Phew — I'm exhausted. I know my team is, too. After all, you're holding in your hands our biggest research project of the year.
When Rating the Suburbs started in 1993, the goal was to provide homeowners with the vital stats they needed to make the biggest decision of their lives. Where you live decides not just where you hang your hat, but where and with whom you spend time, the school your children attend and the overall convenience of your day-to-day.
But over the years, we found that statistics, while important and illustrative, cannot determine the Best Places to Live alone. Numbers don't lie, but they don't tell the entire story either. Beyond education results, home value and crime statistics — all essential to our calculations — there's an unquantifiable X factor that makes people fall in love with their community.
That's why, for the first time, we're expanding our Best Places to Live package to not only explore Northeast Ohio's suburbs but also to highlight a few of Cleveland's charming, historic, eclectic and growing neighborhoods.
Why wasn't Cleveland included in our Best Places to Live guide in the first place? It's a good question — one I had myself when I first joined Cleveland Magazine eight years ago.
What I found was that so many of the measurables used to understand our suburbs simply didn't apply to neighborhoods or didn't accurately represent residents' experiences in them. Most of the time neighborhood-specific stats aren't even collected. Measuring a major city like Cleveland as a whole against a suburb such as Pepper Pike, this year's No. 1 suburb, isn't any less of an apples-
to-oranges comparison.
So this year, we're taking a step forward by including the city in our editorial package, but it's important that we continue to improve this process. If you have ideas, we'd love to hear from you at conversation@clevelandmagazine.com. Until then, I'll be relaxing with a beer and a book on my Lakewood porch. It's not a Top 20 suburb, but it's home. I hope wherever you're at feels like home, too.
Start reading our 2023 guide to Cleveland's Best Places to Live.
Read more about How We Did It: Calculating Cleveland's Best Places to Live.
Get ahead of the weekend by signing up for our free weekly “In the CLE” newsletter — your guide to fun throughout The Land. Arriving in your inbox every Wednesday, this weekend to-do list fills you in on everything from concerts to museum exhibits — and more. Click here to subscribe.
