I’m reading the entertaining Schott’s Almanac, sadly published only in 2007. At that time, the top ten places to live in the US were, according to Money Magazine, as listed below. Similar lists in Canada do not always reveal very interesting places. So I was wondering if any Dopers had any thoughts about this list or these “top US” places.
I know Naperville very well; it’s in Chicago’s western suburbs; it’s where many of my friends live, and it’s where I go to church. When I was a little kid, before my family moved to Wisconsin, we lived in nearby Lisle; I went to grade school in Naperville, and my sister was born there.
It’s about 30 miles west of downtown Chicago. It is, at least in part, a “bedroom” community for Chicago, with a lot of residents commuting to the city for work (or, at least, they did, pre-COVID).
It has about 150,000 people, which makes it almost twice as big as it was when I moved back to the Chicago area in 1989.
It’s not as upscale/wealthy, overall, as some other Chicago suburbs (like Hinsdale in the western suburbs, or Highland Park or Winnetka in the northern suburbs), but it’s solidly middle-class to upper-middle-class.
It tends to be somewhat conservative and, in the minds of a lot of residents, kind of boring, but it has, historically, been pretty safe, and pretty stable.
Looking at the entire list of 10, I bet that at least half of them fall into the same general camp, as “nice suburbs of a bigger city.” (Especially if #6 is actually “Overland Park, KS”.)
The only one I’m familiar with is Sugar Land. It’s a suburb southwest of Houston. Like kenobi wrote, it’s a nice suburb of a bigger city.
The area was named for sugar being grown and processed there. It’s also known for having several prisons in it. This is why some versions of “The Midnight Special” have a line abound being “Sugar Land bound”.
Nowadays it’s an upscale residential suburb. A lot of wealthy people who work in Houston commute in from Sugar Land. There’s also a lot of upscale shopping.
My parents lived in a little community (Meadows Place) which bordered Houston and Sugar Land, so I can speak with a little bit of authority on it.
It’s called Sugar Land because the Imperial Sugar mill was originally located there, as were the sugar-growing fields when the company was founded. The mill is no longer in operation, but the company is still headquartered there.
The city itself is a suburb of Houston. A mostly middle/upper-middle one that’s located southwest of Houston and is mostly in Fort Bend County. Sugar Land itself is pretty diverse- it’s something like 31% white, 12% hispanic, 7% black, and 38% asian (which is predominantly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indian, with Indians being the largest single group).
It’s… suburban. Lots of chain restaurants and stores, and most of the growth has taken place since the late 1980s/early 1990s, with a lot of it being in the early 90s and early 2000s.
When I was a kid, it was a small town- we lived near the western edge of the Houston urban area, and it was a good 15-20 minutes out in the country from us. There were a few tony suburban developments that I think were technically in Sugar Land- Quail Valley and Sugar Creek. But for the most part, it was a small town centered right around the sugar mill. I actually got to tour it as a kid as part of a field trip- it was intensely interesting. And the best part was that there was an old two-screen theater(the Palms, I think) that somehow had the latest movies, but was far enough off the beaten path so that it had no lines. So I saw most of the action blockbusters of the 1980s there with my Dad.
If I had to guess why it’s on that list, it’s because it’s fairly affluent, not huge, has relatively low crime, and so forth. It’s also got some outposts of stuff like University of Houston, a minor league baseball team, and is located within a fairly decent school district (Fort Bend).
Sugar Land has been one of Texas’ fastest-growing cities, approximately doubling in population in the last 20 years. In 1970 the population was about 3,300. It’s now over 120,000.
Very rapidly-growing cities typically have quality-of-life problems. When I lived in the Houston area in the late '90s, I remember a slow crawl during the evening rush hour if you had to get from Houston to Sugar Land. It’s probably gotten considerably worse.
Fun fact: The Sugarland Express (a movie marking Steven Spielberg’s theatrical movie directing debut) was partially set in Sugar Land. About all I can remember from it is Goldie Hawn being given a piglet to hold and subsequently protesting “He peed on me!”.
I used to work in Columbia and I still have friends that live there (our company moved to Owings Mills, they didn’t).
It’s a planned community, so there are all sorts of rules about what can go where. Overall it has a nice aesthetic. Instead of sprawling ugly buildings placed willy-nilly all over the place, everything is hidden behind hillsides, rows of trees or bushes, etc. While this prevents Columbia from getting the typical “suburban sprawl”, it also means that it’s really freaking difficult to find anything. There are few signs on the main roads, other than signs that tell you the street names. What’s behind that row of trees that you are driving past? Homes? A Walmart? You have no way of knowing. Looking for a gas station? Good luck. You might have just driven by one.
Columbia is a VERY expensive place to live, so much so that if you have a minimum-wage type job you can’t afford to live there. They have to bus in minimum-wage workers from Baltimore every day. Groceries are more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Everything is more expensive.
Rush hour traffic sucks. Big-time.
It’s a nice place to live, if you can afford it. And the high cost of living there does keep out the riff-raff.
It is distinctive, I’ll give you that. But at the end of the day it’s just another fancy suburb of Baltimore.
Since I used to subscribe to Money Magazine, I can tell what the criteria most likely were:
They were cities with amenities readily available (hence inside the metro area of a major city), with lots of jobs availability, low crime and (the tough one) relatively affordable.
Looking at the U.S. list, I think it’s safe to say that one doesn’t move to those cities, specifically for cultural attractions or thriving social scenes (though those are likely available, to a greater or lesser degree, in the bigger nearby cities), but because they have good schools, relatively low crime, nice parks, homes that appreciate in value, etc. In other words, “a good place to raise a family.”
My wife grew up in Columbia, and would probably agree with what you said. I didn’t realize it has gotten super expensive, but I’m not surprised. Of course if you have a minimum wage type job there aren’t a lot of places you can afford to live. We couldn’t afford the house we live in now, even though our income is probably twice what it was when we bought it in 1999 (we live in Silver Spring, just outside DC).