Keep on smilin’
San Antonio is all smiles with new ranking as one of the happiest cities in Texas and the U.S.
If you smile in San Antonio, the whole world smiles with you. So maybe Alamo City needs another motto: Happiness City.
That’s the idea behind a new study from personal finance website WalletHub that ranks San Antonio among the happiest places in Texas and the U.S.
The study puts San Antonio at No. 13 in Texas and No. 130 in the country in terms of the happiest locales.
To come up with the ranking, WalletHub looked at more than key indicators of happiness for 182 of the largest U.S. cities. Among the factors were depression rate, suicide rate, sports participation rate, separation and divorce rate, and hours worked per day.
WalletHub then placed those numbers into three buckets. Here’s how San Antonio ranked in that regard:
- 160th in the community and environment category.
- 116th in the physical and emotional well-being category.
- 88th in the income and employment category.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a third of Americans to be so stressed that they sometimes find it hard to make basic decisions. Therefore, it’s vital for people to boost their happiness however they can, whether through family, friends, activities, entertainment, or work,” WalletHub says. “What people might not realize is that where they live may also determine how happy they are.”
So, what’s the happiest city in the U.S.? According to WalletHub, it’s Fremont, California, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. And the unhappiest? WalletHub hands that dubious distinction to Detroit.
Here’s how Texas cities in the study are ranked:
- Austin, No. 30
- Grand Prairie, No. 83
- Irving, No. 89
- Garland, No. 97
- Fort Worth, No. 103
- Arlington, No. 107
- Dallas, No. 111
- Houston, No. 112
- Laredo, No. 115
- El Paso, No. 120
- Brownsville, No. 125
- San Antonio, No. 130
- Corpus Christi, No. 139
- Amarillo, No. 143
- Lubbock, No. 157
