Cottonwood Heights, UT

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Salt Lake City

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• Park City, UT

  Park City began as a 19th-century silver mining boomtown before the industry's decline in the mid-20th century led the community to reinvent itself around winter recreation, and Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resort have since made it one of the most significant ski destinations in the entire American West. The Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford and held in Park City every January since 1981, has grown into the most prominent showcase for independent film in the United States, temporarily transforming the small mountain town into one of the entertainment industry's most closely watched gatherings each winter. The town's Main Street, built along the original mining-era commercial strip, has preserved much of its 19th-century architecture even as ski tourism replaced mining as the area's economic base, giving Park City a genuine historic core alongside its modern resort development. Park City's combination of major ski resort infrastructure, a globally significant film festival, and a preserved mining-era Main Street has made it one of the most internationally recognized small mountain towns anywhere near Salt Lake City, despite sitting roughly 35 miles from the city itself.

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• Sandy, UT

  Sandy has grown into one of the largest suburbs in the entire Salt Lake City metro area, its population expanding substantially through the postwar decades as Salt Lake Valley development pushed southward along the Wasatch Front's flat valley floor beneath the surrounding mountains. America First Field, home to Major League Soccer's Real Salt Lake, has anchored a significant sports and entertainment district in Sandy since the stadium's 2008 opening, giving the suburb a professional sports presence uncommon for a city of its size. The city sits at the base of the Wasatch Range, giving residents quick access to several major ski resorts in the nearby canyons, a genuine recreational advantage that's made Sandy a popular choice for buyers who want mountain access without living directly in a resort town like Park City. Sandy's combination of substantial suburban growth, a professional soccer stadium anchoring its own sports district, and quick access to Wasatch Front ski resorts has made it one of the larger and more recreation-oriented suburbs anywhere in the greater Salt Lake City metropolitan area.

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• Draper, UT

  Draper sits at the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley and has become a significant anchor of Utah's "Silicon Slopes" technology corridor, a cluster of software and tech companies that's grown substantially along the Interstate 15 corridor south of Salt Lake City over the past two decades. The city's population has grown dramatically as that tech-sector employment base has expanded, transforming Draper from a smaller rural community into one of the more economically significant suburbs in the entire Salt Lake Valley, with new residential development built specifically to house the influx of tech workers. Draper's position at the valley's southern edge, backing directly up against the Wasatch Range's foothills, has given much of its newer residential development a genuinely scenic, elevated character with sweeping views back across the broader Salt Lake Valley. Draper's combination of anchoring a significant piece of Utah's tech-industry growth and its scenic foothill geography has made it one of the more economically important and rapidly developing suburbs anywhere in the greater Salt Lake City metropolitan area.

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• Provo, UT

  Provo is home to Brigham Young University, a private university operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with an enrollment of roughly 35,000 students, making the city one of the largest genuine college towns in the entire Mountain West despite sitting roughly 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City. The university's ownership and religious affiliation shape much of the surrounding city's character, including a strict campus honor code extending into off-campus student housing and a broader community culture closely tied to the Latter-day Saints faith that a substantial majority of both students and longtime residents share. Provo has also become a significant technology-sector hub in its own right, part of the broader "Silicon Slopes" corridor extending south from Salt Lake City, with several notable software companies founded or headquartered in the city, giving it an economic base extending well beyond the university itself. Provo's combination of hosting one of the largest religiously affiliated universities in the country and a genuine and growing technology-sector economy has made it one of the most distinctive and economically significant cities anywhere along the Wasatch Front south of Salt Lake City.

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• Bountiful, UT

  Bountiful sits directly north of Salt Lake City along the Wasatch Front, and it was among the earliest areas settled by Mormon pioneers after Brigham Young's original 1847 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, giving it one of the longer continuous settlement histories of any community in the immediate Salt Lake metro area. The city's elevated position on the benches above the valley floor gives many neighborhoods sweeping views across the Great Salt Lake and the broader Salt Lake Valley, a geographic advantage that's made Bountiful's hillside properties particularly sought after relative to flatter valley-floor suburbs. Bountiful's historic Main Street has retained a small-town commercial character even as the broader Salt Lake metro area has grown substantially around it, and the city's proximity to downtown Salt Lake City has kept it a practical commuter suburb despite its deep pioneer-era historical roots. Bountiful's combination of being among the earliest Mormon pioneer settlements in the Salt Lake Valley, sweeping bench-top views of the Great Salt Lake, and a preserved small-town Main Street has made it one of the more historically significant suburbs anywhere immediately north of Salt Lake City.

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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.