7) Birmingham
If you have kids, Birmingham, Michigan is a better place to raise children than Beverly Hills, California. And there’s a good reason for it. The city’s five public schools have done a tremendous job of producing some of the best brains in Michigan. The average test scores for Birmingham are 21 percent higher than the national average. Ninety-eight percent of the residents are high school graduates; more than three-fourth of the adults are college graduates. With an overall crime rate that is 64 percent lower than the rest of the country, the city’s safer than 83 percent of all other American cities. The unemployment rate in Birmingham is 48 percent lower than the national average. The city’s poverty rate is even more impressive since it’s one-fourth of the national average. The only downside is Birmingham’s median house price which is slightly higher than the national average, but understandable if you look at the fact that the median household income in Birmingham is almost double the average household income in the rest of the country.
