What is a caring city? For starters, it’s a place where the residents have a track record of actively looking for those around them who lack the basic necessities, such as the ill, lonely, elderly or low-income.

Caring “can be expressed in many ways – from helping an older adult cross the street to fighting a house fire,” stated analyst Cassandra Happe on the website for WalletHub.

Happe recently researched the 100 largest cities in the U.S. and applied 38 indicators of a “compassionate spirit” to see which could be construed as being the most caring places to live.

Those indicators included a metric regarding the number of people who carpool to work in order to care for the environment, the pedestrian fatality rate, the share of citizens who voted, a metric representing efforts to end veteran and chronic homelessness and more.

Many bright spots emerged. In Massachusetts, for example, Bostonians donate the most money online per capita. The city is also one of the best at sheltering its homeless.

Madison, Wisconsin, ranks first in the number of doctors and EMTs who stand ready to restore patients to good health. Although they didn’t make the top 10, the survey concluded that residents of Jacksonville, Florida, do more than any of the other cities for their neighbors.

Here are the top 10 most caring cities in America

1. Madison, Wisconsin
2. Boston, Massachusets
3. Virginia Beach, Virginia
4. New York, New York
5. San Diego, California
6. Chesapeake, Virginia
7. Colorado Springs, Colorado
8. Fremont, California
9. Portland, Oregon
10. Scottsdale, Arizona

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