Atlanta is a stressful place to live, and it has nothing to do with heat or pollen.
According to a survey by Sperling's Best Places, an Oregon research company that specializes in livability issues, Atlanta is the 15th most stressful metro area in the United States.
Sperling uses a number of criteria to rate stress, including divorce rate, average commute time, crime and unemployment. Atlanta's divorce rate of 10.2 percent, unemployment rate of 10.4 percent and average commute of 33.3 minutes combined with a violent crime rate of 413.8 per 100,000 population and property crime rate of 3,462.6 per 100,000 residents helped push Atlanta ahead of such locales as Philadelphia, Newark, New York and Baltimore.
Not surprisingly, Atlanta's traffic was one of the main factors in its high ranking. Only New York City and Nassau, N.Y., Chicago, Washington and Newark, N.J., had longer average commutes than Atlanta's 33.3 minutes.
If your plans for escaping the stress of Atlanta include moving to the sun and warmth of Florida, you might want to reconsider. Six of the metro areas ahead of Atlanta on the list are in the Sunshine State, including No. 1 Tampa-St. Pete, No. 3 Miami, No. 4 Jacksonville, No. 6 Orlando, No. 10 West Palm Beach and No. 11 Fort Lauderdale.
“Frankly, I was shocked by the concentration of Florida cities clustered in the top ten,” lead researcher Bert Sperling said in the report. “But when we look into the statistics, we can see some of the reasons.” Many of the factors, including high levels of divorce and suicide and high unemployment, are consequences of Florida’s real estate boom and bust.
On the other end of the spectrum was Minneapolis, which, despite its harsh winters, was rated as the least stressful place to live.
The top five most stressful cities were Tampa-St. Pete, Las Vegas, Miami, Jacksonville and Detroit. The bottom five were Minneapolis, Nassau-Suffolk, N.Y., Cambridge, Mass., Virginia Beach and Pittsburgh.
The full slate of factors considered in the survey were unemployment rate, suicide rate, average commute time, mental health (days per month with poor mental health, from an annual CDC survey), poor rest (days per month without adequate restful sleep, from a CDC survey), alcohol use (drinks per month, from a CDC survey), violent crime, property crime and cloudy days annually.
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