Scottsdale, AZ

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Phoenix

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• Paradise Valley, AZ

  Paradise Valley sits between Phoenix and Scottsdale in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, and the town has deliberately maintained some of the lowest housing density and largest minimum lot sizes of any municipality in the entire Phoenix metro area, a zoning approach that's kept its roughly 13,000 residents spread across large, walled estate properties rather than conventional suburban subdivisions. Camelback Mountain, whose distinctive silhouette is said to resemble a kneeling camel, sits largely within the town's borders, and its Echo Canyon and Cholla trails are among the most heavily used hiking routes anywhere in the Phoenix area, drawing hikers directly up a mountain that also happens to be ringed by some of the most expensive residential real estate in the entire state. The town has become a favored home base for professional athletes, entertainers, and business executives specifically seeking the combination of desert-mountain scenery, large private lots, and proximity to both Phoenix and Scottsdale's amenities without the density of either larger city. Paradise Valley's combination of some of the lowest residential density and largest lot sizes of any Phoenix-area municipality, direct Camelback Mountain access, and a concentration of celebrity and executive homeowners has made it one of the most exclusive and consistently expensive small towns anywhere in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.

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• Tempe, AZ

  Tempe is home to the main campus of Arizona State University, one of the largest public universities in the country by enrollment, and the school's roughly 80,000 students on the Tempe campus alone give the city a genuine college-town energy and a substantial share of its overall population identity. Tempe Town Lake, a two-mile artificial reservoir created in 1999 by installing inflatable rubber dams across the normally dry Salt River bed, transformed what had been an empty riverbed into a genuine waterfront amenity, hosting rowing, dragon boat racing, and a lakeside park system that's become one of the more distinctive pieces of public infrastructure anywhere in the desert Southwest. Mill Avenue, Tempe's historic main commercial street running directly toward the ASU campus, has developed into one of the more walkable and consistently active nightlife and dining districts in the entire Phoenix metro area, sustained substantially by the university's large student population. Tempe's combination of hosting one of the country's largest public universities, a genuinely inventive piece of desert waterfront infrastructure in Tempe Town Lake, and a lively, walkable college-town commercial district along Mill Avenue has made it one of the most distinctive and consistently youthful suburbs anywhere in the greater Phoenix area.

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• Gilbert, AZ

  Gilbert was, for much of the 2000s and 2010s, repeatedly cited as one of the fastest-growing towns in the entire United States, expanding from a population of roughly 5,700 in 1980 to well over 275,000 by the mid-2020s — a growth rate that's transformed what was once a small farming community into one of the largest municipalities in Arizona while it continues to formally retain "town" rather than "city" status. The Heritage District, built around Gilbert's original early-20th-century downtown, has preserved the town's historic agricultural-era commercial buildings alongside newer development, giving longtime residents a walkable historic core amid the vastly larger master-planned residential development that's grown up around it over the past several decades. Gilbert's public schools have consistently ranked among the strongest in Arizona, a reputation that's been a significant driver of the town's sustained population growth, as families relocating to the broader Phoenix metro area have specifically targeted Gilbert's school district boundaries when choosing where to buy. Gilbert's combination of one of the most dramatic sustained growth rates of any American municipality in recent decades, a preserved historic downtown in the Heritage District, and consistently top-ranked schools has made it one of the most closely watched examples nationally of rapid, large-scale suburban growth in the desert Southwest.

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• Chandler, AZ

  Chandler has developed one of the most significant concentrations of semiconductor manufacturing in the entire country, anchored by Intel's Ocotillo campus, one of the company's largest chip fabrication facilities worldwide, a presence that's given the city a substantial high-tech manufacturing employment base well beyond the more typical retail and service-sector jobs common in many Phoenix-area suburbs. That semiconductor and broader technology manufacturing cluster has drawn additional major employers to the area over the following decades, reinforcing Chandler's identity as one of the more significant advanced-manufacturing hubs anywhere in the Phoenix metro region, sometimes cited alongside similar clusters in Texas as part of a broader Sun Belt semiconductor manufacturing expansion. The city's historic downtown, centered on a preserved early-20th-century town square, has been revitalized alongside the newer corporate and residential growth surrounding it, giving Chandler a walkable historic core distinct from its larger identity as a technology-manufacturing center. Chandler's combination of a globally significant semiconductor manufacturing presence through Intel's Ocotillo campus and a preserved, revitalized historic downtown has made it one of the more economically consequential and industrially significant suburbs anywhere in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.

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• Carefree, AZ

  Carefree is one of the smallest incorporated towns in the greater Phoenix area, with a population of under 4,000, and it was deliberately planned in the 1950s as a low-density desert retreat, with street names like "Easy Street" and "Ho Road" reflecting the developers' explicitly leisurely, laid-back branding from the town's earliest days. The Carefree Sundial, installed in 1959 and expanded in 1982, is one of the largest sundials in the Western Hemisphere and remains the town's most recognizable landmark, a functioning timepiece built specifically to reinforce Carefree's founding identity as a place where the pace of life was meant to feel slower and more deliberate than the surrounding Phoenix metro area. The town sits at the base of Black Mountain in the high Sonoran Desert north of Scottsdale and Cave Creek, giving it dramatic desert-mountain scenery and a genuinely small-town, artist-colony character distinct from the more corporate resort-and-golf identity of larger neighboring Scottsdale. Carefree's combination of an extremely low-density, deliberately leisurely founding philosophy, one of the largest sundials in the Western Hemisphere as its civic landmark, and dramatic high-desert mountain scenery has made it one of the smallest and most distinctively laid-back towns anywhere in the greater Phoenix 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.