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(Updated 2:55 p.m.) Thirty Arlington companies made Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies, including one advertising firm made the top 15.
Local groups including Mothers of North Arlington (MONA) and the Alcova Heights Community Association were left scrambling last week after Yahoo announced it would be shuttering its still-widely-used online messaging tool, Yahoo! Groups.
“This listserv was very valuable to the neighborhood,” said Mark Wigfield, the moderator for the Barcroft School & Civic League chat list (Bsclchat). “People [used it to] chat back and forth about hiring plumbers and carpenters, local issues, crime reports, ‘curb alerts’ for stuff they’re putting out on the curb for the taking, and more.”
The companies — Promontory Interfinancial Network, Applied Predictive Technologies and Halfaker & Associates — were ranked based on feedback from a survey of employees.
The full list of Arlington companies on the Post’s annual rankings is below.
FlipKey.com, a TripAdvisor company, put together a list of “Best Pizza Worth Traveling For” and chose one pizza place for each of the 50 states. Arlington’s own Pupatella received the honors for Virginia.
A representative for FlipKey said the winners were chosen based on market research and traveler feedback.
Although it may seem surprising that Arlington would be ranked above areas with larger gay populations, such as San Francisco and New York City, it might make more sense when considering the non-traditional scoring process. The list compilers even note they looked for “hidden factors that give a city its queer cred” and that “It’s not all piano bars, gender-specific music festivals, and giant disco houses.”
Arlington scored low in a number of categories such as “Lesbian couple-headed households” and “Mariah Carey concert dates” but picked up a point for having a nearby Gay Rodeo association. Arlington also picked up three points for having gay local elected officials and 0.1 points for having gay state elected officials.
At $99,255, Arlington’s median income ranked 7th out of 3,142 counties. However, Arlington ranked lower than some Washington area neighbors: #5 Fairfax County ($106,690), #4 Howard County, Md. ($108,234), #2 Loudoun County ($118,934) and #1 Falls Church ($121,250), which is an independent city but counted as a county by the Census Bureau.
“Metropolitan counties along the East Coast continued to have the highest median household income and lowest poverty in the country,” said the Census Bureau’s Lucinda Dalzell, in a press release. “Northern Virginia alone accounted for about one-fifth of the nation’s 50 highest-income counties.”
Arlington’s median family income in 2012 was $137,216, putting the county comfortably in first place over the country’s second-richest county, Loudoun County (Va.), at $127,192.
Arlington’s median family income grew by more than $5,000 since 2011, when it stood at $131,890, and more than $10,000 since 2007, when it was $127,179.
Allstate released its annual “America’s Best Drivers Report,” which ranks the country’s 200 largest cities in terms of frequency of car collisions. The report is based on Allstate claims data.
Arlington ranked 12th on the worst drivers side, coming in at 53% more likely than the national average to be involved in a collision. That’s up from 14th worst in 2011 and 20th in 2010.
The ranking is based on Arlington’s $132,580 median family income. Arlington’s median home price is $485,000, according to CNN Money.
Two other D.C. suburbs ranked higher than Arlington. Bethesda, Md. was #1 with a median income of $184,606 and a median home price of $740,000. Ashburn, Va. is #6 with a median income of $146,093 and a median home price of $345,000.
The list is an excerpt from a recently released book, written on the belief that the role of creativity is on the rise in American society. It asserts that the creative class consists of around 40 million workers, or more than one-third of the total workforce. Examples of fields with high numbers of creative class professionals include management, education, science, architecture and media.
The list charts the concentration of the creative class by county (although several independent Virginia cities also made the list). Arlington County came in at number two, second only to Los Alamos County, New Mexico. A number of D.C.-area locales also made the list, including:
