In a recent Business Week article, Gaithersburg was chosen as the best place in Maryland to raise your kids. The comments were brief:
Gaithersburg, a former farming town at the terminus of the D.C. Metro’s Red Line, is a diverse, affordable place with a shopping district called “Old Towne” that dates back to the 19th century.
The Maryland runners-up were both also in Montgomery County: Silver Spring and Aspen Hill. Nationwide, their winner was the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect. Regarding their selection criteria, the said:
The most important factors in our analysis were school performance, affordability, and safety. But we also gave weight to cost of living, air quality, job growth, racial diversity, and local parks, ball fields, zoos, recreation centers, museums, and theaters.
We knocked out towns with populations of fewer than 50,000 and median household incomes of less than $40,000 or more than $100,000.
These criteria were substantially different than those used in last year’s rankings, which appear to have been the subject of a fair amount of criticism:
“I guess we’re all supposed to pick up, saddle up the horses, and move out to Nebraska,” reader John Sasko said—a reference to the 11 Nebraska hamlets, all with populations under 2,500, on the list. As Sasko and others pointed out, we didn’t reward towns for ethnic diversity or for ample employment opportunities, factors that would favor more urban places. Indeed, most of the top 50 places are small towns in the Midwest.
It’s pretty easy to see how this year’s criteria were specifically designed to address those complaints.