woohoo- A suburb outside my city is #1 on the list... which is cool, imo , because my city was also this years #1 on the Forbes list of best cities for business.
I guess I sure picked a wniner of a city to live in when I moved back to the States 8)
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woohoo- A suburb outside my city is #1 on the list... which is cool, imo , because my city was also this years #1 on the Forbes list of best cities for business.
I guess I sure picked a wniner of a city to live in when I moved back to the States 8)
I find it strange that Brevard County in Florida is a high cost living area...wtf?
Yeah one where my grandparents live is there as well.
Where's the list of 25?
to be totally correct, the AOL Business Week list is based on a combination of four specific measurements - #1 median home price , #2 cost of living index , #3 violent crime index , and #4 Secondary Schools Test Scores Index. Considering that Santa Clarita CA made the list at #16 with a median home price of $ 619,000 and a cost of living index of 153.9 IMHO costitutes irrefutable proof that the weighting factors used in compiling this list couldn't have been primarily based on 'affordability'.
Given that observation, it would appear that two other important criteria for ranking these suburbs is to field enough police presence to 'chase' the gang bangers, drug dealers etc. across the city limits into the 'large' city in order to reduce the local 'violent crime' statistics, and also to rip down enough low income housing within the suburb to maintain local student bodies being comprised of children from upscale english speaking families, and you've got a good shot at making the list !
The list also limited 'eligible' suburbs to only the suburbs of 'largest' cities, thus disqualifying thousands of suburbs of 'smaller' cities outright despite the fact that all four of their criteria may have been better than any of those suburbs that did make the list.
you can page through the 25 suburbs that made the AOL / Business Week list at
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Lake Zurich, IL is one of the 25 most affordable places to live? Yeah, right. They said that the MEDIAN home price goes for $400,000...NOT. There are several suburbs right around Lake Zurich that are just as nice, but not as pricey.
I wonder who paid off the people doing the research. ::)
let me guess ... Lake Zurich has a fairly large and conspicuous local police dep't, and practically no low income housing ??
I think what this is is they picked 25 major cities, and then chose the best suburb for each.
Every major city is on there. And they are in alphabetical order, so being #1 just means you're in a metropolitcan area that starts with "A".
The suburb they picked for Philly is a nice suburb though....still pretty expensive compared to mine, which is about the same distance from the city.
I think suburbs are one of the most destructive features of this country's landscape. They breed strip malls full of chain stores. The people who live in them consume huge amounts of gas to travel into the nearby cities to work, and the people who work in retail for minimum wage have to travel back to the cheap parts of the city where they live.
I have no problem with the boonies. And cities are good because higher density living is better, overall, for the environment; Manhattan's the most ecologically sound place in the U.S. as far as consumption of resources per person. But the suburbs are for people who want the convenience of cities while deluding themselves into thinking they live in a small town, never mind the eventual cost.
Goddamn you, Levittown!
/rant
Well, Melonie, its "low-income area" has housing that starts at $300,000. There are no government subsidized housing in the area. I mean, Lake Zurich is right next door to Barrington...which is our Multi-Million dollar area (yeah, their low income housing starts at around $400,000).
But the vast majority of Lake Zurich is built by builders/investors coming in and buy up the older homes, tearing them down and replacing them with--almost--1/4 million dollar homes. So, if Lake Zurich is one of the most affordable areas to live in, color me flabbergasted...but, maybe by CA standards, its "most affordable". LOL
^^^ I was making reference to the two other 'scores' utilized to rank these suburbs ... crime rate (which is usually logarithmically proportional to the amount of low income people residing in the area, which in the case of Lake Zurich sounds like essentially zero) ... and secondary school test scores (which is also usually inversely logarithmically proportional to the amount of low income people residing in an area, which therefore sounds very high).
Forgive be for being blunt, but I must admit that the basic hypocracy of such studies is truly amazing. According to this line of thinking, the solution to the economic and social problems in any given city / state is to simply rip down all of the low income housing and/or redevelop the properties so that only the 'gentry' can afford to purchase them. Thus the 'poor' people are forced to relocate to a different city or state ... taking the problems of crime, poor educational performance, high state and local taxes necessary to fund welfare / medicaid / other social programs etc. along with them !
Unfortunately, at some point you wind up with wonderful suburbs like Lake Zurich versus ultra-hell holes like the South Side of Chicago which essentially contains all of the crime, poor educational performance, social program recipients with associated costs etc. and essentially nobody remaining in the South Side of Chicago with any significant 'official' incomes to tax. What does the state do then ... erect a fence around the area, throw in food and a little bit of money, and watch the 'poor people' rob, rape and kill each other without taking action as long as the 'poor people' don't try to leave their fenced in area ?
Hey this works in Europe, with the best known example probably being 'Le Zones' outside major cities in France. But it certainly smacks of economic Apartheid. And as the French found out recently, if the 'poor people' do decide to jump their fence they are capable of wreaking all sorts of havoc.
There are a lot more affordable suburbs of Miami/Ft Lauderdale than Weston. In fact, I'd say that's one of the less affordable suburbs in that area.
Honestly, who are these people that can afford a median home price of $600,000 and what do they do for work? That's an outrageous mortgage:O I thought the $300,000 median in my town was crazy. Remind me to never move to Cally, Chicago, NY, or New Jersey:O
My affordable doesn't equal theirs , oh well I just prefer the fact they dont show any place I would think about moving to .
Same thing goes for St Louis. There are WAY more afforable places to live than St. Charles.
I love that they listed some areas that were $400,000+ as "affordable".
again, the 'affordability' was only 1/2 of the criteria used to compile this list. The local crime statistics and the local school performance on standardized tests factored in just as heavily, if not more so.
^ Yeah, but there are other towns/cities around here that are affordable, low crime rate, and have good local schools. So, they were just throwing darts at a map.
^^^ ah yes, that would certainly be more 'accurate', but it wouldn't further the political agenda of the source publication anywhere near as effectively !!!
Suburbs exist because the COL in cities is so damn high, especially on the coasts, less so in fly-over country. There would be no suburban sprawl if population was a fixed quantity, but since we've added 100 million people in less than forty years, that's not really an option.Quote:
But the suburbs are for people who want the convenience of cities while deluding themselves into thinking they live in a small town, never mind the eventual cost.