Health and the City: "Suburbs Rule!"

From today's WSJ, a report by Melinda Beck on the latest County Health Rankings that gives state-by-state comparisons of health measures in every U.S. county. City people are healthier and live longer than people in rural areas, but the real action is in the suburbs:

In many measures, residents of suburban areas are the best off. They generally rate their own health the highest and have the fewest premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts. Suburbanites also have the fewest low-birth-weight babies, homicides and sexually transmitted diseases.

"Suburbs rule!" says CHR deputy director Bridget Booske, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin's Population Health Institute, which produces the rankings with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

For further reading, here's a piece I wrote last year for the New York Post, In Defense of the Suburbs.