Buying your first house? Fleeing the city for a life within your means?

[jbr12]

Terrible Article on Yahoo! news I just read...

Buying your first house? Fleeing the city for a life within your means?

Here's a novel idea: Move to a suburb where you won't break the bank or get your car broken into. A community with reasonable home prices and decent schools. A suburb close to your city job, with a lively downtown of its own.

[Veloise]

Terrible Article on Yahoo! news I just read...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20070509/bs_bw/...xgW4zumzXsDW7oF

Way to promote city living and help the urban sprawl problem we're facing nation wide.....

[jbr12]

Those median home prices are RIDICULOUS!

A suburb of BOISE, Idaho @ $569,900.... wow!

[suburban george3]

This sounds like a list for elitists. While I know not everyone wants to live in a dense urban situation, I do think we should support stronger central cities.

[tamias6]

So this is the list of affordable suburbs. Eh? Well I guess the price range I can afford will put me a fixer upper in a slum lord's paradise full of high crime, drugs galore, and crappy schools. So much for the American dream.

[torgo]

I like how some of these suburbs are more than a hundred miles away from the "core". What a dumb article.

[eagle]

OK, here's their slightly-edited list.

25 Affordable Suburbs

My take on this article: fast and badly-researched. Whothehell travels 300 miles to the symphony?? Someone took data snippets and turned them into on-line junk.

[Explorer55]

Just like most news articles. I can't believe how sloppy "journalism" is. Every news story I've ever been involved in has had major facts completely incorrect that should've been verified with a simple phone call.

I find these "Top 25 cities for...." lists are usually silly.

[Veloise]

I can attest that Castle Rock, CO is the ulitmate example of sprawl gone really bad. Ugly subdivisions and shopping centers spread out over the high prairies, "main street" is I-25, splits the community in two, and offers just about the only way to get back forth to where all the jobs are (but of course, it's the federal government paying for over 90% to build, maintain, and operate that "main street"), virtually no public transportation, back-ups on the Interstate frequently due to bad weather (higher elevations here lead to more snow, ice and fog than in Denver proper) and sometimes horrendous vehicle and truck crashes due to speeding and high volumes or that bad weather. Unless you happen to work in Castle Rock or are retired and find contentment staying in Castle Rock (there is a "historic downtown" of sorts and shopping at a nearby, major outlet mall), I just don't understand why the area is such a draw (the views were pretty, before all the sprawl). The housing isn't that cheap (although much of the new stuff is cheaply built) and the drive to/from Denver and Colorado Springs is usually just an accident waiting to happen or a slow crawl.

[Sundodger]

OK, here's their slightly-edited list.

Olympia, Wash. (Again, this is a city on its own)

Nearest city with pop. 200,000-plus: Seattle (55.8 miles)

Median Home Price: $369,900

Average Commute Time: 21.3 minutes