each branched out into several subcategories. Each factor was weighted differently, with population health weighing the most, at 14.15% of the total score. This was followed by equity at 12.23%, education at 12.15%, economy at 11.08%, housing at 9.46%, food and nutrition at 8.77%, environment at 8.62%, public safety at 8.46%, community vitality at 7.62%, and infrastructure at 7.46%.
In total, 92 metrics were used to determine each community’s health rating. Falls Church was the only community in the top 500 to be given a perfect 100 rating on education, and the community additionally scored a 97 for population health, 96 for economy, 95 for infrastructure, and 94 for food and nutrition.
The northern Virginia city put up modest numbers on equity, 62, environment, 58, and housing, 56. The lower equity score was driven by the city’s high rate of racial disparity in educational attainment, while its environment score was hindered by higher-than-average pollution figures. Falls Church scored lower on housing, in part because 46.5 work hours per week are needed in order to achieve affordable housing in the city.
Fairfax County, which surrounds Falls Church on all sides, was the only community with a perfect 100 rating on population health. It scored 93 on economy and 92 on food and nutrition but was rated just 58 on equity, 51 on housing, 45 on environment, and 42 on community vitality.
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Some factors that help determine a community’s population health score include the smoking rate, the percentage of the population without health insurance, and life expectancy. Two things that especially boosted Fairfax’s population health score were its high vaccination rate and low rate of mental illness.
D.C., which was given a 63 overall health rating, scored 93 for food and nutrition, 86 for population health, and 85 for infrastructure, but its overall score was driven lower by scores such as 38 for environment, 26 for community vitality, and 15 for equity. Falls Church and Fairfax were given overall ratings of 100 and 87, respectively.