Top Ten Places to Live

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exploder3211

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I find this article rather funny.. I live near Cary NC (15-20 min from my house)... I am sorry, but Cary is very expensive to live in and has nothing notable to offer other than the name. Most every one drives to Raleigh or Durham to work (Duke Universty Health System is in Durham and Raleigh is the state capital)..When i was out apartment hunting, Cary had the worst apartments for the most money. Its also the only place around here with mobile homes. It also has a small dinky mall and not much else... Where do they come up with this??

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2006/snapshots/PL3710740.html
 
You have to take surveys with a grain of salt and also look at what they are using as the criteria to make a place "the best". Geneva Switzerland and Vancouver BC Canada consistently rate in the top 3 cities in the world. I lived in Vancouver for 12 years and while it was nice I wouldn't live there again for various reasons. Toronto ranked in the top 10 and I wouldn't live there if they paid me to. Calgary where we just left after 20 years again in the top 15, wouldn't move back there now though we liked it well enough it's gone crazy price wise. I can't fathom ever visiting NYC again let alone live there, too many people, too crowded yet my cousin who lives there absolutely loves it. I'm back in my hometown now, sometimes wrongly considered one of the worst industrial cities in Canada, it's small, not much more than fats food joints and a Walmart Supercenter but the location is fantastic, miles of sandy beaches sand dunes, no slummy areas, pretty laid back and quiet. I hated this place growing up and couldn't wait to leave which I did. But now I quite like it. I can drive to Toronto in 3 hours, less than 1 hr to Detroit, about 4 hrs to Chicago and I don't have to live in those places, just go for the day and come home.
 
I've never really heard of Cary NC. I believe the reason why it was ranked as one of the best places to live as primarily a numeric value type of thing. From the page there, it appears income is high, while cost of living is low. Taxes seem to be a bit high however. The education system appears to be good though, usually a tradeoff for low taxes.

Oddly enough, I think I'd prefer a mobile home over an apartment. Primarily because of the simple fact that it is a detached dwelling, and I am not sharing the walls (and noise, and bugs, etc) with neighbors. The other is the fact that although the land is typically rented, the structure is purchased, meaning it is mine to do whatever I want to with. I've heard numerous stories from friends over apartment maintence, or I should say, the lack thereof!
 
Oh, please!

Is some rube really going to believe this crap and pick up and move to these places? And who picks this out? I mean, you've got FARGO in the top 100. Have you ever been to Fargo? Yech!

I live in the best place by far and I will argue that with anybody-although I guess from the Money Magazine standpoint...

Anyway the saying around here is "Maui no ka oi" which is hawaiian for "Maui is by far the best" and I didn't make that up! Don't believe me? Come see for yourself! It beats the hell out of freakin' Eden Prarie to be sure!
 
Yes I've been to Fargo and it wasn't pretty LOL. I'd driven a couple of times across the northern states thru Minot ND, Bismarck etc and one time I decided to go thru Fargo to see it. Whew, it was ugly downtown as was the drive into town off the highway. Actually it's downtown ugliness is on par with with Sarnia here's downtown. LOL. I got out of the car and went to see what looked like a fabulous old Great Northern RR station, they'd gutted the inside or drywalled over it and added suspended basement ceiling tiles. It was now a seniors center. What a disappointment. I stayed about 30 minutes in town and left. Now to be fair I did not drive around the residential areas etc. Thing is, Minot and Bismarck both had great looking downtowns.
 
Sorry David and Pete, if I had the choice between living in Fargo, or living in Maui or living in small industrial town in Ontario, I would pick Fargo in a heartbeat, actually I think it has a cute little downtown.

I guess that proves that these lists really are subjective.

4-4-2007-23-28-45--Unimatic1140.jpg
 
Well it certainly looks nicer in your photo than what I remember LOL The times I've spent in Minot and Bismarck I always thought to myself I wouldn't mind living there. But your right it is subjective and you really do have to "look around" a little bit more. Like this place, if you only saw the downtown here you'd think it was a horrible little city and it has a terrible reputation throughout Canada but the truth is it's actually quite nice if not a little boring. People are often quite surprised when they the parks and the sandy blue beaches etc.
 
