What are the best suburbs in the US?

No. No.

Daly City

Bethesda, MD.

Naperville and Oak Park, IL

Pasadena, CA & Torrance, CA / beaches (LA)

Winnetka, IL (Chicago)

Leucadia, CA (San Diego- don’t tell anyone)

Fairfield, CA (Napa)

Gig Harbor, WA (Seattle)

Metairie, LA (NOLA)

Vancouver. WA (Portland)

Pahrump, NV (Vegas)

Bishop, CA (Mammoth)

Rosarito, BC, MX (TJ)

Location evaluation troll is RELENTLESS.

Kirkland Washington

Westport CT

Schaumburg. IL

Ronkonkoma, NY

Saugus, MA

Metairie,LA

I’ve been very lucky to have lived in two of the best ones in the country, despite not being in the same socioeconomic bracket as most who live there.

Montclair, NJ, is very affluent, but it also has a long history of diversity and being more welcoming to lower socioeconomic groups. There was a golden triangle for many years of people who first lived in Manhattan single and making money, then married and start having children living in Park Slope, and then as the kids edged up in elementary school relocation to Montclair for the big house, nice yard and good schools. While this was primarily straights, it was equally viable for Gays and Lesbians and very welcoming. Commuting to the city has gotten better over the last decades, but has never been seamless.

It has great amenities of city parks and recreational actives, first class libraries, world class level art museum and collections, film festivals, strong literary community, a real downtown shopping area with fantastic restaurants, great music, strong churches and houses of worship, lovely architecture and even the local YMCA is more like a upper end gym then a sweaty blue collar gym. There are also many social services available and philanthropy within the community is very strong. There is also a state college with a strong academic reputation there. Perhaps one of the weak spot is not having a good world class hospital.

There is a long history of very creative and famous people living there such as painter George Inness, the Galbraiths of Cheaper by the Dozen fame, Bobbi Brown makeup artist, Savion Glover, Christine Ricci, Olympia Dukakis, Kal Penn who just came out and one of the prominent night time personalities, I don’t remember which one as I don’t follow that stuff. Many writers from newspapers and journalism, children’s books, novels and nonfiction also reside there. There are also lots of CEO of major international companies that live there. At one point one was the head of Scholastic Books and J.K. Rowling made one of her few US public appearances in town because of that. There are many special situations that happen in Montclair like that as there are some very wealthy and powerful people who live or come from there.

Running out of room and time so I’ll save the other one for another post, but it’s Greenwich, Connecticut.

Is Montclair NJ the place on here that often gets mentioned as the new place for married gays to raise kids? There is some place in NJ that I've seen discussed.

(BTW great post r10, very informative.) Thanks.

R5 Torrance is a shithole of malls, car dealerships, commercial properties and there is only technically a beach, a little strip of sand calked RAT beach, for right after Torrance. The tony suburbs are between Torrance and the coast, Palos Verde, and the four communities that make up the peninsula. It’s pretty much all cliffside though, if you want actual beaches the affluent one is Manhattan Beach, with a step down of upper middle class being Redondo Beach and the young affluent post frat populations being in Hermosa Beach, which is basically the Hoboken of LA.

R11 Definitely there are gay and lesbian families in Montclair, but they tend to be very wealthy like Neil Patrick Henry level if Gay, and more moderate levels for Lesbians. Asbury Park is really the LGBTQ+ populous community in NJ with all socioeconomic levels and Lamberville, being across from New Hope, PA, is a popular spot. If heard inklings that Maplewood is becoming very popular with Gay families.

Medina (Seattle) Brentwood (L.A.) Potomac (D.C.) Edina (Twin Cities, MN) Marion (Philly) Buckhead (ATL) Lake Oswego (Portland) Sausalito (SFO)

I’ve always pictured Shaker Heights as this amazing and picturesque suburb and it’s usually portrayed that way in literature and on screen. I spent the night and a few hours in Evanston, which seemed to have the potential of being an amazing place to live and many cool people are from or live there so I would love to hear more about both of these suburbs if anyone has a history there.

thanks r13

Not to be a typo troll but your little mistake there is kind of funny Neil Patrick HENRY.

Give me liberty or give me a NJ suburb!

R16 I knew something didn’t seem right, I usually just call him NPH, but was afraid without context it wouldn’t be clear who I meant, lol.

In California: San Pablo (Bay Area) South Gate (LA) National City (SD)

South Gate? That is a total ghetto.

Bel Air Crest

R9 Saugus, MA? Why? It’s so ugly.

I would go with Nahant out of the Boston North Shore. Marblehead would be a first choice but it too far away from Boston.

Princeton, NJ - the question is though is it a NYC or Philly suburb? It’s literally split right down the middle.

