What is the most difficult county in the United States to live in?
Where ever it is it is not Chester County according to the New York Times.
Chester County, in fact, is one of the easiest and well off counties of the county’s 3,135 counties to live in, coming in a more than respectable 33rd on the Times’ ranking.
The Times’ survey looked at the following six data points it could capture from each county in the United States:
- education (48.3% of Chester County residents have at least a bachelor’s degree)
- median household income ($86,184)
- unemployment rate (6.1%)
- disability rate (0.5%)
- life expectancy (80.8 years)
- obesity (31%)
Chester and Montgomery (#82) counties were the only Pennsylvania counties to crack the Times’ top 100 well off counties list.
Bucks County (#173), Delaware County (#770) and Philadelphia (#2,420) rounded out the area list.
And where are the worst counties in the United States according to the Times?
“The 10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.”
And the best counties from the same article:
“Six of the top 10 counties in the United States are in the suburbs of Washington (especially on the Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the top ranking of all goes to Los Alamos County, N.M., home of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”
The entire New York Times article and a interactive map of all 3,135 United States counties here.
