America's Top Towns To Live Well

ntrepreneur Joshua Onysko, owner of Pangaea Organics, has two regions to thank for his success.

Rhode Island-born Onysko, 31, learned the agriculture and natural products business during volunteering trips to Nicaragua and India during his 20s.

And when Onysko launched his skin-care line in 2005, he set up shop in Boulder, Colo., despite time spent on the East Coast and in Jackson Hole, Wyo. It was both a personal and business decision. Boulder offers world-class ski slopes and an abundance of parks, as well as a strong venture capital environment, plenty of like-sized start-ups and high-quality talent from local resident University of Colorado.

This month, Onysko hopes to fill three sales and marketing positions, for which he’s received over 300 resumes. Why is he hiring when many other business are contracting? The factors that lured Onysko to the area have helped Pangaea become a company whose annual revenue has grown 229% since 2005, to $7 million, Onysko says. He now boasts sales in 12 countries. The result? Onysko has the means to attract candidates willing to relocate to a desirable place like 90,000-strong Boulder.

In Depth: America’s Top 25 Towns To Live Well

“It’s a really easy place to live and work,” he says. “There are a ton of new companies here, and that environment helps you build your business because there are great connections, and it’s easy to get people to move here.”

Features like these helped propel Boulder to the top spot on our list of best towns to live well. Our data comes from ZoomProspector.com, a San Francisco-based consulting firm specializing in corporate relocation. It evaluated areas of the country with less than 100,000 people. Due to differing regional definitions, we used the label “town” for any city, township, borough or Census-designated place with such populations. Characteristics like the number of museums, parks, bars and restaurants, and cultural institutions per capita were considered, as were factors indicative of a favorable business environment. These include patents, venture capital funding, sole-proprietorships, start-ups and small businesses per capita.

By these measures, Doral, Fla., ranks second. Thirteen miles west of downtown Miami, 35,336-population Doral offers mild weather and access to world-class golf courses. It also has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of small businesses per capita, especially surrounding aerospace and logistics. Third-place Fairfax, Va., home to a strong public school system and a high median salary of $86,088, is packed with entrepreneurs–its rate of 0.14 sole proprietors per capita ranks in the top 1% nationwide.

These factors are increasingly important in a recession. When businesses and jobs retract, as they have nationwide, municipalities with strong environments for start-ups, and those that offer attractive amenities, are better suited to recover from economic downtimes, as there are more business activity filling the void. “Many small and medium-sized cities have developed the business, demographic and lifestyle amenities of big cities,” says Anatalio Ubalde, chief executive of ZoomProspector.com. “While smaller cities may not have the total number of quality employees and amenities of larger cities, on a per-capita basis, they are very competitive locations for businesses.”

We also looked at the quality of the labor force, including the percentage of the population, the percentage of foreign-born workers and the percentage of people aged 25-34 with bachelor’s degrees or higher; the latter two were more heavily weighted as indicators of places so desirable that highly skilled workers from all over the world are willing to move there. Other factors considered: median income levels, commuting time, distance to highways and airports, and the share of professional level workers as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Not surprisingly, places like Cupertino, Calif., Coral Gables, Fla., Evanston, Ill., and Newton, Mass., with their proximity to critical masses of research universities, perform very well on our list. Those places tend to produce start-ups, develop patents and attract venture capital money.

It also helps to have natural beauty, high salaries and plentiful restaurants and cultural attractions.

Santa Fe, N.M., which has only 67,391 residents, is home to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and has dozens of quality music venues that are used to host various jazz, rock and classical music festivals. The area is well-known as one of the country’s hottest art markets. These amenities almost certainly play a part in the number of BLS-defined highly skilled workers (19%) and sole proprietors (0.10 per capita) the area attracts, and helps it to No. 24 on our list.

Seventh place Columbia, Md., a 97,506-population town between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, is packed with restaurants, parks and music venues, and it is zoned against big boxes, making it exceptionally small business friendly.

When you have museums and sunshine, mountains, nice restaurants and a local economy with new companies starting up, it makes an otherwise slow economy far easier to deal with.

America's Best Places To Raise A Family

When Amelia Hamilton-Morris and her husband William were starting a family, they had to choose between living in Iowa, where his family had settled three generations earlier, or in her native Houston. They eventually decided to raise their children in Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines, because it boasted good schools, affordable housing and a strong sense of community. Two children and 17 years later, Hamilton-Morris is still enthusiastic about their decision.

“You feel safe all the time, and people are extremely friendly,” says Hamilton-Morris, a spokeswoman for the city of Des Moines, Iowa. “The commute is not long; even if you live at the far end of the city, you’re only talking about 12 to 15 minutes to downtown.”

