The Worst of Cleveland Magazine’s Best Suburbs, Ranked

Cleveland Magazine last week unleashed its annual ranking of the best places to live in Northeast Ohio, which it also conveniently calls, to avoid any confusion, the best suburbs in Northeast Ohio. Because eff Cleveland, right?

Anyway, the highlights detailed for Pepper Pike, which this year took home the top prize, say about all you need to know about this ritual genuflection to sprawl.

“Every home in this 7.15-square-mile suburb is built on at least a one-acre lot” and it boasts appealing proximity to great private schools, the magazine staff noted, while Mayor Richard Bain touted that, “People invest large amounts of money in maintaining their properties.”

Huzzah.

Cuyahoga County continues to hemorrhage population: The latest census estimates show from mid-2021 to mid-2022 it lost nearly 12,000 residents, the most of any county in the state and more than the number of residents Ohio lost in total.

From 1994 to 2017, sprawl sucked some $2.4 billion in residential tax base from Cleveland, $4.8 billion from 18 inner-ring suburbs, and $4.4 billion from Cuyahoga County.

It is worth noting here that fully 25% of Cleveland Magazine’s best suburbs — ranked chiefly on safety, housing and education — aren’t even in Cuyahoga County.

But it is also worth noting and celebrating that for the first time since the city’s monthly mag began publishing the rankings in 1993, it also used the Best Places to Live issue to shine a light on Cleveland proper.

As editor-in-chief Dillon Stewart wrote in a note this month: “Why wasn’t Cleveland included in our Best Places to Live guide in the first place? It’s a good question — one I had myself when I first joined Cleveland Magazine eight years ago. What I found was that so many of the measurables used to understand our suburbs simply didn’t apply to neighborhoods or didn’t accurately represent residents’ experiences in them. Most of the time neighborhood-specific stats aren’t even collected. Measuring a major city like Cleveland as a whole against a suburb such as Pepper Pike, this year’s No. 1 suburb, isn’t any less of an apples-to-oranges comparison.”

So, “Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the entire story either. Beyond education results, home value and crime statistics — all essential to our calculations — there’s an unquantifiable X factor that makes people fall in love with their community. That’s why, for the first time, we’re expanding our Best Places to Live package to not only explore Northeast Ohio’s suburbs but also to highlight a few of Cleveland’s charming, historic, eclectic and growing neighborhoods.”

It’s a smart and long overdue move, and one appropriate for a magazine with the city in its name.

But we digress and move on to our annual and much-anticipated re-ranking of Cleveland Magazine’s rankings, calculated and organized after hundreds of hours of research and data-crunching.

Our ranking first, followed by Cleveland Magazine’s.

Congrats to all the winners. May your acres be ample and your landscaping budgets flush.

20 (tie): Pepper Pike (1)
20 (tie): Moreland Hills (2)
20 (tie): Solon (3)
20 (tie): Beachwood (4)
20 (tie): Hudson (5)
20 (tie): Rocky River (6)
20 (tie): Westlake (7)
20 (tie): Chagrin Falls (8)
20 (tie): Brecksville (9)
20 (tie): Bay Village (10)
20 (tie): Broadview Heights (11)
20 (tie): Orange (12)
20 (tie): Shaker Heights (13)
20 (tie): Highland Heights (14)
20 (tie): Aurora (15)
20 (tie): Twinsburg (16)
20 (tie): Bath (17)
20 (tie): Richfield (18)
20 (tie) North Royalton (19)
20 (tie): Avon (20)

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