Money's List of Best American Small Cities

[amykhar]

Best places to live 2008 - Top 100: 1-25 - from MONEY Magazine

Reading is pathetic. (If your city is not in the top 100, you can add it manually to the compare list and then view its stats)

How does your area rate?

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Bah. I would definitely take a city in Western NY over "North Hempstead," which isn't really a city anyway.

[lynnzop[$]]

I'm moving to Napierville, IL.

[magenta321]

I compared my city, which is unranked, to the top cities. Here's the comparison on the things I found most important (first numbers are my town, second numbers are the average of the top places):

Financial City stats Best places avg.
Median family income
(per year) $93,192 $93,075
Family purchasing power
(annual, cost-of-living adjusted) $113,881 $107,483
Sales tax 6.00% 6.57%
State income tax rate
(highest bracket) 5.00%I 5.17%
State income tax rate
(lowest bracket) 3.00%I 2.43%
Auto insurance premiums
(Average for the state) $2,029 $1,791
Job growth %
(2000-2007) 11.88% 18.72%
Housing City stats Best places avg.
Median home price $299,000 $291,949
Average property taxes
(2006) $4,617 $3,886

Personal crime incidents (per 1,000) 1 2
Property crime incidents (per 1,000) 27 25
Median commute time
(in minutes) 25.1 23.0
% population with commute
45 mins. or longer 19.6% 15.7%
% population walk or bike to work 2.7% 3.0%
Racial diversity index
(100 is national average; higher numbers indicate greater diversity) 20.2 104.2 :o

Overall, it looks like I live in a good place, albeit not a very diverse one, and not a very cultural one (way fewer museums, libraries, etc than the average top places). I think it's a good place to live, but I didn't need a survey to tell me that

The place I used to live was much better (in my mind), but I can't compare it to the national averages because it's not a city.

[frazzledspice]

Fort Smith, AR wasn't even on the list, and it's stats aren't anywhere near as good.

But you know, I've lived here 8 years, and in that time I have discovered the best aspects of living here and prefer to focus on those....

I spend forty hours a week at a job I love, and I wouldn't have that job anywhere else.

Our income is considerably better than the median income here, and that has a big effect on our quality of life.

My biggest complaint about living here is that I am far away from two of my adult children, but since one is still in South Korea (he's coming home for a visit Sunday, thank the Lord!) I'd be far away from him no matter where I lived.

[wivabef]

Take out the Columbia in the Columbia/Ellicott City ranking and I would agree. Ellicott City.. wonderful (though pricy)... Columbia.. old and ho hum. And highly commercialized and really hard to get around in a car.

[brian_igo]

Places on the list I know, with editorial comments:

Fishers, Indiana (#10) - This is the tenth-best small city to live in? You have got to be kidding me. My niece lives there and this Indianapolis burb is one of the most soul-sucking places I know. Three-quarters of the town used to be cornfields, now they're covered with suburbs that are monotonous and characterless.

Gilbert (#28), Chandler (#30), Scottsdale (#47) and Peoria (#55) Arizona: All of these used to be actual small cities, but in the last 20 years they've been taken over by the explosive growth of sprawl in Phoenix. Is it still a small city when you can go from one to another to another without an inch of undeveloped land in between?

This wasn't a bad place to live if you didn't have to commute from one of the burb cities into Phoenix every day. If you do, expect to spend at least three hours a day commuting.

Weston (#73), Coral Springs (#78) and Miramar (#98) Florida: Three Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood 'burbs, Weston and Miramar on the western edge and Coral Springs on the northern border. All are relatively new master-planned communities so its hard to think of them as real small cities. Weston is new money with a heavy Venezuelan accent, Coral Springs is for shopping, and Miramar is a bedroom community that exploded in size after Hurricane Andrew. None have any real character or sense of place compared to neighboring communities that didn't make the list, but that's true for most of South Florida.

Like the Phoenix entries, the quality of life is inversely proportional to the amount of time you have to spend in the gawdawful traffic every day. If you can live and work in the same town, and you like everything about Florida except the beach, these western burbs can be a great place to live. But it is insanely expensive thanks to high homeowners insurance costs.

[Helen_B[$]]

Troy, Michigan (#22) has 75% good air days. That's in my neck of the woods, but I would like better air quality than that. I didn't even look to see what was toward the bottom of the list. These days, breathing is rather a high priority to me, and I resent being trapped in my house by bad air.

[frazzledspice]

Well, I lived in Wildwood, MO for 9 years, and I'd pick it before St. Charles or St. Peters any day. St. Peters is in the Francis Howell School District, which has two different school year schedules--year round for your elementary school students, and traditional school year for JHS and HS (because of sports.) Talk about a nightmare!

Although Wildwood, St. Charles, and St. Peters all have experienced a lot of growth, the traffic seems much more nightmarish in those towns, and you have to get over a bridge (no easy task, I've heard) in heavy traffic to leave St. Charles.

As for North Hempstead, NY, a place where I lived for sixteen years, it has lots of advantages to go along with the traffic, tremendously overpriced and overtaxed homes, and high cost of living....

What I liked best about living there was that we lived in the kind of neighborhood where my kids could ride their bikes anywhere, walk anywhere, and lead pretty independent lives. After leaving NY everything was subdivisions, none intersecting, none close to stores...or schools....

My favorite place of all the places I lived--Wildwood, MO.

[Prepoia[$]]

I lived in Troy for 10 years but its traffic and population wasn't nearly as bad as now. I can't imagine that there's much clean air left. Ann Arbor on the other hand seems to fit the great place to live mode. In the top 100, 5 were in Michigan (the state of no jobs) so living here could be a problem for many. The other place Helen is Novi where the 12 Oaks Mall is (I sometimes see Canadian shopping buses in the parking lot). Again, like Troy, traffic jam time but new and beautiful and expensive homes. West Bloomfield is an older residential area but is spread out and not really what I'd think of as a city. That goes for Shelby too (which is really country compared to the other 4 but it's some place I have seldom visited.

Interesting choices but ....