Eden Prairie, MN

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Minneapolis

  Currently #3 · score 0

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• Edina, MN

  Edina is home to Southdale Center, which opened in 1956 as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States — architect Victor Gruen designed it specifically to bring a European-style indoor town square to a Minnesota suburb that had to contend with brutal winters, and the concept went on to reshape American retail development for the rest of the 20th century. The city's public schools have consistently ranked among the strongest in Minnesota, and Edina's residential streets, built out substantially through the mid-20th century as one of the Twin Cities' earliest planned suburbs, have kept a reputation as one of the more consistently affluent communities in the entire Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Edina's Country Club neighborhood, developed in the 1920s around a private golf club and built with unusually strict architectural covenants for its era, remains one of the more historically preserved planned residential districts anywhere in the Twin Cities. Edina's combination of hosting the literal birthplace of the modern indoor shopping mall, consistently top-ranked schools, and well-preserved early-20th-century planned neighborhoods has made it one of the most historically significant and consistently desirable suburbs anywhere in the greater Minneapolis area.

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• Wayzata, MN

  Wayzata sits on the northern shore of Lake Minnetonka, one of the largest and most developed recreational lakes in the entire Twin Cities region, and its compact downtown along Lake Street has built a genuine small-town lakefront character around boating, sailing, and waterfront dining. The city's history as a lake resort destination dates back to the late 19th century, when wealthy Minneapolis families began building summer estates along Minnetonka's shoreline specifically to escape the city heat, a pattern that established the area's enduring reputation as one of the more exclusive lakefront addresses in the entire state. Wayzata's historic railroad depot, built in 1906 for what was then the Great Northern Railway, has been preserved and repurposed as a public building along the lakefront, giving the small city's walkable downtown a direct architectural link back to its resort-town origins. Wayzata's combination of direct Lake Minnetonka waterfront access, a genuine 19th-century lake-resort history, and a walkable, well-preserved historic downtown has made it one of the most consistently desirable and expensive small lakefront communities anywhere in the greater Minneapolis metropolitan area.

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• Minnetonka, MN

  Minnetonka takes its name from the lake it borders, though the city itself sits primarily inland from Lake Minnetonka's main body along smaller connected bays, giving it a somewhat different, less exclusively lakefront-focused character than neighboring Wayzata despite the shared name. Ridgedale Center, one of the larger enclosed shopping malls in the western Twin Cities suburbs, anchors a substantial commercial corridor that's made Minnetonka a significant regional retail destination alongside its residential development. The city has built an extensive network of paved trails connecting its parks and neighborhoods, including segments along Purgatory Creek and several smaller lakes within its borders, giving residents substantial recreational green space distributed throughout the community rather than concentrated in a single large park. Minnetonka's combination of Lake Minnetonka-adjacent geography, significant regional retail anchored by Ridgedale Center, and an extensive internal trail and park network has made it one of the larger and more consistently desirable suburbs anywhere in the western Twin Cities metro area.

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• St. Louis Park, MN

  St. Louis Park sits directly west of Minneapolis, close enough to the city that it functions almost as a close-in urban neighborhood as much as a traditional suburb, and its position along both Highway 100 and several Twin Cities rail lines has made it one of the more consistently convenient commuter suburbs for residents working in downtown Minneapolis. The West End, a large mixed-use development combining office towers, retail, and entertainment venues, opened in the 2010s on former industrial land along Interstate 394, giving the city a significant modern commercial and entertainment district well beyond its historically more modest suburban retail base. The city has built a reputation for religious and cultural diversity relative to some of its neighboring suburbs, with a historically significant Jewish community that's shaped several long-standing local institutions, alongside a broader and increasingly diverse population reflecting the Twin Cities' overall demographic changes in recent decades. St. Louis Park's combination of close proximity to downtown Minneapolis, the substantial modern West End development, and a historically diverse community has made it one of the more urban-feeling and consistently convenient suburbs anywhere in the immediate Minneapolis metro area.

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• Excelsior, MN

  Excelsior is one of the smallest incorporated cities on Lake Minnetonka, and its walkable downtown along Water Street has preserved a concentration of small, independently owned shops and restaurants that's given the tiny lakefront city an outsized reputation as one of the more charming small towns anywhere in the Twin Cities metro area. The city's history as a 19th-century steamboat resort destination is still visible in its lakefront layout, and the Steamboat Minnehaha, a restored historic vessel, operates seasonally out of Excelsior Commons park, offering public rides on the same lake the boat once served as passenger transportation across generations ago. Excelsior's compact size — under one square mile — has kept its downtown genuinely walkable in a way most of its larger, more car-dependent Twin Cities suburban neighbors aren't, and its lakefront Commons park gives residents and visitors direct public beach and dock access right at the edge of the downtown business district. Excelsior's combination of a preserved 19th-century steamboat-resort history, a genuinely walkable small-town downtown, and direct public Lake Minnetonka access has made it one of the most distinctively charming small lakefront communities anywhere in the greater Minneapolis metropolitan area.

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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.