These lists are so silly . . .

because they demand comparisons between cities and, as Robert noted, that is very subjective indeed. There are good and bad points to every place and wherever you live you just have to find them.

I haven't been to Fargo or Ontario, Canada, but I have been to Maui. Lovely scenery, especially driving south and west from Hana, but most of the architecture and infrastructure seemed to be copied from the worst Southern California strip-center school of design. My boyfriend at the time loved tropical scenery and was in heaven. I value nice buildings and once I got over the scenery I really didn't find a lot to look at. One isn't better than the other, but you just have to suit yourself.
 
The other thing about these "best places to live" is that they are generally focused on two groups: families and retirees. Over the course of a lifetime, wants and needs can change. Few of these big surveys are done for single gay people in their 20s or 30s. And what's good for a couple in their 40s and 50s might be hell on earth for a younger single person. Many people wind up wanting to live in a town like the one in which they were raised and probably just as many run like hell to avoid any place that has any resemblance of their home town.
 
Naperville, IL

What they also don't tell you is the high cost of property taxes in Naperville. Average price home (they say) is 329,000. That would mean over $10,000 in property taxes alone.

I live about 12 miles from Naperville and am GLADLY away from there. Naperville is filled with stepford wives and people trying to outdo each other money wise.
 
NAperville???

Thats one of the growing-est suburbs around here, but not someplace I'd want live!

Housing in Naperville is not what I would call affordable either, an average single family home there is $325,000 - $350,000!
 
Feh!

Just need a change in attitude. ;)

Whereever I live is one of the tippy toppest places in America. Be it Kent, Ohio, or Richfield MN, or Needham MA. (I am most often found in Kent, however.)

An argument can be made in favour of most places, and can be made against most places.

Bloom where ye are planted, I say.

Lawrence/Maytagbear
 
These surveys should generally be ignored. One recent survey ranked New York City the #1 safest large city in the country. That should speak volumes about the accuracy of these ridiculous surveys.

After reading the posts about property taxes related to Naperville, IL I am glad that as a California homeowner I am benefitting from Proposition 13 even though it gets blamed for every funding shortfall in this state. People here who owned their homes prior to 1978 are the ones who are getting the biggest break. I pay well over $3K a year for taxes on a home that's worth maybe 70% of what my mom's is, and I just the other day wrote a check, a whopping $562, for the 2nd installment of her 2006 property taxes. As these pre-1978 owned homes turn over, the Prop 13-related tax base imbalance will continue correcting itself, but for now it seems very unfair that I'm paying over $3K a year and my next door neighbor who has lived in the same house since 1957, is probably paying an amount that's still only in the 3 figures range. However, when her house sells someday, the new owners will likely be paying three times the property tax that I am so the shoe will be on the other foot. It won't have anything to do with Prop 13, just the fact that home values have skyrocketed since I bought mine 17 years ago.
 
Proposition 13 is really unfair . . .

I don't mind giving some tax breaks to older people on fixed incomes with modest homes so they can afford to keep them. However, Prop 13 doesn't take income or anything into account other than how long you've owned your home. So lots of well-off people lucky enough to have bought luxury homes years ago are living in multi-million dollar homes and paying way less in taxes than those who recently bought ordinary houses. It is a great incentive for someone who has a long commute to keep commuting forever, rather than buying a home to close to work, as it is cheaper to commute than take the tax hit in many cases.

I have clients who bought a house a couple of years ago near the husband's job in a very nice section of West LA. He has a fifteen minute commute, and doesn't get near the freeway, but their tax bill last year was well over $20,000! It is a luxury home and they are well off, but even for them this is a hit, more so since they are fairly young and have small children to support.
 
Eden Prairie, MN

is a very nice place IMHO. It is urban as well as somewhat rural in places. It helps that I have relatives about 45 minutes from there as well. Shopping for clothes without paying sales tax doesn't hurt either.
 
