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Yeah Naperville sucks, at least if you want to have a life outside overpriced Thai restaurants and potlucks at the houses of your kid's T-ball teammates.
My top 10, having grown up in Chicagoland. Not necessarily the ones I'd want to live in the most, just the ones I find the most interesting or have the most positive associations with.
Oak Park/River Forest (biased, grew up there)
Forest Park/Berwyn
Evanston
Aurora
Joliet
Waukegan
Hammond (love the hardcore Rust Belt aesthetic)
Skokie
Arlington Heights
Fox Lake (one of my friends in Seattle is from there, and I just find central and northern Lake County beautiful)
Your list is certainly more "balanced" than mine.
My top 10 was really a combination of best/most desirable/reputation with a little bit of personal touch. E.g. I probably wouldn't live in Winnetka, but a drive through town and maybe a bite to eat was always in our weekend rolodex when we lived North of the city.
I'll go through my top 10 for NYC and Boston in a bit. Maybe I'll try to be a bit more equitable for those.
Just because a suburb was conceived well prior to WW2 doesn't mean it's nice. And just cause a burb looks sprawled out doesn't mean it sucks. "Nicest" means clean streets, roads that don't look like they've been bombed, VERY low crime/social decay like graffiti and underclass, homes/apts that have consistent upkeep, etc. Even "sterile". Phoenix and DC are the 2 that fits the criteria of "nicest".
"Nicest" means clean streets, roads that don't look like they've been bombed, VERY low crime/social decay like graffiti and underclass, homes/apts that have consistent upkeep, etc.
You forgot amenities. A nice suburb is one where you don’t need to drive 30-45min for a carton of milk and some eggs. There should be a mix of shops, restaurants, and stores that most residents have easy access to.
Just because a suburb was conceived well prior to WW2 doesn't mean it's nice. And just cause a burb looks sprawled out doesn't mean it sucks. "Nicest" means clean streets, roads that don't look like they've been bombed, VERY low crime/social decay like graffiti and underclass, homes/apts that have consistent upkeep, etc. Even "sterile". Phoenix and DC are the 2 that fits the criteria of "nicest".
There's obviously a lot of subjectivity to the word "nice," which is the purpose of the poll.
Neither "newness" or "oldness" are proxies for "nice," but I think most are also inclined to include some type character or visual interest in the category of "nice," as well.
There's obviously a lot of subjectivity to the word "nice," which is the purpose of the poll.
Neither "newness" or "oldness" are proxies for "nice," but I think most are also inclined to include some type character or visual interest in the category of "nice," as well.
Exactly. Because if "newness, clean streets" are the only real criteria we are going off of, I would vote Miami, as its suburbs are some of the cleanest out there.
However, Miami has some of my LEAST favorite suburbs because they lack character, they all look the same, and much like pretty much all of the major cities in Florida's suburbs, are bland and soulless. Same with Phoenix.
Location: northern Vermont - previously NM, WA, & MA
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What I like about Atlanta's suburbs are the the generous lot sizes and big yards along with beautiful tree canopies. I never saw the point in moving out to the suburbs away from a denser city only to have a postage stamp sized yard.
well, in NJ/NY there are rail burbs but they aren't full blown cities/developed as multi family as those around DC (Bare New Brunswick).
In Boston, theres virtually no dense rail burbs ... maybe the old mill towns and some exburbs/functional extensions of the city? But yeah no.
Philadelphia is between Boston and NYC with the Main Line and PATCO. Beautiful towns, but nto built up as much as DC. But they are beautiful.
Our exception to that rule is the Conshohockens, a faded industrial town and its "suburb" (West Conshohocken) that recently morphed into an edge city filled with office towers and mid-rise apartment complexes (one of them a fairly cheaply built one that went up like a tinderbox while under construction in the 1990s but got rebuilt).
It has both SEPTA Regional Rail service and what seems to be another must-have for edge city formation: a major freeway junction sitting just outside it. It's just down the road from the region's premier edge city, King of Prussia, an autocentric archipelago along the lines of Tysons (no longer Tysons Corner) outside DC.
None of these I would rank among Philadelphia's most beautiful suburbs, but Conshohocken has become a more interesting one thanks to all the development there.
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