Lee's Summit, MO

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Kansas City

  Currently #6 · score 0

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• Overland Park, KS

  Overland Park has grown since the 1960s into the second-largest city in the entire state of Kansas, expanding from a small farming community into a major suburban employment and residential center on the Kansas side of the greater Kansas City metro area, a growth trajectory driven substantially by deliberate mid-20th-century planned development. The city has attracted a substantial corporate office presence over the decades, including major telecommunications and healthcare companies, giving Overland Park a significant employment base well beyond a typical bedroom community dependent entirely on commuting into downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Overland Park's public schools have consistently ranked among the strongest in Kansas, and the city's extensive network of parks and the Deanna Rose Children's Farmstead, a free hands-on farm attraction, have made it a particularly popular draw for families with young children across the broader metro area. Overland Park's combination of significant corporate employment, consistently top-ranked schools, and a genuinely broad family-oriented amenity base has made it the largest and arguably most economically significant suburb anywhere in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area.

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• Leawood, KS

  Leawood has built a reputation as one of the wealthiest suburbs in the entire Kansas City metro area, with residential development leaning heavily toward larger custom homes on generous lots rather than the denser subdivision development found in some neighboring Johnson County communities. Town Center Plaza, an open-air lifestyle shopping center anchored by upscale retailers, has made Leawood a significant regional shopping destination, drawing visitors from across the broader Kansas City area for a level of retail selection uncommon in a suburb of its size. The city's public schools, part of the well-regarded Blue Valley School District, have consistently ranked among the strongest in Kansas, a reputation that's reinforced Leawood's broader identity as one of the more consistently affluent and family-oriented suburbs in the entire metro area. Leawood's combination of larger-lot residential development, significant upscale regional retail in Town Center Plaza, and consistently top-ranked schools has made it one of the wealthiest and most consistently desirable suburbs anywhere in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area.

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• Prairie Village, KS

  Prairie Village was developed beginning in the 1940s by the J.C. Nichols Company, one of the most influential residential developers in Kansas City's history, as a planned suburban community built around a central shopping district — the Prairie Village Shops — designed specifically to give the new suburb a walkable commercial center from the outset rather than letting retail develop haphazardly around it later. That mid-20th-century planning legacy has made Prairie Village one of the more architecturally consistent inner-ring suburbs in the Kansas City area, with its original brick ranch and Colonial-style homes largely preserved rather than replaced by newer, larger construction. The city's compact size and central Johnson County location have kept it one of the more walkable and closely knit communities in the broader metro area, with residents frequently citing the ability to walk to the Village Shops as a defining part of the community's identity. Prairie Village's combination of significant J.C. Nichols-era planned development, a preserved mid-20th-century architectural character, and a genuinely walkable central shopping district has made it one of the more historically distinctive inner-ring suburbs anywhere in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area.

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• Lenexa, KS

  Lenexa has grown substantially since the 1980s as part of the broader Johnson County suburban expansion west and south of downtown Kansas City, transforming from a smaller agricultural community into one of the larger cities in the Kansas side of the metro area. The city has built a reputation around its extensive public park and trail system, including its designation by outdoor recreation publications as a "trail city," with an interconnected network of paved paths linking neighborhoods, parks, and the newer Lenexa City Center development. Lenexa City Center, a newer downtown development built around a public plaza, aquatic center, and civic buildings, represents a deliberate effort to give the largely suburban city a genuine, walkable downtown core it hadn't historically had as a more dispersed, car-oriented community. Lenexa's combination of sustained suburban growth, an extensive trail and park system, and a deliberately constructed new downtown core in Lenexa City Center has made it one of the more recreation-focused and rapidly evolving suburbs anywhere in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area.

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• Olathe, KS

  Olathe serves as the county seat of Johnson County and has grown into one of the larger cities in the entire state of Kansas, its expansion driven substantially by both residential growth and a significant corporate and manufacturing employment base along its Interstate 35 and K-10 highway corridors. Garmin International, the GPS and wearable technology company, has been headquartered in Olathe since the 1990s, giving the city a globally recognized technology company anchor well beyond what a typical suburb of its size would host. The city's historic downtown square, built around the Johnson County Courthouse, has been preserved alongside Olathe's substantial newer commercial and residential development, giving longtime residents a walkable historic core distinct from the city's more sprawling suburban growth. Olathe's combination of serving as Johnson County's seat of government, hosting Garmin's global headquarters, and preserving a historic downtown square amid substantial growth has made it one of the more economically significant and rapidly expanding suburbs anywhere in the greater Kansas City 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.