Ireland topped the poll in terms of Countries to live in

Here's the Economist's review of countries to live in :

1 Ireland
2 Switzerland
3 Norway
4 Luxembourg
5 Sweden
6 Australia
7 Iceland
8 Italy
9 Denmark
10 Spain

It also topped the same quality of life index in 2005
Haven't found 2006 and 2007 isn't over yet :)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4020523.stm
 
Blech! I like Raleigh alot, there is nothing wrong with living in an apartment if you pick the right one (even then you will still have the very creepy looking couple who lives below you and drives two very tattered old cars that make them look like criminals...)

I will take them with a grain of salt. I have seen alot of the west and quite frankly i'd much rather have Southern New Jersey or South Florida over anything else out west. Now gimme Tampa/St. Petersburg and oh i am in heven
 
OK after getting a free moment I finally found the rest of my Fargo, North Dakota pictures that I took 1 1/2 years ago when I went vintage washer and parts hunting up there. I love the northern center of our country and what I have always particularly like about this little city is that to me it is the quintessential far northern mid-America city. It reminds me of the towns that 1950's TV shows would have taken place in...

http://automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/00ShowCollectionGETD.cgi?dir=/COLLECTIONS/_FARGO
 
Neat pictures Robert. It is so good to see a busy downtown, I just wonder how they have managed to keep it this way. Do you recall if they had any large shopping malls?
 
Hi Terry, yes I had thought the very same thing that it was unusual to see such a busy downtown for such a small city. It does have a very large mall and lots of Home Deopt/Best Buy big box stores all in the newer sections. What I had read, just like in so many other little cities, the malls built in the 1960's and 1970's had killed downtown for a decade or two. But in the 90's incentives were given to business to open up again in downtown Fargo and now it seems to be quite prosperous. Also they have had a sort of population boom of recent which might add to the busy feel.
 
Well they certainly have fixed it up then because when I was there it wasn't a pretty sight, nothing like that at all to my recollection and that's why I was so disappointed after Minot and Bismark seemed so nice. Whatever they did we should send our mayor and council there to find out. The downtown here in Sarnia is dreadful, of course the "malls" on the outskirt certainly were the biggest factor in its demise, they made an even more grave error by countering that and building a mall downtown behind the main street which naturally sucked the remaining street front stores inside, for awhile until even that mall succumbed to the pull of the big box openings of the 90s. Now the streetfront stores are near all boarded up, the downtown mall is probably 75% empty and what is in there is mostly federal govt job offices and services occupying what once was stores.
 
I'll be more objective this time...

I'm sorry-I don't mean to pick a fight. I just made a nasty comment about Fargo because we usedtato visit my boring lutheran minister brother there when I was at that bad attitude age of 14-16, so I just made a nasty bad attitude comment about an otherwise fine place. My snotty remark about Eden Prarie was driven by that silly old Saint Paul/ Minneapolis rivalry thing (E.P. is a Minneapolis suburb-I was born in St. Paul). Thank You Robert for the pictures of your visit there. The midwest is charming in a way that Maui is not and I sure don't trip over vintage washers here the way I do back in Minnesota! I completely agree with Hydralique that the buildings and house here are mostly horrid and there was some terrible planning involved for sure.

I cannot lie and say that it is cheap to live here at all. In St. Paul we spent $600 a month for a 3 bedroom home vs. $975 here for a 1 bdrm cottage. Food is a bit more expensive if you are careful or a lot more expensive if you are not. Nobody ever said Hawai'i was going to be cheap.

The roads here are horrid. Our local government teeters on the edge of being a banana republic, corrupt with greed, nepotism, graft. Things are run down and people don't care for their lawns like the fine folks in Omaha do. There sure were some things here that took some getting use to because this ain't the mainland! 85% of the people who move here from the mainland move back within a year.

I still think I live in the nicest place.

I see flowers every day of the year. We have less than 5 cloudy rainy days each year. I walk out onto my lanai in my nightclothes first thing every morning and it is almost never too cold to have our morning coffee outside. I typically see no less than 3 rainbows per week. Nearly every Sunday, we attend that great cathedral known as "the beach" and say our thanks to the Great One. Being imperfect being, we do sometimes say things like "I wonder what the kids in Minnesota are doing today?" when we know full well it's January 21.
 

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