| 150 Great Places To Live | ||
| Reasonably priced U.S. cities and towns you might consider as you set out to find the where of your happiness | ||
| In Life 2.0, I list 150 small towns, medium-sized cities and larger metro regions in the U.S. where you can live well and your dollar will go far. | ||
| Of course, the "live well" half of my claim is shot through with subjectivity. It will be highly dependent on who you are, and what you want out of life. There are plenty of folks who will steadfastly refuse to suffer even one more day of subfreezing temperatures—period, end of story. Others may be bored to the point of madness by living in a small town. They crave big-city stimulation. Their hope is to find such a lifestyle devoid of Manhattan-like expenses and pressures. | ||
| One of the great pleasures of living in the U.S. is its sheer diversity. As I point out in the book's introduction, America offers by far the richest selection of location choices to work and live—to pursue your American Dream by your own definition. You can chose cities by size, by weather, by political tenor (Portland, Ore. is very liberal while a city of equal size, Cincinnati, Ohio is deeply conservative), by industry, by tax and regulatory scheme, by schools, by the arts and music scene, by acceptance of racial and sexual minorities, and by cost of living. You can dwell in the mountains, put down on the beach, reside on a farm, or repair to the high desert. | ||
| In other words, you don't have to "settle" when you settle. | ||
| Now, some words on how my team and I organized our list of 150 cities. One, respecting America's vast size and diversity, we broke the 150 locations into six categories. They are: | ||
| • Porch Swing Communities (best
family friendly cities) • Happy Hootervilles (best small towns) • IQ Campuses (emerging centers of biotech and infotech) • Steroid Cities (fast-growing, business friendly metro areas) • Bohemian Bargains (lively inner cities) • Telecommuting Heavens (where to work in your underwear) |
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| Two, we purposely excluded from our list the following: really expensive cities (which includes Seattle, coastal California, Boston, New York, and Washington D.C.); high-priced resorts (Aspen, Jackson Hole, Palm Beach, the Hamptons, Kennebunkport, etc.); and cities such as Chicago and Houston, reasonably priced but too huge. | ||
| Our price cutoff was $500,000 for a median professional class home. Just what is a "median professional class home?" We considered it to be a 2,500 square foot house on quarter-acre or half-acre lot, with new amenities such as kitchen, bathroom, flooring, windows and paint—located in a nice neighborhood. In La Jolla, California, a suburb of San Diego, that house would fetch $1,800,000. Happily, most of our 150 Great Places To Live offer such houses in the $200,000 to $350,000 range. | ||
| On house prices, we found the city-to-city comparison chart on www.coldwellbanker.com to be the most accurate and up-to-date. This is an incredible site! Go to the main page and click on "house price index" and see for yourself. I've spent many hours there. | ||
| So where is the list of 150 Great Places to Live? Sorry, I can't share it with you at this time. The list is compiled, but it won't be released until Life 2.0 hits the bookstores on July 27. | ||
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