I don't think I'd argue... although Boulder is #1 on my list.. After the foreclosure wave, might be able to pick up some property there for pennies on the dollar in 2009...
Here's the top 25 from the latest Money survey. Do you know what you'd have to pay me though to live in most of these cities? Thanks borka for the link
Fort Collins, CO
Naperville, IL
Sugar Land, TX
Columbia/Ellicott City, MD
Cary, NC
Overland Park, KS
Scottsdale, AZ
Boise, ID
Fairfield, CT
Eden Prairie, MN
Plano, TX
Eagan, MN
Olathe, KS
West Bloomfield , MI
Richardson, TX
Gilbert, AZ
Parsippany-Troy Hills, NJ
Santa Clarita, CA
Carrollton, TX
Henderson, NV
Bellevue, WA
Newton, MA
Sandy, UT
Westminster, CO
Ann Arbor, MI
July 17, 2006
Fort Collins seen as best place to live in America
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29 comments:
Uuhhh. Is it just me or are most of these places pretty unknown? I mean, I've never heard of most of them....
Olathe KS is simply awful. Kansas in general or anywhere in the midwest is beyond bad. East coast baby, water, boats, and beaches. The only negative, besides the cost, is that that area is full of nutjob, left wing, liberal Dems, but most of the idiots on this blog fall into that catagory.
Santa Clarita = home of the 4 hour commute!!!!!
What idiot made this list up?? Santa Clarita has a terrible commute, and boasts as its major cultural attraction Magic Mountain Amusement Park. . .every chain restaurant on the planet. . .well, come to think of it - typical American crapola suburb - full of SUV driving, beer guzzling fat stomachs. . .ME a cultural elite??? no way. . .
These "Best..." lists put together by young journalism grad who haven't lived real time in any of these places, are meaningles. They put together the list based on data, anecdotal hearsay and buzz. The best place to live is strictly subjective and personal and I wouldn't tell anybody if I knew.
And I agree with the previous poster,
Scottsdale, AZ. is one of the WORST places to live.
By the way Keith, why don't you start a blog on readers input of the worst places to live, which would provide a perspective of where to avoid.
Sugarland, TX is #3? LOL!
The place is a gumbo swamp. I remember moving to a brand new commercial building and within six months, the settling and ground swell had warped the framing to the point that most doors wouldn't close anymore.
The roaches are big enough to BBQ though...
Yeah..Snottsdale is way overated...the following comment appeared in the North Scottsdale Times last week:
" I moved here from Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't been to Scottsdale. I came here pretty blindly, with the exception of the Internet, which kind of made this place look like Utopia online. But I'm curious. Where are the mom-and-pop shops and the dive bars and the artsy urban laid back thirty-somethings that aren't ruled by money and status and high-end cars? I'm curious.
Where's the culture? I'm thinking I made a serious mistake. So far, I've gotten a parking ticket and a lesson on tent city and dirty politics. Surely this town has more to offer, but it's looking like one giant corporate strip mall. Its kind of disappointing, so if anyone has any advice"
My advice to the writer is that it has nothing to offer except what he's experienced and to get the flock out of there ASAP!
Florida's not on the list....I thought everyone wanted to live here?
(according to the Florida real estate agents groups anyway....)
OH, and Olathe, KS is a great town. Move the yuppies out of Naperville and it would be nice too.
Needless to say, most arealos bigots and their idea of patriotism is to paste a made in China plastic American flag on their leased SUVs and support young kids to die for their gasoline addiction.
you could find the same thing in most cities. Just today I flipped a woman off in a SUV with a flag sticker, driving by herself, sitting in the starbucks exit lane.
Sugar Land is a standard suburb. Its advantages are low cost of living and good jobs. Tom Delay's district - well taken care of. Schlumberger, Halliburton, KBR, Baker Hughes, etc.
From an insider. Fort Collins is an ok place to live if you are retired...
Other than the University, Fort Collins has no jobs locally. Most of the tech talent has been laid off in the past 3 years and jobs are very slow to return.
They're still building new homes though!
FCJohn
I like how California is not even mentioned.
"Olathe KS is simply awful. Kansas in general or anywhere in the midwest is beyond bad. East coast baby, water, boats, and beaches. The only negative, besides the cost, is that that area is full of nutjob, left wing, liberal Dems, but most of the idiots on this blog fall into that catagory."
Gee, maybe one might think there's a correlation between having """leftwing, liberal Dems""" and very nice places to live?
My brother lives in "The Fort". I visited him a litle over a yr ago (APR 05)& the number of for sale & for rent signs was amazing. He lives in a "planned" subdivision where every house looks exactly the same. If you like to hang out with your friends & drink beer it's great, but hey I'd take Milwaukee in that case. For big city types or people more career oriented, it didn't seem viable.
I had to get to #70 before one city in Alabama was listed. And they picked Hoover, a city south of Birmingham, but still "Birmingham" in my view. I would not live there. That list was probably sold rather than researched.
I agree Boulder is nice...if you can afford 800K for a dump and I mean the houses here need bulldozers...NOTHING to salvage!
