by Mark McDermott\u00a0<\/p>\n
Manhattan Beach has achieved something no American city has before. According to the latest Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, the city scored 71.6 \u2014 the highest community well-being measurement ever recorded in the survey\u2019s 17-year history, across more than 1,500 communities studied nationwide since 2008.<\/p>\n
Dan Witters, Gallup\u2019s Well-Being Index research director, put it plainly when he presented the findings to the Beach Cities Health District board in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cManhattan Beach is sitting at 71.6, which is now the highest that we\u2019ve ever recorded,\u201d Witters told the board. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a big database, over 1,500 community level entries, going back to 2008. So that\u2019s no joke.\u201d<\/p>\n
The score breaks Manhattan Beach\u2019s own previous record of 70.6, set in 2023. The national average for 2025 is 60.1.<\/p>\n
The Well-Being Index, which Gallup has administered to more than 3.2 million American adults since 2008, measures five interconnected dimensions: career, social, financial, physical and community well-being. Manhattan Beach led in every category. Its financial well-being score of 80.5 \u2014 against a national figure of 62.6 \u2014 and community score of 74.7, compared to 60.7 nationally, were particularly striking. Some 85 percent of Manhattan Beach residents said their city is the perfect place for them. Nearly 80 percent said they are proud of their community.<\/p>\n
The physical health numbers are equally remarkable. Three-quarters of residents exercise at least 30 minutes three or more days per week, against 51.8 percent nationally. Nearly two-thirds ate healthy all day the previous day. The obesity rate stands at just 7.2 percent, compared to 37.2 percent nationally. Smoking is nearly nonexistent at 2.3 percent \u2014 roughly one-quarter the U.S. rate.<\/p>\n
\u201cImprovement in exercise habits, eating habits, and BMI are all major success stories,\u201d Witters told the board.<\/p>\n
The question of why Manhattan Beach ranks where it does \u2014 and whether that position can be attributed to deliberate community intervention or simply to wealth \u2014 is one the data raises but doesn\u2019t settle. It\u2019s a question Witters has been thinking about for 15 years, since he first arrived in the Beach Cities alongside Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner to launch what would become one of the longest-running community well-being experiments in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still remember,\u201d Witters told the board. \u201cThe night before our very first press conference here, 15 years ago, I said to Dan \u2014 we were sitting right next to each other at dinner \u2014 \u2018They have pretty good well-being already. You sure you want this to be your very first Blue Zones community?\u2019 And I was very much proven wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
What followed proved his skepticism misplaced. Since 2015, the Beach Cities\u2019 combined Well-Being Index score has risen 3.6 points \u2014 while the national score has fallen 1.6 points over the same period. \u201cAll those boats are lifting, while the tide\u2019s going down,\u201d Witters said.<\/p>\n
Not everyone at the January board meeting was prepared to credit Blue Zones or the Beach Cities Health District for the results. Sheila Lamb, a member of the Redondo Beach Planning Commission, challenged the interpretation directly during public comment. The report, she argued, shows that only 10 percent of residents are engaged in Blue Zones programming, and only 11 to 12 percent believe it has had a positive impact on their lives or community. \u201cThe data presented are descriptive, not evaluative,\u201d Lamb said. \u201cThere is no comparison group, no pre or post analysis tied to program participation and no evidence of causation.\u201d Income, she argued, was the more parsimonious explanation.<\/p>\n
Witters, called back to the podium, was careful. \u201cNo one from Gallup and no one from the Beach Cities Health District that I\u2019m aware of has claimed that we have causal evidence between Blue Zones and the very impressive improvement in well being over time,\u201d he said. But he pushed back on the income explanation with the peer cities argument he has refined over years of parallel studies. \u201cMore affluent communities, probabilistically, are not more likely to improve,\u201d he told the board. \u201cThey\u2019re more likely to have higher well-being than lower income communities, but they\u2019re not more likely to improve over time. To improve over time, you have to do something to move the needle.\u201d<\/p>\n
The peer city comparison makes this concrete. Communities that demographically resemble the Beach Cities \u2014 affluent, educated, coastal \u2014 tend to have high well-being scores. But they\u2019re flat over time. Manhattan Beach has high well-being and keeps climbing. \u201cWhat\u2019s different here than what we find with others that kind of look like they\u2019re affluent, that have a similar demographic mix?\u201d Witters asked the board. \u201cThey have high well-being too \u2014 but they\u2019re flat over time. You have high well-being, but you\u2019ve gotten better over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buettner, the National Geographic explorer and author who pioneered the Blue Zones framework and brought the project to the Beach Cities in 2010, has his own account of what that something is \u2014 and it starts with what he found when he arrived.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we arrived, the health of the Beach Cities reflected pretty much like the rest of California,\u201d Buettner said in a recent interview. \u201cRedondo Beach was actually kind of below average.\u201d<\/p>\n
