University Park, TX

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Dallas

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• Highland Park, TX

  Highland Park is a fully independent municipality entirely surrounded by the city of Dallas, and it's consistently ranked among the wealthiest small towns in the entire state of Texas — a status the town has maintained since its founding in the early 20th century as a deliberately upscale, deed-restricted development built specifically to stay outside Dallas's own city limits and taxing authority. Highland Park Village, opened in 1931, is widely credited by architectural and retail historians as one of the first planned shopping centers built anywhere in the United States, designed in a unified Spanish Mediterranean style that's been preserved essentially intact for nearly a century and now houses a roster of high-end luxury retailers. The town sits directly adjacent to Southern Methodist University, and together with its twin municipality, University Park, forms what locals refer to collectively as "the Park Cities" — two small, independently governed towns that function almost as a single community despite maintaining entirely separate city governments, police departments, and school districts. Highland Park's combination of complete municipal independence from Dallas, one of the earliest planned shopping centers in American retail history, and consistently top-ranked schools has made it one of the most expensive and prestigious small-town addresses anywhere in Texas.

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• Plano, TX

  Plano sits roughly 20 miles north of downtown Dallas, and over the past two decades it's become one of the most significant corporate relocation destinations in the entire country, drawing major company headquarters — including Toyota's North American headquarters, which relocated from California to Plano in 2017 — specifically for the combination of no state income tax, comparatively lower costs, and a large, well-educated regional workforce. That corporate influx has been concentrated substantially around Legacy West and the broader Legacy Business Park, a large mixed-use development combining corporate office towers with upscale retail, restaurants, and residential space built specifically to give relocating companies and their employees an urban-style amenity district in what had previously been a more conventional suburban office-park setting. Plano's population grew from a small farming town of a few thousand residents in the mid-20th century to well over 280,000 by the 2020s, one of the more dramatic sustained growth trajectories of any American suburb over that timeframe, driven substantially by the telecommunications and technology corporate expansion that took root in the area beginning in the 1980s and '90s. Plano's combination of a genuinely significant national corporate relocation trend, the large-scale Legacy West mixed-use development, and decades of sustained population growth has made it one of the most economically consequential suburbs anywhere in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

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• Frisco, TX

  Frisco was, for much of the 2010s and early 2020s, consistently ranked among the fastest-growing cities in the entire United States, expanding from a population of roughly 6,000 in 1990 to well over 220,000 by the 2020s — a growth rate driven substantially by large-scale planned corporate and residential development on what had previously been mostly farmland north of Dallas. The Star, a 91-acre mixed-use development that opened in 2016, houses the Dallas Cowboys' corporate headquarters and practice facility alongside retail, restaurants, and a Baylor Scott & White sports medicine and orthopedic center, giving Frisco a direct and highly visible connection to one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world. The city also became home to the PGA of America's national headquarters, relocated from Florida in the early 2020s as part of a broader development that includes two new golf courses and clubhouse facilities, cementing Frisco's identity as a genuine hub for professional sports organizations well beyond just the Cowboys' presence. Frisco's combination of an exceptionally rapid, sustained growth trajectory and its emergence as a genuine home base for major professional sports organizations has made it one of the most closely watched examples nationally of a small Texas farm town transforming into a significant suburban city within a single generation.

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• McKinney, TX

  McKinney's historic downtown square, built around its 1927 Collin County courthouse, has preserved a dense cluster of early-20th-century brick commercial buildings that now house restaurants, boutiques, and galleries — a walkable town center that's stood in deliberate contrast to the newer, car-oriented commercial development that's grown up around the city as the broader Dallas metro area has expanded northward. Money magazine named McKinney the number one "Best Place to Live in America" in 2014, a national ranking that brought the city significant attention and that local officials and real estate agents have continued to cite as validation of the city's combination of historic charm, strong schools, and comparatively affordable housing relative to closer-in Dallas suburbs. The city has grown rapidly over the past two decades even while working to preserve its historic square, expanding from roughly 55,000 residents in 2000 to well over 200,000 by the mid-2020s, making it one of the larger cities in the broader Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex despite still being commonly described as a "small town" because of its preserved historic core. McKinney's combination of a genuinely well-preserved historic downtown square, a nationally recognized "best place to live" ranking, and rapid population growth managed alongside historic preservation has made it one of the more frequently cited success stories among Dallas-area suburbs balancing growth against small-town character.

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• Southlake, TX

  Southlake sits between Dallas and Fort Worth, close to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and it's developed since the 1990s into one of the wealthiest and most consistently high-scoring suburban school districts in the entire state of Texas, a reputation that's made it a frequent draw for corporate relocations bringing executives and their families to the broader metroplex. Southlake Town Square, a large mixed-use development that opened in the late 1990s, was built deliberately to evoke a traditional small-town Main Street aesthetic — brick storefronts, a central green space, and a town hall — despite being an entirely new, purpose-built development rather than an organically grown historic downtown, a template several other Texas suburbs have since tried to replicate. The city's proximity to DFW Airport has made it a particularly convenient home base for corporate executives and frequent business travelers, a factor real estate agents in the area frequently cite as a meaningful driver of Southlake's continued desirability relative to suburbs further from the airport. Southlake's combination of consistently top-ranked public schools, a deliberately designed town-square commercial center built to evoke traditional small-town character, and unusually convenient airport access has made it one of the most consistently expensive and sought-after suburbs anywhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

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• 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.