Brentwood, TN

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Nashville

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• Franklin, TN

  Franklin's historic downtown, built around its late-19th-century public square, has preserved one of the best-maintained collections of Victorian-era commercial buildings anywhere in Middle Tennessee, and the city has invested heavily over recent decades in maintaining that historic character even as the surrounding area has grown rapidly as part of the greater Nashville metro's southward expansion. The Battle of Franklin, fought on November 30, 1864, was one of the bloodiest single engagements of the entire Civil War relative to its short duration, and the Carnton plantation house, which served as a Confederate field hospital during and after the battle, has been preserved as a museum documenting one of the war's most devastating days for the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Franklin has also become a significant home base for the country music industry, with numerous singers, songwriters, and music executives relocating there from central Nashville over the past two decades specifically for the combination of larger properties, strong schools, and continued proximity to Music Row. Franklin's combination of a well-preserved historic downtown square, deeply significant Civil War history, and a substantial country-music-industry resident population has made it one of the most historically rich and consistently desirable suburbs anywhere south of Nashville.

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• Murfreesboro, TN

  Murfreesboro briefly served as Tennessee's state capital in the mid-19th century before the capital permanently relocated to Nashville, and the city's central location — it's often cited as sitting at or near the exact geographic center of Tennessee — has continued to shape its identity as a regional hub southeast of Nashville. Middle Tennessee State University, the largest undergraduate institution in the state's public university system, anchors the city's economy and culture, giving Murfreesboro a genuine college-town identity layered on top of its rapid growth as a Nashville-area suburb over the past two decades. The Stones River National Battlefield, preserving the site of a major and costly Civil War battle fought in late 1862 and early 1863, sits within the city and draws Civil War history visitors alongside the university's own draw, giving Murfreesboro a dual identity as both a college town and a significant historic site. Murfreesboro's combination of a brief but genuine turn as Tennessee's state capital, hosting the state's largest public university, and significant Civil War battlefield history has made it one of the more historically and academically distinctive suburbs anywhere in the greater Nashville metropolitan area.

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• Hendersonville, TN

  Hendersonville sits along the shores of Old Hickory Lake northeast of Nashville, and the reservoir, created by a Army Corps of Engineers dam completed in 1954, has given the city a genuine waterfront identity built around boating and lakefront property that's distinct from most other Nashville-area suburbs. Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash made their home on the lake in Hendersonville for decades, and the couple's long residency there, along with several other country music figures who settled in the area over the years, gave the city a meaningful place in country music history well beyond central Nashville's Music Row. The city's rapid growth as a bedroom community for Nashville commuters accelerated substantially from the 1970s onward, transforming what had been a smaller lakefront town into one of the larger suburbs in Sumner County, though it's retained a stronger recreational-lake identity than many of the more purely residential suburbs closer to downtown Nashville. Hendersonville's combination of genuine Old Hickory Lake waterfront recreation, a direct historical connection to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and decades of steady suburban growth has made it one of the more distinctively lake-oriented suburbs anywhere in the greater Nashville metropolitan area.

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• Gallatin, TN

  Gallatin's historic downtown square, built around its Sumner County courthouse, has preserved a cluster of 19th-century commercial buildings that reflect the town's origins as one of the older county seats in Middle Tennessee, with a settlement history predating Nashville's own rise to statewide prominence by several decades in some respects. The city sits along the shores of Old Hickory Lake as well, giving it a similar recreational lakefront draw to neighboring Hendersonville, and the Bledsoe Creek State Park along the lake's shoreline provides additional public camping, fishing, and hiking access for residents of the broader area. Gallatin has grown substantially as part of the broader Nashville metro area's expansion northeast along the Highway 31E corridor, transforming from a smaller, more agricultural county seat into a significantly larger suburban city over the past two decades while maintaining its historic square as a walkable civic center. Gallatin's combination of a well-preserved historic county courthouse square, genuine Old Hickory Lake recreational access, and steady suburban growth along the Nashville metro's northeastern edge has made it one of the more historically grounded suburbs anywhere in the greater Nashville area.

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• Spring Hill, TN

  Spring Hill has been among the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee for much of the past two decades, expanding from a population of under 8,000 in 2000 to well over 50,000 by the mid-2020s, driven substantially by new-construction residential development along the Nashville metro area's rapidly expanding southern edge. General Motors built a major assembly plant in Spring Hill in the mid-1980s specifically to manufacture the Saturn brand, a purpose-built production complex that brought thousands of manufacturing jobs to what had been a small rural community, and the plant has continued operating under GM ownership for other vehicle lines in the decades since Saturn's 2010 discontinuation. The city's Rippavilla Plantation, an antebellum home that served as a headquarters for both Confederate and Union forces at different points during the Civil War, has been preserved as a historic site and event venue, giving the rapidly growing city a direct link back to its 19th-century agricultural and wartime history. Spring Hill's combination of one of the most dramatic sustained growth rates of any Nashville-area suburb, a historically significant automotive manufacturing plant through GM's Saturn-era investment, and preserved antebellum Civil War history has made it one of the more economically and historically distinctive suburbs anywhere south of Nashville.