What followed was what Buettner calls \u201csilver buckshot\u201d \u2014 dozens of small, permanent or semi-permanent changes to the physical and social environment. Some 226 miles of bike path were added. Smoking was banned first at the Hermosa Beach pier, then spread to Manhattan Beach. Nearly 100 restaurants became Blue Zones certified. Safe routes to school were established, and the share of children walking to school climbed from zero to more than 30 percent. A public garden was created. The Beach Cities Health District, which had partnered with Blue Zones from the start, continued the work under its own banner after the formal program concluded \u2014 and continues it today.<\/p>\n
\u201cWinston Churchill famously said that you change people\u2019s environments and their behaviors change,\u201d Buettner said. \u201cI think Blue Zones deserves a good bit of credit for changing the environment \u2014 and then the culture starts to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buettner recently bought the Blue Zones company back after it had drifted toward private equity, and is finishing a new book on communities that have deliberately manufactured the conditions for longer, healthier lives. He speaks about the Beach Cities as one of the clearest examples of what intentional environmental change can produce over time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moral of the tale,\u201d he said, \u201cis that there is an enormous cost for doing nothing. When you have a focused group of people who are finding out what can be done and making those changes \u2014 no matter how small, as long as they\u2019re lasting \u2014 you\u2019re going to get a return.\u201d<\/p>\n
That return, he argues, compounds: longer lives, greater life satisfaction, lower healthcare costs, a stronger tax base, and a community that draws people who want to live well. The inverse, he warns, is the trajectory most American cities are on \u2014 more cars, more processed food, more sedentary hours \u2014 and the cost is already running at roughly $5 trillion annually in chronic disease nationwide.<\/p>\n
The role of wealth in Manhattan Beach\u2019s outcome is not something Buettner or Witters dismisses. Household income is, by Gallup\u2019s own analysis, the single strongest predictor of well-being at both the individual and population level. Manhattan Beach, where the median home price has reached $3.3 million, is one of the most affluent small cities in California. Buettner describes what money makes possible in concrete terms: engaging work, safe streets for walking and biking, strong health literacy, access to care, and social networks that reinforce healthy behaviors.<\/p>\n
Over the same 15-year period, Manhattan Beach\u2019s underlying wealth surged. Median home values more than doubled, rising from roughly $1.3 million in the late 2000s to more than $3.3 million today. Household income climbed as well, increasing from roughly $140,000 to around $190,000 in recent years \u2014 a gain of about 35 to 40 percent. The scale of that wealth increase raises the obvious question: how much of the city\u2019s well-being is simply the byproduct of rising affluence?<\/p>\n
Buettner has long argued that money\u2019s impact has limits, drawing on research including a widely cited Princeton University study that found emotional well-being rises with income only up to about $75,000 a year. \u201c$75,000 is about the cap,\u201d he has said. \u201cIf you make more than that, then your day-to-day experience doesn\u2019t get any better \u2014 you just have more stuff.\u201d Manhattan Beach, by any measure, long ago surpassed that threshold.<\/p>\n
But the 15-year arc of the data keeps returning to the same inconvenient fact for anyone who wants to reduce the story to demographics: peer cities that look like Manhattan Beach on paper don\u2019t look like it in the numbers. The improvement is real, and it started from a specific moment in time, with specific interventions.<\/p>\n
The 2025 survey also identified areas where Manhattan Beach still has room to grow. High cholesterol jumped five percentage points since 2023, now matching the national average \u2014 a data point Witters flagged as worth watching, driven likely by diet. Only about a third of residents report having a leader in their life who creates enthusiasm for the future, barely above the national figure. Significant daily stress remains a factor for more than 40 percent of residents, even as that number has improved substantially since 2010, when it was even higher here than the national average.<\/p>\n
And then there is alcohol. Manhattan Beach residents average 4.1 drinks per week, well above the national figure of 2.5 \u2014 a number that has hovered stubbornly high across multiple survey cycles despite improvements elsewhere. It is, in the context of an otherwise exceptional report, the community\u2019s most conspicuous outlier. Witters noted that alcohol consumption has edged down slightly since 2023 but remains statistically higher than national levels. Whether that reflects a cultural feature of beach community life, the social rituals of an affluent population, or something else the data doesn\u2019t capture, the index doesn\u2019t say. It is simply the one metric that declines to cooperate.<\/p>\n
Those are the footnotes. The headline is the number: 71.6, the highest well-being score any community has ever posted in 17 years of national measurement. Whether the cause is the bike paths, The Strand, the Health District, the culture, the money, or all of it compounding across 15 years, Witters \u2014 who has spent 35 years at Gallup studying what makes communities thrive and decline \u2014 offered his bottom line to the board.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Beach Cities are getting better, while when we look at national comparables, they\u2019re going the other direction,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you\u2019re doing something right.\u201d<\/p>\n
The survey was conducted between September and November 2025, with 6,850 questionnaires distributed across the Beach Cities and 1,270 responses returned.<\/p>\n
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