Marietta, GA

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Atlanta

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Alpharetta, GA

  Alpharetta sits in north Fulton County roughly 25 miles from downtown Atlanta, and it's built a substantial enough concentration of technology and financial-services company offices over the past two decades that local boosters and regional media have taken to calling it "the Technology City of the South," anchoring a broader corridor of corporate campuses along Georgia 400. Avalon, a large mixed-use development that opened in 2014 on the site of a former shopping mall, combines upscale retail, restaurants, apartments, and office space in a deliberately walkable outdoor format, and it's become one of the most visited commercial destinations in the entire north Atlanta suburban area since opening. The city's downtown historic district has retained a small-town commercial core even as the surrounding area has grown rapidly, giving Alpharetta a contrast between its dense, modern corporate and retail corridor along Georgia 400 and a more traditional, walkable old town center just a short distance away. Alpharetta's combination of a genuine technology-sector corporate cluster, the large-scale Avalon mixed-use development, and a preserved historic downtown has made it one of the fastest-growing and most economically significant suburbs anywhere in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area.

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• Sandy Springs, GA

  Sandy Springs existed for decades as one of the largest unincorporated areas in the entire United States before residents, after a sustained multi-decade political effort, finally succeeded in incorporating it as its own independent city in 2005 — a move driven substantially by a desire for greater local control over zoning and services than unincorporated Fulton County governance had provided. That 2005 incorporation is widely cited in Georgia and among municipal-governance researchers nationally as the opening move in a broader wave of "cityhood" incorporations across north Fulton and DeKalb Counties over the following two decades, with several neighboring communities, including Dunwoody, following Sandy Springs's example within just a few years. City Springs, a civic and cultural complex combining a new city hall, a performing arts center, and mixed-use retail and residential development, opened in the late 2010s specifically to give the young city a genuine downtown center it had never had during its decades as an unincorporated area without its own defined civic core. Sandy Springs's combination of a genuinely consequential local incorporation movement and a deliberately built new downtown in City Springs has made it one of the more closely watched examples nationally of a large unincorporated suburban area successfully establishing its own independent municipal identity from scratch.

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• Decatur, GA

  Decatur sits just east of downtown Atlanta and has built a reputation as one of the most walkable close-in suburbs in the entire metro area, with a compact downtown built directly around its historic courthouse square that's stayed dense with independent restaurants and shops even as much of the surrounding Atlanta suburban sprawl has developed around car-dependent strip retail. The city hosts the AJC Decatur Book Festival every Labor Day weekend, which has grown since its 2006 founding into one of the largest independent book festivals in the entire country, drawing nationally known authors and tens of thousands of attendees to the small city's downtown streets each year. Agnes Scott College, a private women's liberal arts college founded in 1889, sits directly in the city's downtown core, giving Decatur a genuine small-college presence within easy walking distance of its courthouse square and MARTA rail station. Served directly by MARTA's Blue Line, Decatur's combination of a genuinely walkable historic downtown, one of the country's largest independent book festivals, and direct rapid-transit access into Atlanta has made it one of the most consistently praised close-in suburbs anywhere in the metro area for buyers specifically prioritizing walkability over larger suburban lot sizes.

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• Roswell, GA

  Roswell was founded in the 1830s by Roswell King as a planned mill town built around textile manufacturing powered by the Chattahoochee River, and the Roswell Mill ruins, along with several preserved antebellum homes from the same founding era, have made the city's historic district one of the more architecturally significant in the greater Atlanta area. Bulloch Hall, an 1839 Greek Revival mansion built by one of the town's founding families, was the childhood home of Mittie Bulloch, whose son, Theodore Roosevelt, would go on to become the 26th president of the United States — a direct historical link between a modest Georgia mill town and a sitting American president that Roswell has preserved and interprets for visitors today. The city's historic district along Canton Street has developed into a genuinely walkable commercial corridor of restaurants, galleries, and shops, giving Roswell a preserved small-town center distinct from the newer commercial and residential development that's grown up around it as metro Atlanta has expanded northward. Roswell's combination of significant antebellum mill-town history, a direct genealogical connection to a US president through Bulloch Hall, and a well-preserved walkable historic commercial district has made it one of the more historically rich suburbs anywhere in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

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• Dunwoody, GA

  Dunwoody sits in north DeKalb County and, following the example set by neighboring Sandy Springs a few years earlier, incorporated as its own independent city in 2008 after decades as an unincorporated area governed directly by DeKalb County — part of the same broader wave of north Atlanta "cityhood" incorporations that reshaped local governance across the region in the 2000s and 2010s. Perimeter Center, a major office, retail, and hotel district anchored by Perimeter Mall along Interstate 285, sits substantially within Dunwoody's borders and has developed into one of the largest employment centers in the entire Atlanta metro area, giving the young city a significant corporate tax base well beyond a typical residential-only suburb. The MARTA Dunwoody station, opened in 1996 along the North Line, gives the community direct rapid-transit access into downtown Atlanta, a genuine convenience relative to many of the area's more car-dependent northern suburbs that lack any direct rail connection at all. Dunwoody's combination of a relatively young but consequential municipal incorporation, a major regional employment and retail center in Perimeter Center, and direct MARTA rail access has made it one of the more economically significant and closely watched of Atlanta's recently incorporated suburban cities.

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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.