To find the most affordable beach towns for homebuyers in 2023, we started by using a federal listing of beaches and their locations. We aggregated Realtor.com listing data for every home put on the market in the past year located within a one-mile radius of each beach. We then selected the most affordable beach towns by price per square foot. Only locations with at least 50 properties within a mile of the water in the past year were included.
We limited our list to just one beach town per state to ensure geographical diversity. And although we did favor places on the ocean, we also included a few bayside locales.
Despite what you may have assumed, in some places, a home by the beach can cost about the same as an average U.S. home—or less. So let’s dive in.
The United States is full of beautiful small towns. Though large metropolises like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC, are often thought of as culture and beauty capitals, this doesn’t mean other locales can’t be beacons of these qualities too. All across the county, locals and tourists alike are drawn to these charming enclaves where beauty takes shape in the form of lakes, mountains, historic main streets, forests, architectural splendor, and beaches, among other picturesque qualities.
As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so when developing this list, we looked at easy access to nature, the presence of historic or design districts, and topography that’s appealing in its own right—whether it’s beaches or mountains, or maybe a riverside perch. From a California community known for its celebrity residents to an indie-shopping hotbed in New York; from Washington’s San Juan Islands to plush inland communities along lakes and within forests—here are the 55 most beautiful small towns in America.
What will it take for you to leave California for Indiana?
Start with $5,000 to $7,500 in relocation cash. If that’s not enough, how about free health insurance for a year, unlimited golf club membership, a seat on the community’s nonprofit board?
How’s a Himalayan massage strike you? Or bourbon and burgers with the mayor?
Across the Hoosier state, dozens of counties and cities are practically stepping over each other in what has become the new competition across the land: attracting the pandemic-enlarged horde of people with remote jobs who no longer feel the need to live in more expensive urban centers like Los Angeles or New York.
Some 30 states have gotten into the action.
Cities and states are accustomed to fighting for manufacturers and other businesses by offering tax abatement and sweet land deals.
The game today is recruiting higher-income and younger households — made possible by the rise of remote working and the geographic flexibility it has afforded many American workers.
You have to wonder about a list that that has no California metro areas in their Top 100, but includes New York City at #14 and Flint, Michigan at #64.
To identify the best places to retire, U.S. News analyzed data for the 150 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. to assess how well they meet Americans’ retirement needs and expectations. Top criteria include the happiness of local residents, housing affordability, tax rates and health care quality.
Although the housing market is often spoken of in aggregate, variations and pricing and market performance can be very localized. For example, according to data from Zillow, the anticipated one-year growth rate for homes prices in the U.S. as a whole is 1.7%, with a median price of $395,220 expected to be reached in 2033. But in fast-growing markets like Columbia, Missouri, that anticipated rate is 6.4% — more than three times the national average.
To determine which are the most attractive cities in which to buy real estate over the coming decade, GOBankingRates looked at homes that are currently priced below the national median of $333,910 with anticipated growth rates in excess of the projected 1.7% national rate. We issued a caveat that of course home prices don’t move in a strictly linear fashion; however, the anticipated one-year growth rate was used primarily to identify housing markets that are moving in the right direction:
For those who are leaving San Diego and want to know where the best deals are, here are the metro areas ranked by their Freddie Mac HPI change from the peak:
