According to a working paper from researchers at Harvard University and the University of

British Columbia, the five happiest cities in the U.S. all happen to be located in one state:
Louisiana, which also ranks as the happiest state.
Specifically, the list-toppers are Lafayette, Houma, Shreveport-Bossier City, Baton Rouge and
Alexandria.
Rounding out the top 10 happiest cities are Rochester, Minnesota; Corpus Christi, Texas; Lake
Charles, Louisiana; Nashville, Tennessee; and Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
The paper, co-authored by Harvard professor Edward Glaeser, UBC Vancouver School of
Economics professor Joshua Gottlieb and Harvard doctoral student Oren Ziv, used data from a
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey titled the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance
System.
It was adjusted for age, sex, race, income and other factors, as women, for example, are happier
than men, and married couples are happier than single or divorced respondents.
On the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest cities had New York City topping the list,
followed by St. Joseph, Missouri; South Bend, Indiana; Erie, Pennsylvania; Evansville, Indiana
Henderson, Kentucky; Toledo, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Jersey City, New Jersey; Gary, Indiana;
and ScrantonWilkes-BarreHazleton, Pennsylvania.
Nearly all of the unhappiest places in the nation lean heavily Democratic when it comes to
voting, noted Caroline Schaeffer of the Independent Journal Review.
Among the goals of the study was to explain why many unhappy cities were still seeing
population growth. After all, why would people move there if it were such an awful place?
Self-reported unhappiness is high in [many] declining cities, and this tendency persists even
when we control for income, race and other personal characteristics, the authors write. Why
are the residents of some cities persistently less happy? Given that they are, why do people
choose to live in unhappy places?
The report concludes many of the unhappy cities have always been so according to limited data.
Higher wages play a role in enticing people to move to unhappy places, as does lower housing
costs. The authors write:
Differences in happiness and subjective well-being across space weakly support the view that
the desires for happiness and life satisfaction do not uniquely drive human ambitions. If we
choose only that which maximized our happiness, then individuals would presumably move to
happier places until the point where rising rents and congestion eliminated the joys of that locale.

An alternative view is that humans are quite understandably willing to sacrifice both happiness
and life satisfaction if the price is right. Indeed, the residents of unhappier metropolitan areas
today do receive higher real wages presumably as compensation for their misery.