Places Rated Almanac bills itself as a “guide to finding the best places to live.” It compares and ranks all 343 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, taking into account cost of living, job opportunities, transportation, housing, recreation, climate and so on. The metropolitan areas surrounding large, vibrant cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Toronto are highly ranked: after all, these places tend to boast a variety of employment, entertainment and recreational opportunities; they also offer a wide choice of health-care facilities and are usually important transportation hubs. It’s a surprise, then, to discover that the fifth-rated place to live in the United States is Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina. This is a metropolitan area whose largest city, Raleigh, has only about 230,000 people; Durham is even smaller, with fewer than 150,000. Yet little Raleigh-Durham is hot: in 1992, Inc. magazine rated it as one of “the best places in the country to own a business,” and last year Money magazine gave it the coveted No. 1 spot in its “best places to live in America” issue.
The runners-up to Raleigh-Durham as Money’s best places to live were Rochester, Minnesota, and Provo-Orem, Utah. Likewise small-to-midsize regional centers that share several characteristics other than their size, they score high in that ephemeral but crucial category, “quality of life.” They are near recreational amenities like lakes and mountains. They have strong local economies and have lower unemployment, poverty and crime rates than the national average. But Raleigh-Durham, Rochester and Provo-Orem are not merely examples of successful small cities. They are also examples of a new urban trend: the rise of what might be called the college city.