Sunday, November 16, 2008

Mount Prospect, IL ... best place to raise kids

According to Businessweek's second annual rankings, the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect is the most affordable place to raise your kids.

BusinessWeek teamed up with OnBoard Informatics, a Manhattan-based provider of real estate analysis, to come up with our list of each state's best affordable towns for raising children. Mount Prospect just squeezed out several other Cook County (Ill.) communities, many of which also ranked high. The most important factors in our analysis were school performance, affordability, and safety. But we also gave weight to cost of living, air quality, job growth, racial diversity, and local parks, ball fields, zoos, recreation centers, museums, and theaters.

We knocked out towns with populations of fewer than 50,000 and median household incomes of less than $40,000 or more than $100,000. And we ended up with a list that included some well-known places such as Phoenix, Columbus, Ohio, and Ann Arbor, Mich. But we also found some hidden gems such as Euless, Tex., smack in between Dallas and Fort Worth, which according to Sports Illustrated has the nation's top-ranked high school football team, and Murfreesboro, Tenn., a college town outside Nashville. Click here for the full article.

Interesting.... I would like to point out on the map how close Mount Prospect is to my hometown of Palatine. Disregard the green arrow. (See it there on the left, near the edge of the image?) Sigh... oh how I love the northwest suburbs.