We live in America’s #24 Small Town??
July 23rd, 2007 by ariana
Its a lazy rainy monday here in NY.. so much so that I couldn’t take pictures of all the progress we made this weekend, it was too dark out this morning!
But I do have some surprising news to share…
Last week, the sellers of the antiquey linen closet/armoire told us that our town Nanuet, NY had been named by the NY Times as one of the top 100 small towns to live in. Now, if you’ve ever been to Nanuet, you would be as surprised as we were to hear this. Not that there’s anything WRONG with Nanuet, its just that I’ve personally been to dozens if not hundreds of cute towns that seem infinitely more charming than Nanuet.
Of course we immediately searched the NYTimes website for said article and came up empty handed. We figured he must have dreamt it up…
Completely coincidentally I was reading a post on Kim’s really cool new blog Four Beds and Two Baths about how her town Baldwin, NY was rated #25 in CNN”s Money Magazine top 100 places to live. Curious as to where Baldwin NY actually is, I clicked through the article to the CNN site to read about it and low and behold, at the bottom of the page where it lists the town ranked #26 and the town ranked #24 is Nanuet!
I mentioned before how surprising this designation is. But they apparently used some pretty strict criterion to choose the towns, things like population size (that had to be under 50k), average home price, income and commuting distance etc.
But here’s the one where we really gained the most points : High Diversity & Low Crime.
According to the statistics, the average number of property crimes per 1000 of the top 100 towns listed was 206. But in Nanuet, that number is only 21. The average racial diversity index for the other towns in the top 100 is 59.2 whereas Nanuet’s is 136.4 – almost three times more diverse than the average.
It was interesting to read their summary description of our town because it had information that I was completely unaware of, despite the fact that I’m a native of this small county such as:
“..It is a close commute to New York City and Lake Nanuet is part of a 33.5-acre park that also includes a water slide, ballfield, picnic area, children’s playground and basketball court. And Nanuet has three public swimming pools and nine parks… “
I’ve never heard of Lake Nanuet in my life. I asked and my parents have never heard of it either and they have lived in the county for 20 years! Kind of weird that there’s an elusive 35 acre park that somehow we’ve never come across in our tiny town or in any of the park literature I’ve received since becoming a resident. (Maybe community outreach isn’t an area they scored highly in?)
Do you think there will an increased demand for real estate in Nanuet now that this list has come out? Or does this list do little more than afford bragging rights to residents of these towns?
My town was #61 last year! It is a weird list…
I definately think that if/when you go to sell your house, you should put your town’s No. 24th designation in the real estate ad!
Adrienne
I saw that article too. We live right next to 49, Catonsville, MD, and right near 42, Elkridge.
I love Nanuet — mainly ’cause of the river…I grew up not far from you in North Salem, NY. We probably never made The List, but it’s a pretty little town. I live in Chicago now and my son just spent 3 weeks visiting Grandma & Grandpa in North Salem, and now that he is back here w/me in Chicago, he is trying to convince me to move back to NY. It’s tempting…
[…] hot on the heels of Nanuet being voted #24 best small town to live in, this is turning out to be QUITE the banner year for our little town. All of this national […]
Whoa. I grew up in Valley Cottage, NY and my Mom used to take me and my sisters to Lake Nanuet. It was a really nice place when I was a kid, apparently still is.
That is so cool. I never meet people down in Orlando that know where I am from. — JF
Nanuet is a nice place but if you live or are around the place for awhile, you will see the “not so bright side”
Take for instance the downtown section. Even though it was redone, it has a lot of shady people. Many of the stores are obvious fronts for selling drugs. The haircut place never has any patrons, yet they stay open!! Nanuet has a “Check Cashing Place” – a sure sign of a ghetto town, so all of the illegals taking the deli and restaurant jobs in the town can send money back to Mexico.
Stay in the Subway parking lot and observe for a while in your parked car – I’m sure you will see drug deals going on in that parking lot.
I would say that a few other stores in the town are also fronts for drugs, and who knows what else. I always get an eerie feeling when walking past some of these stores in Nanuet. How long did Money Magazine really stay to evaluate? Do they really know the hidden truths?