Measured in selfie smiles, Concord scores as happiest city in U.S.
CONCORD -- In an East Bay triumph thanks to social media pseudo-science, Concord has been named America's happiest city.
An analysis released Thursday by HouseFresh.com, a site focused on improving residential air quality, placed Concord in the Number One slot.
"The hometown of Tom Hanks is said to be a quiet and pleasant place to live: moderately wealthy, moderately liberal and more affordable than similar cities nearby," according to the HouseFresh.com website.
The rating method was, er, interesting. It was based on how many people in each city or state in America were smiling in their Instagram selfies. Yes, really.
HouseFresh.com used a face recognition API known as Azure to analyze a database of Instagram selfies from each state, as well as the 100 biggest U.S. cities.
The locations were ranked by the percentage of people smiling. Apparently, 74.4 percent of the Concord residents had a grin above their chin.
Regardless of the relative efficacy of this approach, one result is not unlikely: Residents of the East Bay might well be smiling at the ratings two of their towns recently received.
Not only is Concord now Number One in the eyes of HouseFresh, personal finance website WalletHub in March awarded the same honor to the city of Fremont.
Returning to the HouseFresh rankings, the top five below Concord were Provo, Utah; Knoxville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina and Mesa, Arizona.
Yet another victory for the East Bay: San Francisco came in 15th, quite a snub.
