Alexandria Lands on 'Most Caring Suburb' in Nation List

Alexandria is known for many things — its history, picturesque streets, family-run local businesses, awesome annual celebrations and dog-friendly ways.

Another kudos to add to the list? Alexandria has been named fourth “Most Caring” suburb in the nation by the Movoto Real Estate Blog.

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

1. CDP of Silver Spring, MD
2. City of Georgetown, TX
3. City of Cupertino, CA
4. City of Alexandria, VA
5. City of Frederick, MD
6. CDP of 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 Alexandria:

This Washington D.C. suburb ranked well in our analysis for a number of reasons. First off, it got an A Plus for its low student to counselor ratio—just 9.8 to 1. To put that into perspective for you, suburbs like Daly City and Seal Beach, CA had a ratio of about 23 to 1.

Alexandria also had the 10th most community service options per capita such as homeless shelters, soup kitchens, the American Red Cross, Goodwills, and much, much more.

How they made their decision:

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 our 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 Alexandria, in its blog post about the nation’s Most Caring Suburbs. Source: Flickr user Something Ferdinand