(NEXSTAR) – Regarding the safety of you and your family, there’s nothing quite like the reassurance of knowing you live in a ‘safe neighborhood.’ But what exactly defines a ‘safe neighborhood’?
SmartAsset recently conducted a study analyzing 360 suburbs throughout the U.S., looking into various factors that might indicate an area is unsafe, such as rates of violent crime, property crime, excessive drinking, and more.
At the top of the list is Lehi, Utah, a suburb just south of Salt Lake City with a population of over 81,000. This suburb uniquely featured less than 10% of its adult population engaging in excessive drinking and had low rankings for both violent and property crimes per capita.
Ranked just below Lehi were three suburbs located around Washington, DC: Bethesda, Maryland, Great Falls, Virginia, and Rockville, Maryland.
Great Falls notably ranked extremely low in crime compared to national figures and reported a relatively low number of traffic-related fatalities.
The top five safest suburbs in Florida were Key Biscayne, Kissimmee, Coral Gables, Homestead and Winter Garden.
Here’s the full list of all 360 suburbs in the entire country ranked according to SmartAsset.
As for the other end of the spectrum, several suburbs landed at the bottom of the rankings for a variety of reasons.
Lumberton, North Carolina, ended up last in the rankings due to its exceptionally high traffic death rate of 41.4 per 100,000 people, the highest on the list, along with the second-highest violent crime rate per capita.
Second to last was Plymouth, Massachusetts, which, despite having a significantly low rate of traffic deaths, recorded more than double Lumberton’s violent crime rate per capita.
A strange suburb ranked near the bottom is Scottsburg, Indiana, where not a single violent crime was reported, according to SmartAsset. Despite this, Scottsburg finished with the third-highest amount of traffic deaths in the country, which is the primary reason the violent crime-free suburb fell to the bottom.
To see the full study on the safest suburbs in the U.S., you can go to SmartAsset’s website.
