Guest blog from Gallup.com Associate Editor Elizabeth Mendes.
Michigan may be suffering from the declining U.S. auto industry, but residents of the state's Holland-Grand Haven metro area are managing to navigate the car crisis and currently top the nation in access to basic necessities. California, on the other hand, is seeing its budget woes trickle down throughout the state. Five of the 20 metro areas in California where Gallup polls fall within the bottom 10 of all metro areas in the country for meeting residents' basic needs.
These findings are the latest from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and were released Monday in conjunction with an event on city well-being held at Gallup's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The key to meeting community needs lies in a robust effort on the part of individuals and businesses, according to Holland Mayor Kurt Dykstra, who attended Monday's event. "Our government is reasonable, efficient, and focused only on the common good. But good government, while vital, is not sufficient. Rather, the true secret to our success is found in our individual and corporate commitment to community," Dykstra said.
Gallup and Healthways measure Americans' access to basic necessities in the cities or areas where they live with a 13-item metric called the Basic Access Index. My colleague Dan Witters and I published a full analysis and list of Basic Access scores for all 187 metro areas on Gallup.com. The charts below highlight the top and bottom scoring places in America.
Over at The Numbers blog, Gary Langer reviews what he sees as the most interesting "factlets" from our article, pointing out that "The metro area with the nation's worst access to basic necessities also has the highest optimism about becoming a better place to live. Welcome to McAllen, Edinburg and Mission, Texas." This finding is even more striking considering that of the 13 items measured with the Basic Access Index, this tri-city metro area performs the worst in the country on six -- having enough money for food, for shelter, and for healthcare; having health insurance; having a personal doctor; and having visited a dentist in the past year.
You can read the full article to see which metro area is doing the best and worst on each of the 13 items. The article also shows that the metro areas with high basic access scores have lower violent and property crime rates.
Witters will be out with a new article next Monday revealing differences in well-being between urban and rural areas. Sneak peak: well-being is higher in big cities than in rural areas.