The perks that attracted Hamilton-Morris’ family to Des Moines are among the reasons it tops our list of the best cities to raise a family. Its young population is more likely to graduate high school than in other cities, and life for most families is safe and affordable. Short average commute times save working parents precious minutes to spend with their families.

The top 10 cities for families aren’t flashy. Most don’t draw throngs of tourists or boast enviable night life. But then that’s not what most families are looking for. Instead, our list has metros like Ogden, Utah; Syracuse, N.Y.; and Knoxville, Tenn.–places where crime is low, educational prospects are solid and most people can readily afford the daily essentials.

Behind the Numbers

To find the cities where families fare best, we ranked America’s 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in seven categories. Using numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sperling’s Best Places and Moody’s Economy.com, we looked at the cost of living, prevalence of home ownership, median household income, housing costs, commute time, crime and the percentage of young adults that graduate high school.

Lots of East Coast Options for Families

The Northeast fares well on our list, claiming six of the top 10 spots. In densely packed Rochester, N.Y., commutes are short; a scant 3% of commuters spend an hour or more in traffic on their way to work. Syracuse offers significant educational benefits: 89% of young adults have high school degrees. And some former manufacturing hubs, like Pittsburgh Pa., are having a renaissance of sorts. Once a fallen steel giant, the city has diversified its economy and boasts low crime and high educational attainment. Pittsburgh also has the highest home ownership rate in our 10.

“People know that Pittsburgh is a really great place for families because of safety, schools and the arts.” says Wendy Hermann, director of student services for master’s programs at Carnegie Mellon University. “I see students wanting that whether they’re married or not. They see staying in Pittsburgh as way to say that’s the kind of lifestyle they’re looking forward to.”

Family-Friendly and Fun

But a city being family-friendly doesn’t automatically make it staid. Buffalo, N.Y., makes our list in part thanks to short commutes and affordability, but there’s also plenty to do there–its spectacular Niagara Falls is a huge tourist draw. Provo, Utah, is a bustling college town, home to Brigham Young University, but it’s not just a great place for students. Families flock there for its safety and schools: It has the highest percentage of high-school graduates on our list and one of the lowest crime rates.

For families, offering their children a safe place to play and the best chance to learn takes precedence over the number of bars and restaurants. In places like Des Moines, that often means young people leave to explore the country when they reach college age, but eventually head back home, says Hamilton-Morris.



“When they’re ready to raise children, we see a lot of young people come back for that family circle of support.”

A Billionaire's Urban Getaway: Inside Shahid Khan's Chicago Penthouse

 

 When Shahid Khan flew from Pakistan to the United States for college at age 16, he dreamed of becoming an architect. But he threw out that career blueprint early in his first semester at the University of Illinois for a simple reason: He found out how much the profession paid.

“I love architecture, but I learned early on that architects just don’t make a lot of money,” the 63-year-old says with a hearty chuckle.

It turned out that Khan’s chosen field, industrial engineering, served him quite well in that regard. After revolutionizing the car industry with a one-piece bumper design in the late 1970s, he went on to build $4.4 billion auto parts juggernaut Flex-N-Gate , which powered him to billionaire status and in recent years enabled him to splurge on two high-profile sports teams: the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars and the Fulham Football Club in the English Premier League.

As a Pakistani immigrant jet-setting to games in Jacksonville and London while overseeing new factory openings from Mexico to China, Khan (with his signature handlebar mustache) could be the poster boy for global business. But at heart, he’s still an adopted Midwesterner, with his main residence and company headquarters just minutes from his alma mater in the sleepy college towns of Urbana and Champaign, Illinois.

And when Khan wanted to lay down urban roots, he didn’t seek a pied-à-terre in Paris, Shanghai or even New York. Rather, he looked to Chicago. Before either football team gave him a global presence, buying an expansive penthouse along Chicago’s prestigious Magnificent Mile in 2006 showed the world that Khan was ready to conduct business on a billionaire scale–and fulfill a lifelong dream of design he gave up on all those years earlier.

From the 61st floor of Park Tower, one of the city’s tallest buildings, his apartment boasts a 360-degree view of Chicagoland, including Lake Michigan. The vista captivated Khan and his wife (and former college sweetheart), Ann, when they were touring properties around the city–and was ultimately the main reason they spent $8.3 million on the 9,000-square-foot space. “We were looking for about a year,” Khan says, “but when this came up we knew it was special and would really capture the essence of Chicago.”

Respecting the city’s rich architectural history–from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry–was also important to Khan, who found the previous owner’s bleak modernist design of unvarnished bleached-white drywall off-putting. For the kind of money he was spending, Khan wasn’t buying a fortress of solitude. His goal was to make the space impressive but inviting–friendly for the dual purpose of family getaways and business meetings. “Urban living is an intersection of business and personal life,” he says. “You need a space that people want to be a part of.”

