Fort Collins, Colorado Is America’s Most Satisfied City

Fort Collins, Colo., must be doing something right, because 94.9% of its residents say they are satisfied with the city — a higher percentage than found in any other American city, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

Fort Collins has been a consistent high performer in the index since Gallup started asking the question in 2008. The second most satisfied metro area in the country is San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles in California. Across the United States, 85 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the city they live in and a majority of respondents believe their community is on the up and up.

The city with the fewest satisfied people in America, according to Gallup’s survey of “at least 300 adults” in each of the 189 metropolitan areas it scoured, is Rockford, Ill., followed by Stockton, Calif., Bakersfield, Calif., and Flint, Mich. In Rockford, only 39.7% of residents said the city was getting better.

Memphis, Tenn. is America’s real Cinderella story — only 68.8% said they were satisfied with the city in 2008, the lowest satisfaction level in the country at the time. By 2012-13, the period surveyed for this most recent study, Memphis had pulled itself out of the lowest-rated communities, with 79.7% of its residents satisfied with their town.