#2 LOWER MERION 

Median home price: $500,000
Percent of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park: 59.1%
Percent of employed working from home pre-pandemic: 9.6%
No. of restaurants per 1,000 residents: 5

Pre-pandemic, Lower Merion had the highest rate of people working from home of any place on this list.

In this Philadelphia suburb, you’ll find a family-friendly community with great public schools and charming local establishments, like Hymie’s — a beloved deli that’s been around since 1955. The well-rounded township also came in at No. 3 on Money’s Best Place to Retire list this year, thanks to its access to the arts, the outdoors, and healthcare options.

That has a lot to do with convenience. Its proximity to colleges, like St. Joseph’s University and Bryn Mawr College, gives Lower Merion the ease and walkability of a college town, without the overwhelming presence of a college campus or students. Only 10% of the population was between the ages of 18 to 24 as of 2010, according to a community profile using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and 79% of the homes were family households.

In addition to access to day care facilities and convenience stores, residents enjoy over 200 museums and 350 theaters, concert venues and dance studios within a 15-mile radius. That’s more than any other city on our list. Plus, Montgomery County, where the township is located, has 140 primary care providers per 100,000 residents, compared to a median of 93 among all the cities Money analyzed.

Housing is expensive compared to our other winners, but incomes are high enough to make up for it. In an index measuring resident income against the cost of living, Lower Merion scored better than the other cities on this list.