This perfectly ordinary South Bay suburb is America’s happiest city.

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The financial technology company analyzed the country’s most populous places by asking a hard-to-quantify question: What is the happiest city in America? The answer, in fact, is contained in the very name of the city: Sunnyvale, California.

Smart Asset ranked the 200 largest cities on 13 metrics, including life expectancy, percentage of population with health insurance, average travel time, concentration of restaurants and nightclubs, crime rate, and percentage of residents earning $100,000 or more. The resulting composite figure has become a symbol of a rather modest bedroom community in Silicon Valley.

Sunnyvale – not to be confused with Sunnydale, the San Francisco area or the city where Buffy the Vampire Slayer lives – is a South Bay suburb sandwiched between Mountain View and Santa Clara, with Cupertino to the south. With a population of 155,000, it is the seventh largest city in the Bay Area, only slightly larger than Charleston, South Carolina.

What makes Sunnyvale different? More than any other factor, it’s an affluent place with a higher percentage of six-figure residents than anywhere else, plus the third-lowest poverty rate. Nearly 57% of residents are or have been married, the fifth-highest rate in the country, with violent crime the ninth-highest.

While the survey clearly left out racial and ethnic diversity, Sunnyvale can hardly be called a 1950s time capsule. This is a lot of whites (43%) with significant concentrations of Asian Americans (40%) and Hispanics (18%).

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While California remains a perpetual punching bag for the right due to its high cost of living, progressive political culture and the number of U-Hauls heading to Reno, a large number of Californians seem to like where they live. At least five of the 10 happiest cities are in the Golden State and are in the top 11 of the top 25.

After Sunnyvale, the highly diverse East Bay city of Fremont ranked fourth on the list of America’s happiest cities, while the fast-growing and Republican Sacramento suburb of Roseville ranked seventh. San Jose itself finished in eighth place, with the Southern California cities of Santa Clarita and Irvine rounding out the top ten. Santa Rosa and Hayward also finished high.

The unhappiest place in America is Birmingham, Alabama, followed by Newark, New Jersey and Memphis, Tennessee. As for San Francisco, which is denigrated by comments on every article from coast to coast, we rank as the 14th happiest city in the United States.

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