R11 I think Maplewood is the one that gets talked about a lot on here as gay friendly. I think there are much nicer/higher end NJ suburbs though.

R11 R13 - yeah, it’s Maplewood

Hillsborough, California

Buckhead is not a suburb, it is a neighborhood with the city of Atlanta

Not for much longer

I really like Waltham, Massachusetts, which is a quick hop on bus and commuter rail lines from Boston. It has a diverse population, a lot of really good food, a Landmark movie theater, a bunch of beautiful historic mansions you can visit, and Brandeis University.

Mill Valley SF, New Canaan NYC, Bryn Mawr Philly.

Mamaroneck, NY

Marblehead/Swampscott, MA

I like towns on the ocean.

Brookline, MA

R11 - Ronkonkoma? Really?

Better than any on the North Shore of Nassau County?

Mountebank

R5 Pahrump and Bishop are not suburbs.

Bay Area: Saratoga, Los Gatos, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Hillsborough, San Carlos, Belmont, Millbrae, Ross, Mill Valley, Orinda, Moraga, Lafayette, Danville, Alamo, Walnut Creek, Alameda.

LA: San Marino, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills, Bradbury, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Redondo, Hermosa, and Manhattan Beaches, Malibu

San Diego: La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, Encinitas, Del Mar, Solana Beach

Ronkonkoma? = Trumplandia

If Staten Island is the Alabama of NYC Nassau is it's FL

-no thonx

and yes i know that Ronkonkoma is in Suffolk and not Nassau, but still adjacent

[quote] If heard inklings that Maplewood is becoming very popular with Gay families.

This happened about 20 years ago, but given that Datalounge is frozen in amber....

Why Ronkonkoma?

It's a blue collar suburb isn't it?

I mostly know it from news reports about the "Ronkonkama line" of the LIRR

McLean, VA (DC) Bronxville and Scarsdale (NYC) Marblehead (MA)

R22 - Maplewood/South Orange have become Brooklyn West for younger families in their 30s and early 40s.

And like Montclair, whose Chamber of Commerce posted at R10, they are rapidly losing whatever diversity (working class Blacks) they had and the public schools are becoming whiter and whiter.

Whereas Short Hills, the Essex County, NJ town once known for being very white/Jewish, posh and un-diverse (is that a word) has recently become very , very Asian (Chinese and Indian)

Yes r39 every obnoxious married breeding frau from my office lives in maplewood

What are Madison, Chatham and Morristown NJ like?

I live on the Harlem Line in Westchester County. Should I move?

levitown!

Miss Montclair at R10, you forgot Yogi Berra!

(Maybe no longer a resident in his corporeal form but always in their hearts.)

All of them

It’s gotta be Aulnay-sous-Bois near Pairs

The People’s Republic of Takoma Park, MD

Hermosa Beach, CA

Lake Forest, IL

Summit, New Jersey

R41 - Chatham and Madison are pretty commuter towns on the train line to NYC, traditionally very WASPy/Irish though Chatham is getting a big influx of Asians because the schools are very good.

Morristown is much larger, has a much bigger town and many companies that open suburban offices in NJ have them in Morristown. It's also more diverse, with a sizable Hispanic population. It has a traditional town square downtown which is sort of cool.

R49 I always think of that square all decorated for Christmas with Meryl and Renee in One True Thing.

Clayton, Missouri.

Suburb of St. Louis and county seat of St. Louis County. Washington University in St. Louis main campus is immediately to the east, as is Forest Park. More Class A office space than downtown St. Louis, home of such large corporations at Enterprise Leasing, Graybar Corporation and Centene Corporation.

Beautiful, tree lined streets of older yet well cared for homes. Excellent school and park system. Lots of condos and high end apartments.

Best of all, its the childhood home of DL super fave Andy Cohen.

For the NY area, there are three acceptable suburbs.

Pelham, just above the city, used to be the most conservative town in Westchester, the last to allow Jews to buy homes, and a truly repellant place for most of its history. But in the 1980s things began to change, especially as Pelham is the closest leafy suburb to the city and, wedged between crumbling New Rochelle and Mount Vernon, its housing was always cheaper than Bronxville, Scarsdale, Larchmont, etc. In the 1980s; writers and artists began moving in, as well as people of color and gays. The town actually became nice. It's still a suburb, but it's a pretty good one. And it's shaken off its horrible history.

Nyack, on the other side of the river, is referred to as the upper, upper, upper west side as so many UWS types have moved there; the town is filled with journalists and artists and the like. It's not as convenient as Pelham, as there is no train (you have to go Tarrytown across the river to get a train, although it's an express one). And it's gotten much more expensive over the last few years. But it's still better than living in any other of the other towns around.

Montclair, NY, but R10 has already explained that one.

I'm curious what criteria people are using to respond:

* Most socially prestigious?

* Hippest?

