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Naperville is a great option for the Chicago area. Oak Park is also great but may be a little more difficult to find a single family detached home in your price range. A condo may work though. Also check out Forest Park that has a great little downtown area that is close to Oak Park both have El access to the city.
Kirkwood and Webster Groves Missouri may barely be in your price range along with Maplewood (that is definitely in your price range) are all in suburban St. Louis. Also check out University City.
Naperville is a great option for the Chicago area. Oak Park is also great but may be a little more difficult to find a single family detached home in your price range. A condo may work though. Also check out Forest Park that has a great little downtown area that is close to Oak Park both have El access to the city.
Kirkwood and Webster Groves Missouri may barely be in your price range along with Maplewood (that is definitely in your price range) are all in suburban St. Louis. Also check out University City.
Except Naperville is not a walkable suburb. It's not even close to walkable. It is very car dependent.
Except Naperville is not a walkable suburb. It's not even close to walkable. It is very car dependent.
Correct - unless you live near the downtown area, which is less affordable (though possible, maybe). Naperville is HUGE. 150K people covering probably 100 square miles.
I think that this is doable basically anywhere in the Northeast, with the exception of most of the BosWash corridor. The main exception within the corridor would be Philadelphia - you should easily be able to find something decent in a walkable suburb there. Maybe not the most highly desirable areas, but somewhere with a great business district and solid neighborhood schools.
Imo it is doable anywhere between DC-Philly-NYC in the inner suburbs. Heck, you can even get a 3br 2ba house in Jersey City for that price...
Correct - unless you live near the downtown area, which is less affordable (though possible, maybe). Naperville is HUGE. 150K people covering probably 100 square miles.
But that downtown though...
Again pay attention to the criteria. Naperville should not have been mentioned. It's the very definition of sprawl. There are walkable suburbs in Chicago, but you need to pay close attention to that criteria and what it actually means. It is something which is pretty definable, and has a metric now...a walkscore.
Many people who live in unwalkable areas this walkability thing remains an abstract, and there is not much understanding of how it actually works. The question should be...does a person need to drive to accomplish tasks. If the answer is no...the area is walkable. If the answer is yes, it's really not that walkable. I would take it even a step further and for a really walkable area, does the person even need to own a car. In my neighborhood, they don't. But my house would be out of these people's price range, as would the houses in the surrounding communities. Walkable places are coming at more and more of a premium in the US, because there are not that many of them.
Again pay attention to the criteria. Naperville should not have been mentioned. It's the very definition of sprawl. There are walkable suburbs in Chicago, but you need to pay close attention to that criteria and what it actually means. It is something which is pretty definable, and has a metric now...a walkscore.
Many people who live in unwalkable areas this walkability thing remains an abstract, and there is not much understanding of how it actually works. The question should be...does a person need to drive to accomplish tasks. If the answer is no...the area is walkable. If the answer is yes, it's really not that walkable. I would take it even a step further and for a really walkable area, does the person even need to own a car. In my neighborhood, they don't. But my house would be out of these people's price range, as would the houses in the surrounding communities. Walkable places are coming at more and more of a premium in the US, because there are not that many of them.
I think you guys are talking past one another.
Naperville does indeed have a walkable downtown core. However, it's not that big compared to the municipality as a whole. Probably less than 1/8th of Naperville is actually within walking distance of it. IIRC, Naperville's aggregate Walkscore was somewhere in the range of 35, but if you look at a map, nearly all of Naperville scores zero, except for the area in and around Downtown Naperville, which scores very highly. This highlights a flaw in Walkscore's system of rating city-wide walkability rather than on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis.
That said, I'm pretty sure the OP wanted to actually live *in* a walkable suburban neighborhood. Being a close drive away from a walkable commercial area is better than nothing, but it's not what they were looking for.
Yes, probably true. A "suburb" is by definition pretty sub-urban, and thus won't be walkable throughout the suburb. The idea would be to find a suburb where you can walk in and around the downtown area from your house.
In the midwest, your typical suburb has a small, charming downtown or business district, often where the train runs through. You'll have 4-8 square blocks of storefronts, restaurants, shops, what have you. The rest of the suburb will be developed neighborhoods of varying distances to the center. Some suburban downtowns aren't worth walking to, and others have enough going on where it would be desirable to live within a few blocks.
Around Chicago, there are maybe 5-10 of these suburbs, where the living in a walkable distance to the downtown is a desirable destination. Naperville, to me, would be at or near the top of this list. Its downtown is sizable, has a river, a beach, tons of restaurants and bars, and is hopping until at least 1am most weekend nights. It is a hard environment to replicate anywhere else in the area. However, there are some others that are also nice, like Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Hinsdale, Downers Grove, etc. Hinsdale is way too much $$ however.
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