"Gee, maybe one might think there's a correlation between having """leftwing, liberal Dems""" and very nice places to live? "
nope, there is a corr. to having water, country and yacht clubs and nice places to live. This is also where the limosine liberals like John Kerry choose to live. I recently saw him on Nantucket picking Theresa at the Catholic Church. Wasn't his campaign pro-choice?? hmm, how does that work?
Hmmm...two Twin Cities suburbs listed, but not the Twin Cities themselves.
Eagan and Eden Prairie are both cookie-cutter subdivision suburbs with the same sterile strip mall ambience we now see across America. Add in the noise from the international airport and the interstate - they've got nothing special going for them, at least not compared to the rest of the TC area.
I'd love to know what their criteria were for compiling the list. Not as if these lists mean anything...
They are affordable places where smart people raise their children, unlike left-wing ratholes (Detroit, SF, LA) full of shallow liberal idiots, drugs and crime
For sure, lots of scum in Scottsdale.AZ.
800K for a dump in Boulder?
Guess again. At the moment there are 82 homes on the market in Boulder priced between 700 and 800K. Few qualify as dumps, in my opinion.
As for Ft. Fun, I've found it a very attractive community. Sure, it has some new developments that were slapped together and painted beige, just like many parts of the country. But it also has many great neighborhoods, a very charming old town, and a university to keep it lively. I think all in all, most people would agree that Fort Collins is a very nice place to live. It's probably my second choice after Boulder.
Oh, and the Anons debating affordable places to raise a family, try Louisville, CO about 60 miles south of Ft. Collins.
Would you like a side order of crime with that?
Looks to me like Fort Collins has over-average (of the Best Places avg) crime stats, so apparently air quality weighs more than crime in their final analysis.
Gee, ya think a median age of 28.8 has anything to do with FC's above avg crime rate?
this is like Consumer Reports-If they gat paid off, the company or city gets recognized. can you say fraud????
So the criteria seem to be places with the most white people named Bob and Sue who wear brown windbreakers and for adventure sometimes drive their Oldsmobiles to IHOP for a tutti fruiti fresh and whatever? Hmmmm... I think the ghost of corporatized sameness (i.e., just consume, after all comfort is about being unchallenged) is at work here!
By and large, with few exceptions, this list is suburban-red-state-flyover country-strip-mall-Walmart-pork-spending-vanilla-middle-of-the-road ass. Clearly little amenities like, um, public transportation, higher education and culture were somehow not factored into the equation of best places to live. Sounds like a rational formula to me.
I just looked at the list of the best "big cities" at www.cnnfn.com and can't stop laughing. At number 9, just BEFORE New York City is Wichita! KS!, where I grew up. I left when I was 17, pretty much as soon as I legally could (I had taken all the math and science classes at the local "university" and needed, well, a bit more because I was 17 afterall). This year I went back and helped my mother sell her house there. She needed to get out of the neighborhood where I grew up because shootings and drug deals are now the norm there. Her house had depreciated about 20% in inflation adjusted dollars since it was built in 1952. My major memory of the place was cold fear of BTK, the serial killer who stalked our neighborhood, murdered my 2nd grade classmate, and was on the friggen news almost daily because he sent letters to the police trying to get caught for 25 years. Otherwise, the only qualities this soulless tasteless colorless featureless place has are crime, racism, and violence. Yes there are 40,000 stoned factory workers who bolt stuff together for a living. One must drive for a day before seeing mountains, forests, water, or anything. I had seen Wichita on lists before, but mainly because the per capita violent crime rate was higher than that of the City of Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami and other big "dangerous" cities where I lived as an adult! But I never thought I would see Wichita in the list of best "big" cities to live in! It should be on a list of dullest and deadliest trailer parks. I can't stop laughing.
WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH MONEY MAGAZINE OR WHOEVER IS GENERATING THESE LISTS?!!! This is just nuts!
I just can't believe it. Howabout we make a list of cities where the ratio of housing cost/income is low because nobody really wants to live there? I think it would come out roughly the same as these lists! But then they threw in NYC for good measure.
I agree these lists can be baffling. I've also taken those tests on websites to find your "perfect match" for a place to live and they always come up with lists of places that would NEVER be on my list.
The rich can live any where because they don't have to stay there year in and year out! Still, if I were rich I doubt that I'd buy a place say in Boulder, I would own one house where I really loved to live and then would jsut rent when I traveled away from there. Don't understand why people want two or three or four homes!
Keith has has people post their favorite and least favorite cities and they rarely match a lot of these "scientific lists". Does America have any great cities? I am sure we do, NY City, Chicago, S.F, Seattle, thought they are not perfect by far. We have some great historic cities, Savannah, Charleston, for starters, but compared to Europe, America does have a lot of sterile cities.
Driving around Texas I find quaint old downtowns, half-dead, and then as you start to leave those towns, strip city and new homes. If the Real Estate Industrial Complex would spend more time investing in America instead of profits and built up those small towns from the center out instead of killing them with sprawl, maybe we'd have quaint villages and cities like the Europeans do!
Super color scheme, I like it! Good job. Go on.
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