A Sacramento-area community is one of America’s healthiest counties. Here’s why
Residents of Placer County live in one of the top 50 healthiest communities in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report magazine. It’s the second year the area scored so well on the annual list.
This year, Placer County ranks at 40, down from 35 in 2021. The new score reflects challenges the county faces with affordable housing and the risk of wildfires.
Dr. Rob Oldham, director of Placer County’s Department of Health & Human Services, said that what this list and a key ranking from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation do is help county and city leaders identify areas of high achievement that need fine-tuning and areas where they are falling short that need greater investment.
“The health of our residents takes the whole community,” he said. “We don’t want to celebrate too much ... when we see these ratings. We still have a long way to go. I think it does give us an opportunity to acknowledge the community partnerships that we have in place that are making us as successful as we are.”
Placer’s scores in several areas of the U.S. News rankings show where those partnerships are going really well, Oldham said. The county’s mark on population health, for instance, was 84 out of 100, which Oldham attributed not only to the county’s public health work but also to a vibrant health care delivery system in the private sector.
U.S. News also reported that Placer scored 75 or better in a handful of other categories:
▪ Infrastructure, 86. This category looks at stats related to walkability, internet access, household access to motor vehicles, workplace commutes and distance to public transit.
▪ Economic, 82, a measure of employment, income levels and opportunity.
▪ Public safety, 78, which looks at crime, injuries, percentages of public safety personnel, spending on health and emergency services, and proximity of the population to emergency facilities.
▪ Food and nutrition, 77, a measure of food availability and nutrition.
▪ Community vitality, 75, which assesses home ownership levels, population inflows, municipal financial health, census responses, the number of nonprofits, neighborhood diversity and voter participation.
Housing remains an issue
The category that proved toughest for Placer was one that so many other California counties struggle with: housing, Oldham said. The county received a grade of 46, the only category where it came in below 50%. The score reflects how well the counties are doing when it comes to housing affordability, capacity and quality.
“All the California counties had a hard time on that one,” Oldham said. “Affordable housing is a statewide problem. ... We’ve done a lot on housing in the last two years, but we obviously have a lot further to go.”
The only other California counties on the U.S. News list of 100 also posted sub-50 marks in this category: San Mateo County ranked 36th overall but go a score of 34 on housing. Santa Clara County was No. 39 but got a 40 in housing. Marin County came in 78th out of 100 but got a mark of 21 in the housing category.
The low scores on housing and the resulting impact on overall health marks explain why state leaders are fining cities that don’t meet affordable housing goals and putting additional dollars toward building affordable housing.
Placer also scored poorly in the environment category, earning a 59 in the area that measures, air quality, airborne cancer risk, the safety of drinking water, potential exposure to toxic chemicals, exposure to extreme heat, size of the tree canopy, access to manmade parks and natural amenities, and risk of natural disasters.
The county’s vast acres of forestland have made it vulnerable to wildfire and to the smoke that pollutes the air.
Addressing health equity in Placer County
Oldham said he’d also like to see Placer County improve in the equity category where it got a 61, and his agency has been partnering with community-based organizations to make inroads with groups that historically have not enjoyed health access or benefits.
“Although we’re a healthy county, we want to make sure that there are groups that are not left behind,” he said. “We have some room to improve there, and again, that coincides with one of the priorities coming out of our (county) strategic plan that we identified — a focus countywide on identifying where those health disparities continue to exist and how we could fill those gaps.”
U.S. News editors worked with researchers from the University of Missouri to evaluate nearly 3,000 counties on 10 key areas that contribute to community health. The magazine’s editors and the Missouri researchers determined how much weight to give each area by asking more than a dozen experts to divide 100 points among the 10 categories.
They then averaged the results from the experts, giving population health a weight of 14.2%, equity 12.23%, education 12.15%, economy 11.1% housing 9.5%, nutrition 8.8%, environment 8.6%, public safety 8.5%, community vitality 7.6% and infrastructure 7.5%. (Due to rounding, the total of these numbers is just over 100%.)
The nation’s five healthiest communities for 2022 are Los Alamos County, N.M.; Falls Church, Va.; Douglas County, Colo.; Morgan County, Utah; and Carver County, Minn.
The Missouri researchers also tracked two stats related to COVID-19, one on deaths and another on vaccinations.
They found that communities with higher cumulative death rates due to COVID-19 tend to have lower rates of post-secondary education, lower life expectancy, and lower percentages of adults who’ve recently engaged in leisure-time physical activity.
This ranking, which has been done for five years now in partnership with CVS Health, also showed a relationship between education level and willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Communities with a higher level of education – as measured by the share of the population with an associate’s degree or higher – tended to have higher COVID-19 vaccination rates, as well as higher rates of booster shot receipt.
This story was originally published June 23, 2022 at 7:09 AM.
