Best Affordable Suburbs in the US

Finishing studies and embarking on a new career is often accompanied by a move to a new city where one hopes to find good availability of jobs in the field they’ve chosen.  However, beyond the availability of work, there are many other considerations to be made about where to live.  In year’s past, many of the “Best Places to Live” lists published by numerous magazines were focused on such things as access to luxury amenities; golf courses, nice restaurants, etc.  Today, the calcuations are much more focused upon things like affordability and quality of life issues like schools and crime rates.  This is why the recent “Best Affordable Suburbs in America 2010” article published in Business Week caught my eye.  Follow past the jump to read the article. The Business Week article looked at communities within 25 miles of larger city centers and reviewed them for such things as  livability (short commutes, low pollution, green space), education (well-educated residents, high test scores), crime (low personal and property crime), economy (high job growth, low unemployment rate, high family income), and affordability (median household income, cost of expenditures). Affordability was most heavily weighted in their calculations. They penalized places with bad weather, a lack of racial diversity, high divorce rates, and few children. If you’re looking for a place to set up a new life after finishing your studies, this list provides some excellent options in towns you likely have not heard of.  For those of you in the New York metro area, two of the ten listed towns are within 100 miles of NYC (one outside Newark, NJ and the other in PA).