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More in Where to Live

• Portland, OR

  Portland's unofficial civic slogan, "Keep Portland Weird," reflects a genuine and long-cultivated civic identity built around independent business, eccentric public art, and a resistance to homogenized national chain culture — one the city has largely succeeded in preserving even as it's grown substantially over the past three decades. The city was among the first in the country to adopt a formal urban growth boundary, established in 1979 under Oregon's statewide land-use planning law, deliberately limiting suburban sprawl and concentrating development within a defined area — a policy choice credited with helping preserve the region's surrounding farmland and forest while also being blamed, by some critics, for contributing to rising in-city housing costs over subsequent decades. Portland has built one of the most bike-friendly infrastructure networks of any major American city, with an extensive network of dedicated bike lanes and one of the highest rates of bicycle commuting in the country, complementing a food-cart culture so extensive that entire city blocks are sometimes organized as semi-permanent food-cart "pods" rather than traditional storefronts. Powell's City of Books, occupying an entire city block downtown, is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world by inventory, and its continued success alongside a broader culture of independent coffee shops, breweries, and record stores has made Portland one of the most frequently cited examples nationally of a mid-sized American city building an identity deliberately around independent, small-scale local business rather than national chains.

• Raleigh, NC

  Raleigh, named directly for English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, was founded in 1792 specifically to serve as North Carolina's state capital, and it forms one corner of the Research Triangle alongside Durham and Chapel Hill — a name coined in the 1950s around the deliberate creation of Research Triangle Park, a large research and technology campus built specifically to anchor the region's universities to private-sector employers. That triangle of institutions — North Carolina State University in Raleigh itself, Duke University in Durham, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — has fed a sustained, decades-long pipeline of research talent into the technology, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms clustered in and around Research Triangle Park, giving the metro area an economic base built substantially around higher education and applied research. That foundation has translated into consistently strong job growth over the past two decades, with Raleigh regularly appearing near the top of national rankings for tech-sector and biotech employment growth, and rankings, drawing a steady wave of relocating professionals from higher cost-of-living metro areas along both coasts. Raleigh's combination of a genuine research-university economic base, comparatively lower cost of living than many coastal tech hubs, and a growing downtown restaurant and arts scene has made it one of the more consistently recommended mid-sized American cities for movers specifically seeking Sun Belt job growth without the highest-tier housing costs of Austin or Denver.

• Minneapolis, MN

  Minneapolis is known as the "City of Lakes," with thirteen lakes located within the city limits itself, and the Chain of Lakes park system connecting several of the largest of them via a continuous public trail has made lake access — for swimming, running, biking, and paddling — a defining part of daily life for residents in a way few other major American cities can match. The city built one of the most extensive enclosed pedestrian skyway systems in the world beginning in the 1960s, connecting dozens of downtown buildings via climate-controlled second-story walkways specifically to make the notoriously cold Minnesota winters more livable for downtown workers and residents — a practical piece of urban infrastructure that's become one of the city's most distinctive physical features. Minneapolis's arts and music scene has produced an outsized cultural footprint relative to the city's size — the Guthrie Theater is one of the most respected regional theater companies in the country, and First Avenue, the downtown nightclub where Prince recorded much of the concert footage for Purple Rain, remains an active and celebrated music venue decades after the film's 1984 release. Functioning as one half of the Twin Cities alongside neighboring Saint Paul across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis's combination of extensive lake access, genuinely functional cold-weather urban design, and a music and theater scene with real national reach has made it a consistent presence on "best cities to live" rankings despite a climate that's, by most measures, among the coldest of any major US metro area.

• Charleston, SC

  Charleston occupies a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers on South Carolina's coast, and its historic district — one of the largest and best-preserved collections of pre-Civil War architecture in the country, including the iconic pastel row houses of Rainbow Row — has made it one of the most photographed and visited historic city centers in the United States. The city has topped Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler readers' polls for "best city in the United States" more times than almost any other American city over the past two decades, a sustained run of recognition built substantially on that historic architecture, a nationally regarded restaurant and culinary scene, and a walkable, cobblestone-street downtown scaled for pedestrians rather than cars. Charleston's history is genuinely complex and increasingly reckoned with directly rather than glossed over — the city was a major point of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, and the International African American Museum, which opened on the Charleston waterfront in 2023 at the site of a former slave-trading wharf, has become a significant addition to how the city presents its own history to visitors. The College of Charleston, founded in 1770, is among the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, and the city's combination of deep colonial and antebellum history, an increasingly candid public reckoning with that history's darker chapters, and a consistently top-ranked culinary and hospitality scene has kept Charleston one of the most nationally celebrated mid-sized cities in the United States.

• Denver, CO

  Denver's nickname, "the Mile High City," is precise rather than approximate — the fifteenth step of the Colorado State Capitol building is marked at exactly 5,280 feet above sea level, a detail the city has embraced as a literal point of civic identity rather than just a loose figure of speech. The city functions as the primary gateway to the Rocky Mountains for both residents and visitors, and that proximity to world-class skiing, hiking, and outdoor recreation within roughly an hour or two's drive has become one of Denver's single biggest draws for the wave of remote workers and outdoor-recreation-focused movers who relocated there in significant numbers through the 2010s and early 2020s. Denver's economy has diversified substantially beyond its historical roots in mining and energy, building genuine strength in aerospace, technology, and craft brewing — the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of breweries per capita of any major American city, anchored by the annual Great American Beer Festival, one of the largest beer competitions and festivals in the country. That rapid growth and diversification have made Denver one of the most consistently cited "best cities to live" picks in national rankings over the past decade, even as the city, like Austin, has faced real housing-affordability pressure and rising cost of living as a direct consequence of that same sustained population growth.