A Chicago suburb beats out thousands of other communities around the U.S. as the best, most affordable residence to raise kids

By Prashant Gopal

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Mount Prospect, Ill., is a quiet Chicago suburb with a population of just throughout 56,000. It is a tight-knit town where over the past eight years Prospect High School’sitting football team won three state championships, its Marching Knights picked up their 26th narrow illustrious champion title at the yearly publication state marching band festival, and just last month the school itself ranked 12th among total state bragging schools. Now the town is also the winner of Businessweek’sitting second annual roundup of the Best Places in America to Raise Kids.

Founded by German immigrants and incorporated in 1917, Mount Prospect hasn’t strayed far from its values of fiscal conservatism and community involvement, calm as it has expanded to include new immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Korea, and India. It is a middle-class community by low crime, affordable homes, award-winning schools, ethnic restaurants, a major regional mall, and a small-town enravish that makes the lofty city less than an hour away seem much to absent.

You won’t find palatial estates here—let unaccompanied McMansions. People generally have life in moderate homes with short driveways that touch the yards next house. And residents here have been known to share domination generators after storms and take turns cooking meals for sick friends and acquaintances. "I knew one girl who had back surgery," said Jean Murphy, a correspondent for the Daily Herald, suburban Chicago’session largest quotidian newspaper. Murphy, who has covered Mount Prospect since 1983, said: "She had six weeks where she didn’t have to cook. That’s the kind of town it is."

BusinessWeek teamed up with OnBoard Informatics, a Manhattan-based provider of real estate analysis, to come up through our list of each state’s best affordable towns for raising children. Mount Prospect just squeezed out several other Cook County (Ill.) communities, many of which also ranked boisterous. The most important factors in our parsing were school performance, affordability, and safety. But we also gave gravity to require to be paid of living, air quality, job growth, racial diversity, and local parks, ball fields, zoos, recreation centers, museums, and theaters.

We knocked fully towns with populations of fewer than 50,000 and median home incomes of less than $40,000 or more than $100,000. And we ended up with a think best that included some well-known places such similar to Phoenix, Columbus, Ohio, and Ann Arbor, Mich. But we also mould some hidden gems such as Euless, Tex., smack in between Dallas and Fort Worth, which according to Sports Illustrated has the nation’s top-ranked eminent school football team, and Murfreesboro, Tenn., a community town outside Nashville.

It wasn’t a perfect list. Our population threshold of 50,000 people limited our options in less-populous states such during the time that Delaware, Vermont, and West Virginia. But our criteria helped us find ethnically and culturally disagreeing places with the kind of amenities that are added frequently found in number of people centers. "We have 19 parks and have common park for all ball fields so mothers dress in’t have to climb from one park to not the same with their children," said Mary Lib Saleh, who has been mayor of Euless for 15 years. "We are a incorporated town of 54,000 and have almost 100 floats in the Christmas parade—as many as Fort Worth or Dallas. We just have a community, and people really lover Euless."

Murfreesboro, fireside to Middle Tennessee State University, the largest undergraduate university in the commonwealth, hosts a jazz and a folk music festival in the summer and most major high school sports championships. It has expansive sports fields, including a new $13 million soccer complex. The economic downturn has started to hurt Murfreesboro as it has other parts of the country. But college towns tend to ride out recessions better than most places since training is somewhat recession-proof. "We have a small town feel with big city amenities right here in our community being a city of 100,000 nation," said Rob Lyons, deputy incorporated town conductor for Murfreesboro.