Fast-growing Colorado city named one of top places in US for families

Raising kids and caring for aging parents can be tough, but it’s a little easier in Fountain, according to Fortune, the global media company.

Fountain, a fast-growing city of about 30,000 people south of Colorado Springs, ranked No. 23 on Fortune’s inaugural list of 25 Best Places to Live for Families, which was released Wednesday. The list was compiled by Fortune Well, a new health, wellness and lifestyle section that can be found on Fortune’s website.

For its top 25 list, Fortune said it evaluated nearly 2,000 cities, towns, suburbs and other areas in the United States with populations of 25,000 to 750,000. More than 215,000 bits of data were collected across five broad categories to help produce the ranking: education, aging resources, general wellness, financial health and livability.

Nearly half of Americans who are raising children under 18 also regularly care for aging parents in some capacity, according to a Harris Poll survey of about 1,200 respondents that was conducted in August for Fortune.

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Fortune also found that 7 in 10 Americans with at least one living parent say they expect to help their aging parents regularly, while 88% of millennials plan to care for their baby boomer parents.

“This so-called ‘sandwich generation’ is the target population of the Fortune Well ranking,” Fortune said in a news release. “Location can make all the difference when Americans are managing caregiver roles. High quality schools, reliable health care, ample senior support and safe neighborhoods help bolster the well-being of multigenerational families and mitigate stress for caregivers.”

Fountain officials were pleased to make Fortune’s list and to represent Colorado in the ranking, Mayor Sharon Thompson said via email.

“Fountain has always been a welcoming, vibrant and diverse community that has worked hard to balance our recent growth and development, while maintaining our All-America hometown feel,” she said. “We are very proud of that, and I think our citizens deserve all the credit.”

Fortune’s ranking isn’t the first time that Fountain has received recognition as a quality place to live.

NerdWallet, the San Francisco-based financial services website, previously named Fountain one of the Best Places in Colorado to Live for Young Families and also named it an American City on the Rise. The National Civic League also tabbed Fountain as an all-American city in 2002, while the New York Times three years earlier chose Fountain as “America’s Millennium City.”

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As part of its Best Places to Live for Families list, Fortune drew boundaries around its data.

For one, it wanted cities and towns where residents could afford to buy homes “without breaking the bank,” Fortune said. As a result, it eliminated areas where sale prices were more than twice as high as the state median and/or more than 2.75 times higher the national median.

Fountain has been known for years as a less-expensive housing alternative when compared with Colorado Springs.

Also, Fortune sought to highlight places with diverse neighborhoods, and therefore eliminated towns where more than 90% of the population was white and non-Hispanic. Fortune also eliminated communities whose racial makeup was less diverse than state or national medians.

And to provide a broad range of communities, no more than two places per state were listed among the top 25 places; the ranking also was limited to no more than one place per county or major metro area.

Fortune relied on information from numerous data partners, including pharmacy giant CVS; online medical information provider Healthgrades; and Caring.com, a senior care resource and referral service for family caregivers. They helped provide information related to 160 data categories for each of the nearly 2,000 communities in Fortune’s ranking.

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Fortune also tapped information from private sources such as ATTOM Data Solutions, the Council for Community and Economic Research, the Johns Hopkins University Data Archive, Kaiser Family Foundation and Realtor.com.

Public information sources included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Education.

A rainbow hangs over a new subdivision in Fountain on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022. (Photo by Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette) (Jerilee Bennett)
A rainbow hangs over a new subdivision in Fountain on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022. (Photo by Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette) (Jerilee Bennett)

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