The 25 Best Affordable Suburbs in the U.S.

Low crime, reasonable commute, and good schools—who says you can't find a nice house in a suburb without paying a fortune?

by Maya Roney

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Buying your first house? Fleeing the city for a life within your means?

Here's a novel idea: Move to a suburb where you won't break the bank or get your car broken into. A community with reasonable home prices and decent schools. A suburb close to your city job, with a lively downtown of its own.

For hedge-fund managers, plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, and other people who earn millions a year, choosing a suburb is not about affordability but convenience and, frankly, prestige. These folks don't balk at high prices or look for fixer-uppers. They can pay for prime real estate on the most exclusive streets in the fanciest towns with the best schools. If they want to live in Greenwich or Brookline or Lake Forest or Malibu, they can. Unfortunately, most people aren't so lucky.

Most people have to balance their real estate aspirations with reality—compromising on acreage or culture in exchange for better schools or lower property taxes. But that's no reason to give up and settle. Sure, you might own the cheapest house in a top suburb, but is that really worth it? Wouldn't it be better if you could live in a decent house and still send your kids to a good school?

Winning Combination

It's not hard if you know where to look. For every prosperous estate section or low-rent neighborhood, major metropolitan areas have communities nearby that offer the winning combination of affordability, academics, safety, and culture that most families dream about but can rarely find—within their budget.

Working with Portland (Ore.)-based Web site Sperling's Best Places, BusinessWeek.com came up with a list of 25 affordable suburbs near the nation's largest metro areas. These suburbs may not have the greatest schools in the country, or the lowest crime rates, but most of them do better than average in these categories. The average secondary test scores index among our featured suburbs is 114, and the average violent crime index is 54 (with 100 being the state and national averages, respectively).

These suburbs don't have the cheapest housing around, either, but none have median home prices over $619,000 (Santa Clarita, Calif.) or cost-of-living indexes over 172.1 (West Nyack, N.Y.). Sperling calculates that 100 is the national cost-of-living average. New York City, for example, has an average of 256.2. Paw Paw, W. Va., a town of less than 600 people with an average household income of around $25,000, has a cost of living average of 70.9. The suburb on our list with the lowest median home price and cost-of-living index is Coralville, Iowa, with $171,600 and 96.9, respectively.

Downtown Diversions

Although they vary in price and quality, all of our affordable suburbs are located within an hour's drive of a major U.S. city, and many have a vibrant downtown scene, with fine restaurants, sophisticated shopping, and seasonal festivals.

"There are so many resources in a metro area," says Bert Sperling, founder and president of Sperling's Best Places and co-author of Best Places to Raise your Family: The Top 100 Affordable Communities in the U.S. He looks for places that suit the typical professional American family, making $50,000 or $60,000 a year. "People don't want to live in the middle of nowhere," he says.

"I think Santa Barbara is a wonderful place to live, but maybe not for you and me," says Sperling, who helped BusinessWeek.com compile its list of the best affordable neighborhoods in the U.S. "We looked for places with a sense of identity and a good economy, and we excluded areas with economic problems and extremely high prices."

Hudson Valley Haven

Take West Nyack, N.Y., this year's best affordable New York City suburb. About a 30-minute drive from Manhattan, West Nyack is one of five villages and hamlets that make up an area on the western bank of the Hudson River known as "The Nyacks." The neighborhood, which has a median home price of $605,700 (vs. New York City's $963,700), is perhaps known best as the location of Palisades Center, the largest shopping mall in the New York metropolitan area.