* Best places for childless gays?

* Best places for gays with children?

* Best places for families of any stripe with children?

Fo me it’s all about quality of life, but that can mean different things for different people.

Kirkwood, MO, Ladue, MO, and Webster Groves, MO much like R51's post.

r52 is right about Pelham. It is beautiful and so close to the city, but the taxes will kill you. It makes no sense to live there unless you have kids and want good public schools for them. This is the cheapest single family house listed there right now. Taxes are $19,000 per year!

[quote]one of the prominent night time personalities

R10, that's Stephen Colbert

Narberth, Pa.

Metairie might be "nice" compared to most wards of New Orleans, and it does boast the area's only Trader Joe's, but it's still ugly, flat and full of strip malls and tacky houses.

Princeton is indeed halfway between NYC and Philly but NJ Transit train and bus services are geared only towards NYC. Amtrak has 2 or 3 northeast regional trains per day that stop in Princeton Junction, which is too bad because it only takes 35 minutes to get to 30th street; the local SEPTA trains from Trenton or West Trenton (aka Ewing) take slightly over an hour.

Philly's main line still has attractive towns (Ardmore, Bryn Mawr, Narberth as R58 mentioned) but new development is all car-focused, so traffic is terrible and gets worse every year. Taxes are also quite high. Lower Bucks and south Jersey are cheaper but far uglier and even more congested.

It very much depends on personal taste.

In NYC area, some people prefer closer in suburbs like Bronxville or Summit where the houses are on smaller plots but there's more of a neighborhood feel, while others may prefer towns like Chappaqua or New Canaan where the commute is longer but the plots are much bigger and there's more of a rural feel.

Riverside, Illinois (Chicago). It’s adorable, very gay friendly and small.

Berkeley Heights, NJ

Pahrump is pretty icky in my opinion as a place to live. We go there every now and then to shop at Smith's grocery store, Star nursery, Home Depot or Wal-Mart if we have to (the Wal-Mart is open 24 hours and is pretty trashy). Other than shopping (fireworks, marijuana, alcohol and gambling are all legal businesses there - even prostitution outside of town) there's no reason to go there or live there, if you ask me. It's almost as hot as Las Vegas, though not as hot as Death Valley nearby. However the people who work there are nice and gas is always cheaper there.

We also go to Bishop from time to time, which is much nicer than Pahrump, but it doesn't have much in the way of shopping (the only big box store it had was a K-mart but that closed). Bishop does have good food shopping, and small services, and a tiny hospital, but it is a small town at heart and is very limited on services compared to a big city. It is nearby to a lot of spectacular scenery though.

Bishop is not a suburb of Mammoth Lakes - they are separated by 42 miles and a difference of 4,000 feet. Bishop started in 1889, while Mammoth was a mining camp from 1870 to 1900 or so, by 1900 only 6 people were left. It wasn't until a good highway was built in the late 1930s and skiing became popular there in the 1940s that Mammoth started growing into a real town. Now it has almost double the population of Bishop. Mammoth is more liberal than Bishop and even has a gay ski week. The district Manmoth is in consistently votes blue on everything even while the rest of Mono County and Inyo lean red.

Given a choice between Pahrump and Bishop I would choose Bishop any day, despite the lack of big city services. Many homes have streams running through the backyards and there are beautiful properties there. The eastern side of the Sierra Nevada is right there in front of you and within a 30 minute drive you can be in beautiful mountain scenery.

Somerset and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. Safe, well educated, pharmaceutical companies with great benefits, excellent schools, stunning beauty.

Not sure either of those counties, especially Hunterdon, qualifies as a "suburb" though R64

"Exurb" is more like it.

It would be very hard to tell people you were from Pahrump and keep a straight face or expect them to keep one as well.

Except R64 Hunterdon county is dyed-in-the-wool Republican and has the highest taxes in NJ, which already has among the highest taxes in the country.

Dennis Hof, the self-styled "Trump from Pahrump," died a couple weeks before he was elected to the Nevada State Assembly. It was too late to remove his name from the ballot, but they voted for him anyway. Shows you the mentality of the voters in that district. (A complicated formula allowed the county commissioners in the counties overlapping that district to vote on a replacement, who, of course was also a rabid right-winger.)

[quote] Bay Area: Saratoga, Los Gatos, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Hillsborough, San Carlos, Belmont, Millbrae, Ross, Mill Valley, Orinda, Moraga, Lafayette, Danville, Alamo, Walnut Creek, Alameda.

What about Atherton, Sausalito, Belvedere and Tiburon?

Does seem like a widely cast met for SF, no? Pablo Alto, Los Gatos, etc are more Silicon Valley than SF. And Danville, Walnut Creek seem a little far. Marin is the true SF suburb.

