by Mark McDermott
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 — the highest community well-being measurement ever recorded in the survey’s 17-year history, across more than 1,500 communities studied nationwide since 2008.
Dan Witters, Gallup’s Well-Being Index research director, put it plainly when he presented the findings to the Beach Cities Health District board in January.
“Manhattan Beach is sitting at 71.6, which is now the highest that we’ve ever recorded,” Witters told the board. “And that’s a big database, over 1,500 community level entries, going back to 2008. So that’s no joke.”
The score breaks Manhattan Beach’s own previous record of 70.6, set in 2023. The national average for 2025 is 60.1.
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 — against a national figure of 62.6 — 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.
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 — roughly one-quarter the U.S. rate.
“Improvement in exercise habits, eating habits, and BMI are all major success stories,” Witters told the board.
The question of why Manhattan Beach ranks where it does — and whether that position can be attributed to deliberate community intervention or simply to wealth — is one the data raises but doesn’t settle. It’s 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.
“I still remember,” Witters told the board. “The night before our very first press conference here, 15 years ago, I said to Dan — we were sitting right next to each other at dinner — ‘They have pretty good well-being already. You sure you want this to be your very first Blue Zones community?’ And I was very much proven wrong.”
What followed proved his skepticism misplaced. Since 2015, the Beach Cities’ combined Well-Being Index score has risen 3.6 points — while the national score has fallen 1.6 points over the same period. “All those boats are lifting, while the tide’s going down,” Witters said.
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. “The data presented are descriptive, not evaluative,” Lamb said. “There is no comparison group, no pre or post analysis tied to program participation and no evidence of causation.” Income, she argued, was the more parsimonious explanation.
Witters, called back to the podium, was careful. “No one from Gallup and no one from the Beach Cities Health District that I’m aware of has claimed that we have causal evidence between Blue Zones and the very impressive improvement in well being over time,” he said. But he pushed back on the income explanation with the peer cities argument he has refined over years of parallel studies. “More affluent communities, probabilistically, are not more likely to improve,” he told the board. “They’re more likely to have higher well-being than lower income communities, but they’re not more likely to improve over time. To improve over time, you have to do something to move the needle.”
The peer city comparison makes this concrete. Communities that demographically resemble the Beach Cities — affluent, educated, coastal — tend to have high well-being scores. But they’re flat over time. Manhattan Beach has high well-being and keeps climbing. “What’s different here than what we find with others that kind of look like they’re affluent, that have a similar demographic mix?” Witters asked the board. “They have high well-being too — but they’re flat over time. You have high well-being, but you’ve gotten better over time.”
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 — and it starts with what he found when he arrived.
“When we arrived, the health of the Beach Cities reflected pretty much like the rest of California,” Buettner said in a recent interview. “Redondo Beach was actually kind of below average.”
What followed was what Buettner calls “silver buckshot” — 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 — and continues it today.
“Winston Churchill famously said that you change people’s environments and their behaviors change,” Buettner said. “I think Blue Zones deserves a good bit of credit for changing the environment — and then the culture starts to change.”
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.
“The moral of the tale,” he said, “is 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 — no matter how small, as long as they’re lasting — you’re going to get a return.”
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 — more cars, more processed food, more sedentary hours — and the cost is already running at roughly $5 trillion annually in chronic disease nationwide.
The role of wealth in Manhattan Beach’s outcome is not something Buettner or Witters dismisses. Household income is, by Gallup’s 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.
Over the same 15-year period, Manhattan Beach’s 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 — a gain of about 35 to 40 percent. The scale of that wealth increase raises the obvious question: how much of the city’s well-being is simply the byproduct of rising affluence?
Buettner has long argued that money’s 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. “$75,000 is about the cap,” he has said. “If you make more than that, then your day-to-day experience doesn’t get any better — you just have more stuff.” Manhattan Beach, by any measure, long ago surpassed that threshold.
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’t look like it in the numbers. The improvement is real, and it started from a specific moment in time, with specific interventions.
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 — 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.
And then there is alcohol. Manhattan Beach residents average 4.1 drinks per week, well above the national figure of 2.5 — 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’s 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’t capture, the index doesn’t say. It is simply the one metric that declines to cooperate.
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 — who has spent 35 years at Gallup studying what makes communities thrive and decline — offered his bottom line to the board.
“The Beach Cities are getting better, while when we look at national comparables, they’re going the other direction,” he said. “So you’re doing something right.”
The survey was conducted between September and November 2025, with 6,850 questionnaires distributed across the Beach Cities and 1,270 responses returned.
