This is from Chicago Magazine:
Quote:
The Best Suburbs to Call Home
Six counties, 205 towns, only one winner. We crunched the numbers to rank every suburb in the Chicago area. Here’s how they stack up.
May 26, 2026, 6:00 am
Over the years, this magazine has produced many rankings of the best places to live in the Chicago area. We’d consult with experts and cite stats, sure, but those lists were largely subjective.
This time around, we put a twist on the exercise: For the first time, we evaluated suburbs based purely on the numbers. And not just the best suburbs — we ranked all 205 in the six-county area with populations of more than 5,000, from top to bottom. We tapped the analytics firm DataJoe to help us collect and weight various statistical measures and crunch the figures. (Our methodology can be found below.)
This quantitative look turned up some surprises: For starters, north suburban Libertyville, which hadn’t been on any of our recent previous rankings, landed at No. 2. And not all of the area’s tony towns ended up near the top. Oak Brook, for instance, came in at No. 157.
The top 25:
1. Winnetka
2. Libertyville
3. Glencoe
4. Arlington Heights
5. Naperville
6. Lake Forest
7. Geneva
8. Highland Park
9. Evanston
10. Lisle
11. Wilmette
12. Wheaton
13. Schiller Park
14. Vernon Hills
15. Aurora
16. Bartlett
17. Glen Ellyn
18. Deerfield
19. Northbrook
20. Long Grove
21. Lake Zurich
22. Itasca
23. Des Plaines
24. La Grange
25. Morton Grove
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Full article with full ranking and methodology:
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magaz...-best-suburbs-to-live-in-all-205-ranked/
Nothing really shocking, though I was mildly surprised to see Evanston land in the top 10, given that it's way more of an "actual city" compared to most Chicagoland burbs, and thus has more "actual city" issues.
I really like that "proximity to The Loop" was one of their criteria for this exercise. Far too often these kinds of "best places to live" listicles competely ignore the "bumblefuck factor" in their methodolgy.
And for those curious about the most burning question: Schaumburg came in at at #33.
I assume local media elsewhere has done this for other metro areas as well, so lets see 'em!
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