Victorville, CA. California dreaming in the high desert for half the price. Too bad about the unemployment, drug use and poverty.

Tiburon is a beautiful island full of very wealthy folks. It is in no way to be considered a "suburb" in the US.

Don't demographics determine the quality of a suburb?

Anything in or around NYC is gross. I can't stand that area of the country. Coastal California for me.

What constitutes a suburb in LA?

Are Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills considered suburbs?

Or do you have to be on the other side of the mountains ?

The people of Leucadia may respond to this thread in a few days, if they get around to it.

[quote]Metairie might be "nice" compared to most wards of New Orleans, and it does boast the area's only Trader Joe's, but it's still ugly, flat and full of strip malls and tacky houses.

Metairie—an unincorporated part of western Jefferson Parish—has nearly 150,000 people. It's basically a small city with one really nice area (Old Metairie), lots of typical McMansion developments, and lots of dumpy, run-down parts.

Mill Valley, CA, (SF Bay area, north over the GG bridge, past Sausalito) is, indeed, nice. Quiet, safe, pretty, etc. Also, 88% white as of 2010. It's pretty snobby there. If you had enough money to insulate you and if you could just accept the snobs, then you could live there. A friend moved there b/c of the school district. Friend's kids are mixed race and ended up moving schools, anyway.

Mendham, NJ. Too bad Chris Christie lives there. Has the most beautiful homes on tons of land.

Tiburon is a peninsula.

I would add Piedmont and Berkeley to the SF Bay Area list. Berkeley has the best microclimate in the whole region.

I find Victorville to be bleak. No real reason to live there. Just shopping - Costco, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, anonymous shopping areas, traffic, run-down homes. The homeless are all over the U.S. but they seem more obvious there. Am I missing something about Victorville? The whole Victor Valley seems this way.

Tiburon could be considered a suburb of the city of San Francisco. Berkeley is more like a city unto itself.

IMO.

R52 I’m curious about where you are getting your information about Pelham?

Regardless Pelham always had a reputation for being antisemitic. Whether that was accurate or not the outcome was that not many Jewish families lived there and they still don’t. As far as gays living there: what are you talking about? Pelham is not diverse. If anything, it continues to clone itself as it has for generations.

Pelham is also tiny with only 12,000 people, maybe 2 square miles. There’s no lively downtown or Main Street scene. The only reason to live there is to send your kids to the public school, and pay exorbitant property taxes to do so.

The mid-1980s was exactly when the opposite of what you say occurred: real estate prices skyrocketed, the creative community sold, and now it’s overwhelmingly populated by Wall Street.

The only thing that has not changed much is that kids in the high school still party a lot.

At least now with the SALT deduction allowed again, you effectively get a 20-30% reduction in the cost of those crazy RE taxes. It is what most of the country, and the self-serving AOC, don’t realize - a middle class family in NY area can pay $30-$40,000 of taxes between income and real estate taxes. Republicans specifically went out of their way to screw us in 2017 with their tax “cut” law - which increased taxes for a huge portion of middle class workers in blue states.

National City? Many years ago when defense contractors such as Rohr, Teledyne and Nassco were thriving, maybe it would have been a nice, working class suburbs then. But today, forget it.

The whole North Shore of Chicago, though Evanston is the first and most interesting of all of them.

I'm with r53, what's the criteria for "best suburbs"? Schools, crime, affluence, politics, what?

Growing up in suburban Chicago where there are about a 1000 suburbs I would say 25% are really nice. The North Shore suburbs are the richest, the Northwest suburbs are stable places with good schools, the West suburbs have beautiful architecture (lots of Frank Lloyd Wright houses) So what's the best?

Silver Spring, MD

property taxes in Pelham are insane. three times as much as Greenwich for a comparable house .

My criteria is suburbs I would most enjoy living in. I grew up in an extremely white-bread, snobby suburb (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that I wouldn’t want to go back to and really dislike some traditional suburban things (lack of ability to walk to stores and restaurants), so my criteria may be a little different than others.

R89 but Greenwich homes are so much more (SO much more) that even with higher taxes in Westchester you pay a lot more.

Some of these suburbs are beautiful, with beautiful homes, but the neighbors would be rotten.

I thought Larchmont was the Westchester suburb that media types lived in, not Pelham.

(Yes Miss Rivers, that Larchmont)

Yes, indeed, and you are assured equally awful neighbors down the hall of your efficiency in the big city.

Federally the deduction for SALT taxes is capped at $10,000 regardless of any higher amount paid. It screws almost everyone.

How are you figuring the big savings, r84?

[quote]SALT taxes

Let me guess -- you also say "ATM machine" and "PIN number" -- right?

#AspieAlert

Terrible thread.

The only decent suburb is Harlem.

La Jolla is a district of the City of San Diego, not a suburb of it.