I’m tempted to brush off the nice compliment that BusinessWeek magazine has given Mill Creek, calling it the No. 2 suburb in the United States.
The Seattle area winds up on so many lists citing great places to live that its easy to brush off one more. After all, the word suburb itself sounds a little stuffy, maybe a little too homogenized.
It’s just not as cool as the word city, which implies something with more sophistication and more style.
But Mill Creek is significantly less stuffy than Bellevue, for example, and a lot less expensive.
Jennifer Kuhlman, branch manager for the Windermere Mill Creek office, told me that the average price for homes in Mill Creek is $209 a square foot compared to $271 for Bellevue and $278 for Seattle.
Kuhlman said the median price for a home in Mill Creek is $388,000, compared to $510,000 for Bellevue and $400,000 for Seattle. She also passed along something I didn’t know. While foreclosures are rising in most places, they haven’t increased in Mill Creek, meaning homeownership is pretty stable there.
I couldn’t afford to buy a home in Mill Creek, so thinking about living there is more of an intellectual exercise for me. That said, I’d choose Mill Creek over Bellevue in a heartbeat.
The magazine’s editors apparently felt the same way. Bellevue wasn’t on their list.
They liked Mill Creek because of a relatively low violent crime index of 24, about one-fourth of the national average. The city’s residents are fairly well off, with a median household income of $83,818, meaning half the households earn more and half earn less. Unemployment was listed at 4 percent, but I suspect that’s changed in recent weeks. It also listed the average commute at 29 minutes. An estimated 36 percent of the residents have children, and BusinessWeek is pro-children, so that’s good.
It’s interesting to look at the other top suburbs and the metropolitan areas in which they’re located.
They are: 1. Pewaukee, Wis. (Milwaukee), 2. Mill Creek; 3. Brandon, S.D., (Sioux Falls); 4. Munford, Tenn. (Memphis); 5. East Norriton, Pa. (Philadelphia); 6. South Weber, Utah (Salt Lake City); 7. Cornelius, N.C. (Charlotte); 8. West Des Moines, Iowa (Des Moines) 9. Pataskala, Ohio (Columbus); and 10 Fort Mill, S.C. (Charlotte).
Mill Creek is sort of in the upper quadrant when it comes to wealth. Only residents of South Weber and Cornelius make more.
Residents of Pewaukee, Brandon, Munford, Norriton, and Pataskala have less violent crime. Munford, outside of Memphis, was voted the third safest rural community in America by The Progressive Farmer, a country living magazine. It has a violent crime index of 3, which can only mean that everyone who looks at them cross-eyed gets shot before they step over the city limits.
Charlotte must have something going for it because it was the only city to have two great suburbs, although, if you noticed, one is in North Carolina and the other is across the state line in South Carolina.
Look at BusinessWeek’s choice, I think Mill Creek definitely deserves a spot in the Top 10. It’s a nice community in a great region.
When I think back to my own hometown, Elyria, Ohio, a suburb about 20 miles west of Cleveland, Mill Creek starts looking better and better.
It would not be incorrect for me to say that I fled Elyria not long after the chemicals filling Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River to the brim caught fire in 1969. It wasn’t the first time that had happened. Time magazine once described the Cuyahoga as a river that “oozes rather than flows.” It’s very existence is generally acknowledged as responsible for passage of the nation’s Clean Water Act and for establishment of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Cleveland and Elyria are better now, but the only list that either would make is one lauding communities with the largest percentage of residents who’ve lost jobs in the auto and steel industries.
So congratulations, Mill Creek. I’ve never lived in a great suburb before. But I’ve lived in a pretty bad one and I’ll take stuffy any day.
Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.
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