Fenway-Kenmore Ranked Best Boston Neighborhood for Living Well

Fenway photo by Jeramey Jannene via Flickr/Creative Commons

Congrats, Fenway residents. According to real estate site Trulia, yours is the best neighborhood in Boston for living well.

Trulia’s new Live Well maps rank neighborhoods from cities nationwide based on how easy they make it for residents to live an active and healthy lifestyle. The rankings factor in the number of low-traffic streets, presumably allowing for safe running, walking, and biking; access to medical resources, such as hospitals, pharmacies, and urgent care clinics; and the number of “play-centric amenities,” such as parks, playgrounds, and running trails.

Fenway-Kenmore won top honors in Boston, but it was still only 54th on the list of neighborhoods in mid-sized cities, defined as areas with populations between 1 and 2 million. While Fenway did quite well in terms of resources and amenities per square mile, its percentage of quiet streets, 19.3, was way below the national average.

Unfortunately, the results only go downhill from there. The South End was 67th, Allston was 83rd, North Allston was 112th, and Charlestown was 196th on the mid-sized cities list. We were slightly better represented by the Cambridge-Newton-Framingham area, which took 36th (with Nonantum) and 61st (with Chestnut Hill) on the large cities list, which ranked areas with populations higher than 2 million.

The top neighborhoods on the mid-sized cities list were in San Fransisco and New Orleans, while the top large city neighborhoods were in San Diego and Los Angeles.

It’s hard to deny that Boston doesn’t have the quietest streets in the world, but at least we can take comfort in our abundance of fitness studios, juice bars, and world-class hospitals.

Below are Trulia’s maps for Boston as a whole: