San Jose: America’s Happiest Big City

Posted by Silicon Valley Newsroom on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 Comments (4)

People in San Jose told pollsters that life is good in the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

People in San Jose are happy. In fact, they’re happier than the residents of any other major city in the U.S. That was the finding of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which was released yesterday. To be fair, there are other, happier places, like Honolulu, Hawaii, or Holland, Michigan (huh?), but when it comes to the country’s biggest cities—the ones with populations of 1 million-plus, San Jose was at the top, beating out D.C., Raleigh and Minneapolis.

The poll was based on telephone interviews with more than 350,000 people. The factors investigated were job opportunities (surprise, surprise), personal finances, physical health, moods, emotional well-being, and expectations for the future—we’re a pretty optimistic bunch.

The number one location in the nation is Boulder, Colorado, with its low unemployment (only 5.7 percent, compared to the national average of 9.7) and an extensive greenbelt. Other towns in California also did well, with Santa Rosa and Santa Barbara edging out San Jose to take the fifth and sixth spots respectively (San Jose came in seventh). Oxnard-Ventura rounded out California’s overwhelming presence in the top ten—with four towns and cities in the top ten, it beat out every other state, and adding Santa Cruz (14th) and San Francisco (20th) gave the state six out of the nation’s top 20 locations.

The state of California overall didn’t fare quite as well, coming in at 18th in a tie with South Dakota. The happiest states across the nation were Utah, Montana, and Minnesota, followed by Iowa, Vermont, Colorado, and Alaska. This could lead to the incontrovertible conclusion that all that San Jose is missing is the snow.
Read More in the Huffington Post.
Read More in USA Today.
Read More in the Business Journal.