Alabaster named in Top 50 best places to live for families by Fortune

By NOAH WORTHAM | Managing Editor

ALABASTER – The city of Alabaster has been named as one of the Top 50 best places to live for families by Fortune.com.

Fortune listed Alabaster as No. 34 on its list of the Top 50 best places for families to live for 2024 which was released on Tuesday, July 23. Alabaster was the only city that made the list from the state of Alabama.

“As a city focused on providing the very best for its residents, we expect to see even more of these accolades in the future,” read an official Facebook post by the city of Alabaster.

The list helps to point out locales which provide a place for families to live that also feature long term benefits, general affordability and a range of diversity.

For its ranking of Alabaster, the Fortune highlighted the city’s affordability, safety, school system and its proximity to the largest medical facility in the county—Shelby Baptist Medical Center. Additionally, Fortune mentioned the city’s financials, nearby recreational activities, senior center and housing prices.

For the ranking, the magazine evaluated more than 2,000 cities across the nation, including cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, villages and townships—each with approximately 20,00 residents or more—across all 50 U.S. states.

To help analyze each place on the list, Fortune reviewed nearly 200 data categories across five main themes which include: education, resources for aging adults, general wellness, financial health and livability.

This particular ranking by Fortune focused on the best place for families and the organization paid particular attention to services that help people and families age well. Special consideration was given to resources for aging adults, livability and wellness, accounting for the importance of residents’ well-being, the number of quality nursing homes in an area, the number of health providers, the safety of a town and racial and ethnic diversity.

Fortune also eliminated locales with home sale prices that were more than twice as high as the state median or more than 2.75 times as high as the national median in an attempt to ensure the winning places were relatively affordable.

In order to ensure that the list offered diverse neighborhoods, Fortune’s staff compared the racial breakdown of each place on the list against state benchmarks and eliminated any location that was 75 percent less diverse than the state median. Additionally, the organization incorporated socioeconomic, religious and ethnic diversity into its data collection.

Data for the rankings came from several partners, including Caring.com, CVS Health, Healthgrades, Ineedana.com, Sharecare and Witlytic. Data was also sourced from America’s Health Rankings, ATTOM Data Solutions, the Council for Community and Economic Research, the School Finance Indicators Database, Everytown Gun Law Rankings, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the Johns Hopkins University Data Archive, Kaiser Family Foundation, SchoolDigger and Synergos Technologies, Inc: PopStats. Fortune also relied on information from a series of federal agencies.

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