This Is the Most Average City in America

US cities don't get more typical than Lynchburg, Virginia
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 17, 2017 5:24 PM CDT
This Is the Most Average City in America
A typical view of the highly average city of Lynchburg, Virginia.   (Getty Images/SeanPavonePhoto)

There may not be a "Real America," but there's definitely an average America—and its name is Lynchburg, Virginia. NewCo Shift crunched the numbers on eight measurements (while admitting there are thousands more it could have used instead) to figure out what constitutes a typical American city. Here are the averages for the 917 cities it looked at:

  • Average population of 321,773 people.
  • Average population density of 161 people per square mile.
  • Average median age of 38.4 years.
  • Average median income of $46,871 per year.
  • Average poverty rate of 16.8%.
  • 80.2% of residents commute by car.
  • 85.6% of residents are high school graduates.
  • 8.1% of residents have postgraduate degrees.

Under those measurements, Lynchburg arose as the most average city in America. It's a little older than your typical American city (the median age of residents is 40.1 years old) and has a little less poverty (the poverty rate is 15.1%), but overall it's the closest to the averages of each category. NewCo Shift also looked at the most typical and atypical (we see you, Los Alamos) American cities in each of those eight categories. Read the full piece here. (More Lynchburg, Va. stories.)

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