Khan drew on his extensive travels to furnish the penthouse with a rich tapestry of color–a palette of golds, reds and browns that evoke a luscious throne room fit for a Chinese emperor. But those hues are used judiciously throughout the minimalist rectangular layout, which was engineered to preserve the unique proportions. Khan, ever the amateur architectural enthusiast, cites Mies van der Rohe as a major inspiration. As the influential head of the Chicago architecture school at what would later be renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies championed a “less is more” design philosophy of steel-framed glass and once described one of his more famous buildings as being “almost nothing.”

“This place would be woefully out of place in Jacksonville, in Urbana, everywhere except probably Barcelona,” Khan says. (With four factories in Barcelona, he draws many similarities between Chicago and Spain’s own “Second City,” where at the water’s edge a history of art and architecture is both glorified and tested.)

The classical-meets-modern vision shapes the apartment, especially the master bathroom, where Roman style meets the city that invented the skyscraper. The shower space is modeled after spas that survived the volcanic explosion of Pompeii, which Khan has visited often. Golden-tiled walls present a mosaic of trees similar to what one might find in those ancient saunas, but here multiple showerheads surround a sparkling white freestanding bathtub that resembles a large egg sliced in half. The modern pièce de résistance is the opposing wall, where simple floor-to-ceiling windows offer the perfect cityscape contrast to the Romanesque motif.

Shortly after purchasing the apartment, Khan grew dissatisfied with the first few high-profile designers he spoke to, most of whom suggested putting up walls and carving out trendy oval-shaped rooms. Instead, he stayed close to home with Suzanne Lovell, a Chicago-based firm that embraced what Khan thought was “true to the space.” As an early proponent of open working spaces, Khan says interactivity among people is just as important in a residential environment as it is on an office floor. Cutting up the penthouse into a bunch of cubbyholes was never an option. “Whether you’re enjoying good times or going through difficult times, it’s the same thing–you’re dealing with people,” he says. “How you have the interaction is very important.”

Last year Khan went through a similar reconstruction with the Jaguars’ front office in Jacksonville, where he installed open floor plans and glass conference rooms after a complete cleanse of the coaching and operations staff. He hopes new personnel working amid a new layout will be able to shake up the moribund franchise he purchased for $770 million in 2012.

Back in Chicago, his apartment’s current design limits privacy to the master and two other moderately sized bedrooms, just enough for Khan’s two grown children. The rest of the penthouse flows freely, with creative solutions to accommodate more guests. For example, when Ann throws a girls-night-in slumber party, the Khans can deploy four Murphy beds installed in the media room.

The space saved by avoiding extra guest rooms means the main living room is 54 feet long, with a wall of windows stretching nearly all the way to the 14-foot ceilings. The result feels like a luxury event hall, which, in essence, it is–the Khans recently entertained 140 guests for their daughter’s engagement party.

Since 2006, Ann and Shahid have slowly gathered art to furnish the space, mixing the old world with the new. Among the first pieces they bought to fill the void were 300-year-old antique rugs from Uzbekistan that each run more than 40 feet. They added a chandelier saved from the Hotel Murano in Italy that was torn down in 1904. A Renoir hangs handsomely across from an abstract painting by contemporary painter Cecily Brown. The apartment also features two Manolo Valdés portraits.











 


Yet no matter how much Khan has spent to beautify the apartment (his official calculation: “a lot of money”), he never wants it to be too fancy to throw a party in. “We’re going to have over friends, family, and enjoy it,” he says. “It goes without saying that you do get some red wine spilled, and you have to be ready for that. But you can’t put plastic covers over everything.”

That attitude has served Khan well over the years in the auto parts business, where practical logistics have always mattered more than strict adherence to ideology. Recently he bought and retrofitted an old Dow Chemical plant in Brazil, right next to a new Ford factory, to maximize profit that would otherwise be lost to transportation. Khan just opened his latest plant in Shanghai, Flex-N-Gate’s 62nd factory across the globe. Organic growth and a rebounding automobile industry has led to what Khan calls a “virtuous cycle” of profits for everyone in the manufacturing chain.

Khan faces a more difficult turnaround job in London. Fulham, the Premier League club he bought for $300 million in July 2013, was supposed to provide synergy with the Jaguars, who now host one game a year at London’s Wembley Stadium. But the team crashed and burned this year despite two expensive managerial changes, and will be relegated to the second-tier Football League Championship division next season.

That’s a challenge Khan will face with the same patience he and Ann applied to building out their Chicago penthouse. “You have to take the time to live in a place to collect all the pieces, develop a vision,” he reflects. “You can’t just go to Home Depot and buy everything.”