Silver Spring Makes List of 'Most Caring Suburbs in America'

Silver Spring earns recognition for its resurgent downtown area, wealth of exciting restaurants, lively arts and music scene and strong business community.

Now the community’s low crime, pet-friendly lifestyle and other amenities have earned it the title “Most Caring” suburb in the nation by the Movoto Real Estate Blog. That’s right, No. 1.

Here are the 10 most caring ‘burbs in the nation, according to the folks at Movoto:

1. Silver Spring, MD
2. City of Georgetown, TX
3. City of Cupertino, CA
4. City of Alexandria, VA
5. City of Frederick, MD
6. Columbia, MD
7. City of Shelbyville, KY
8 . City of Round Rock, TX
9. City of Alameda, CA
10. Village of Skokie, IL

Here’s what Movoto had to say about Silver Spring:

Fun fact! Did you know that Silver Spring, Maryland is the home of comedic genius, Dave Chappelle? And, no joke, in addition to his career onstage, Dave Chappelle is something of a philanthropist. Now we have absolutely no proof to back us up here, but we are 99 percent sure because of his hometown.

After all, Silver Spring has more community services and mental health professionals per capita than nearly anywhere else we looked at (it ranked third and seventh in these categories, respectively).

Plus, with a student to counselor ratio of 14.9 to 1, it’s clear that this ‘burb starts caring for residents early on.

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How suburbs were selected:

Movoto gathered information from the U.S. Census Bureau, finding 109 of “our nation’s finest suburbs.” For the purposes of this analysis, Movoto defined a suburb as any large population center near one of the nation’s 50 largest cities. They also took into consideration whether or not the place was called a suburb on Wikipedia, in the list of inner-ring suburbs, or in any official capacity.

Then, they used sources like the U.S. Census, the 2012 Uniform FBI Crime Report, business listings, and Sperling’s Best Places, to look at each of the 109 places in terms of the following criteria:

• Student-counselor ratio
• Crimes per 100,000 people (the lower the better)
• Pet shelters and rescue per capita
• Community services per capita
• Mental health counselors and therapists per capita
• Percent of workers who carpool (caring for the environment)

From there, Movoto ranked each place with scores from 1 to 109, where the lower scores went to more caring places. Next, they averaged each city’s rankings into one overall “Big Deal Score,” where again, the lowest score went to the most caring suburb, Silver Spring.

PHOTO: This is the photo that Movoto used for Silver Spring, in its blog post about the nation’s Most Caring Suburbs. Source: Flickr user U.S. Department of Agriculture