Louisville, CO, Tops Money.Com Best Cities

By Elizabeth Fairchild, your money etc. news source

And the winner is …

Image from Medtronic.com: Louisville, CO, is a great place for bike riders.

CNN’s financial site has released the list of Money.com best cities, and this year’s winner is a little town in Colorado. Louisville, CO, tops the list of 100 best small cities in the United States.

The Money.com Best cities list only includes places that have populations of 50,000 or fewer. The Money.com best cities list looks at unemployment, median income, housing and several other factors to determine rankings. Let’s get to know this year’s winner, Louisville, CO.

With or without you

The entry at Money.com on best cities starts off with sharing what Louisville, CO, does not have rather than what it does have:

Some towns nestled along the Rockies are full of pretentious eco-hipsters. Not Louisville.

That probably means that you can find places to get easy payday loans, besides the obvious place: online. It also probably means that if you are a “pretentious eco-hipster,” as Money.com so lovingly puts it, you might not agree with the site’s assessment of best places to live.

My cup of tea

From the first sentence, we know that Money.com’s best places list is based on loving small towns that lack pretentious eco-hipsters. It goes on:

Ice cream shops dot the historic downtown. Families grab burgers at the cozy Waterloo Café. A Friday-night street fair, with a beer garden, live music, and games for the kids, runs all summer.

See, I don’t eat ice cream, don’t love street fairs and prefer towns that have 150,000 to 200,000 people rather than the 18,800 population in Louisville, CO. Also I quite enjoy the presence of pretentious eco-hipsters. I could do worse. So “best” is a matter of opinion.

Much love for Louisville

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons Louisville, CO, nabbed the No. 1 spot on Money.com’s best cities list. With an unemployment rate of 6 percent, it doesn’t have the most highly employed population on the list, but 6 percent is considerably better than the national average. The Money.com best cities article says:

No wonder this down-to-earth town has appeared high on Money’s Best Places list before–and on many others.

It’s also weathering the economic downturn well. Robust industries in the area, such as high tech, energy, and health care, make county unemployment among the lowest in the state.

But the top reason residents give for moving here? The great outdoors. Louisville is laced with nearly 30 miles of trails, Rocky Mountain National Park is less than an hour away, and eight world-class ski resorts are within two hours. The town’s schools are highly rated as well.

Add in dry, clear weather, little crime, good health care, and low taxes, and Louisville is pretty tough to beat.

Second place

After Louisville, CO, on the list of Money.com best cities, is the town of Chanhassen, MN. Many of the reasons for its distinction as the No. 2 spot holder behind Louisville, CO, are financial:

Apparently Chanhassen never got the memo that it’s supposed to be in a recession. Unemployment here was more than three percentage points below the national average in May, thanks to a broad jobs base in the Twin Cities area.

Property taxes have dropped every year in the past five, even as median home prices have crept up. And the town still boasts a perfect triple-A bond rating.