The 25 Best Value Suburbs In America
Suburban life can have a ton of perks - great schools, open spaces, a sense of community - but some suburbs aren't cheap to live in.
We went through our list of the 50 Best Suburbs in America and came up with the suburbs with the best value. We believe that value is more than just affordability: It's about getting a great education, a safe and thriving community, and affordable real estate.
To come up with this list, we looked at over 300 suburbs across the country with populations between 5,000 and 100,000 that were within 40 kilometers (24.9 miles) of the the nearest metropolitan area. We then factored in two criteria: housing affordability and school ratings from GreatSchools. To gauge affordability we looked at the percentage of homeowners in each suburb spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs.
Elm Grove, Wisconsin, which was No. 1 on our full list, dropped to No. 8, while Morton, Illinois, which was No. 28 on the full list, ranked first when it comes to value.
