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Ever spent time wondering about what’s the happiest city in America? But apparently some folks at HouseFresh.com — a site dedicated to helping people improve the air quality in their homes — apparently has.

The company has sponsored a study to find out what’s the jolliest city in the 50 states and the top prize goes to: Concord.

Yup, that’s right — Concord, the home of the Concord Pavilion, Six Flags Hurricane Harbor and Luigi’s Italian Delicatessen, takes the crown as the “Happiest City in the U.S.”

That’s interesting, in part because we were told a few months back that it was Yet, that Alameda County city — which came in at No. 1 in a 2022 report by the personal finance website WalletHub ranking Happiest Cities in America in 2022 — doesn’t even make the top 20 of this current rating.

Did Fremont suddenly get sad? Maybe the reality of the Saddle Rack’s closing is just starting to settle on the country music fans in that city? Feel better, Fremont! You’ve still got Strizzi’s.

Filling out the top 5 just behind Concord on the current list were (in descending order) Provo, Utah; Knoxville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Mesa, Arizona. Besides chart-topper Concord, the only other Bay Area city to make the top 20 was San Francisco, which ranked in at No. 15. The happiness ranking was based on, well, smiles. No, we’re totally serious.

HouseFresh used “Microsoft’s face recognition API, Azure, to analyze a database of Instagram selfies from every state and the 100 biggest U.S. cities to see which are the happiest places to live,” according to the study. “This facial recognition happiness score, averaging all the scores in each location. For the smiliest cities and states, we considered that a face has a smile if its smile score was greater than 0.75. The locations were ranked by the percentage of people smiling.” actually Fremont that is tops when it comes to happiness. tool places numerical estimates on emotions based on characteristics and expressions. To work out the happiest cities and states, we used the FaceAPI Yeah, neither have we. smiling. That makes Concord the “smiliest” — wait, is that a real word? oh, well, just go with it — city in America.