If you ate 270 pounds of meat and drank 27 gallons of beer last year, there’s a reasonably good chance you live in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, in the city of Lynchburg. That’s because consuming those amounts of food and drink would make you a typical American and, according to an analysis by Karl Sluis, Lynchburg is the most typical city in the country.
Sluis looked at 917 cities across the country and evaluated them across eight key metrics (population, population density, median age, median income, poverty rate, commuting by car, high school graduates and postgraduate degrees) to determine what constituted “average.”
Here’s what he found:
Although no city perfectly matched those figures, Lynchburg came closest, with measurements that include a total population of 255,440, median income of $46,913 and a 15.1% poverty rate.
And while Lynchburg may be able to claim the title of most average, here are a few cities that are less than typical:
- With 1.8 people per square mile, Winnemucca, NV, has the lowest population density
- The Villages, FL, has the highest median age in the country, at 64.5
- At $106,000 per household, Los Alamos, NM, has the highest median income
- Only 46.8% of residents in Rio Grande City, TX, have a high school diploma, a U.S.-worst
- With 90.1% of commuters using their cars, Dyersburg, TN, is tops in the nation
Dare to be different.
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