The Best Places to Raise Your Kids

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"And Nashville being a half hour drive away opens up other recreational, cultural opportunities, and professional sports."

Mount Prospect, like many of our selections, is a village where children study hard but also pack their afternoons, evenings, and weekends with sports, music, and other extracurricular activities. Prospect High School Principal Kurt Laakso said the area's schools regularly outperform more affluent districts largely because of a tradition of parental involvement and dedication on the part of teachers and administrators who are well paid, but not outrageously so. "We have a good balance of academic rigor and the social aspect that makes high school memorable," said Jason Block, an English teacher at the high school who also serves as faculty adviser for the student newspaper. "They are at an elite high school here. And it's preparing them really well for next step. At the same time, it's not out of whack here, where it's all academic all the time. Prospect High School is not a stress factory."

Mount Prospect's Downtown

But Mount Prospect isn't just some quaint throwback. It is changing quickly. Recent immigrants are opening stores and restaurants, including a regionally known Flamingo's Fine Mexican Seafood. The city has worked hard to revitalize its downtown, bringing in condos, new stores, and restaurants such as the Blues Bar, a "Blues Brothers"-themed bar that features live entertainment and a replica of the "bluesmobile" featured in the 1980 cult movie. (Dan Aykroyd's character, Elwood Blues, famously says of the police car: "I picked it up at the Mount Prospect City Police auction last spring.") The million-square-foot Randhurst Mall, the first in the Chicago area when it was built in 1962, is being remade into an outdoor lifestyle mall.

But the village's biggest pluses remain unchanged, including it's proximity to Chicago and the airport, its employment opportunities related to the airport and a large corporate park, and its "street reputation" as a family-friendly community, said Tom Zander, who with his wife Mary co-owns Picket Fence Realty in downtown Mount Prospect.

Longtime Village Manager Michael Janonis said the town has not yet been hit hard by the economic crisis, largely because it has had few foreclosures and isn't depending too heavily on a single source of tax revenue. "We're not flashy," Janonis said. "It's not like other places that [have] huge increases in property values and huge crashes. We're very steady."

Click here to read more about Mount Prospect and the other best places in the U.S. to raise kids.

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Gopal writes about real estate for BusinessWeek in New York.