Luxury Homes: April 2008

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Former Bush aide sells for $1.3 million. Wizard Andray Blatche, NPR’s Diane Rehm, and Channel 9’s Tracey Neale make deals.

Wizards forward/center Andray Blatche bought this Mitchellville home with a four-car garage for $1.4 million. Photograph by David Pipkin

News anchor Tracey Neale sold this Georgetown home for $1.3 million—nearly $400,000 more than what she paid. Photograph by David Pipkin

In DC: Former Channel 9 news anchor Tracey Neale sold a four-bedroom, four-bath Federal-style brick rowhouse in Georgetown’s West Village for $1.3 million. The house, which Neale bought in January 2005 for $935,000, has a wrought-iron gated front and a private patio.

Business executive and civic leader Terence Golden bought a two-bedroom, three-bath penthouse on Military Road in Chevy Chase for $2 million. The 2,650-square-foot condo has a two-story master bedroom, terrace with Viking grill, and wet bar. Golden is chair of DC’s Bailey Capital Corporation, a private investment company. From 1995 until 2000, he was president of Host Marriott Corporation. He is also chair of the Federal City Council, a civic organization of Washington business leaders.

Businessman Miles Gilburne and his wife, Nina Zolt, bought a two-bedroom, three-bath condo on E Street in Penn Quarter for $1.5 million. Gilburne, a former senior vice president at AOL, is a managing member of ZG Ventures, a venture-capital firm. Zolt is cochair and cofounder of ePals, an online education company.

Radio talk-show host Diane Rehm and her husband, lawyer John Rehm, bought a two-bedroom, three-bath corner condo in the Colonnade on New Mexico Avenue for $800,000. Rehm hosts The Diane Rehm Show on NPR and has written two books: Finding My Voice and, with her husband, Toward Commitment.

DC Superior Court judge John Mott bought a four-bedroom, four-bath Colonial in Northwest DC for $900,000. The house has a library, guesthouse, and rear patio. Mott was named to the court in 2000 by President Clinton.

National Building Museum president Chase Rynd bought a condo in the Lofts Eleven building near Logan Circle for $1.3 million.

Former Bush communications director Dan Bartlett sold this Chevy Chase home for $1.3 million. Photograph by David Pipkin.

In Maryland: Former George W. Bush aide Dan Bartlett and his wife, Allyson, sold a three-bedroom, three-bath Colonial in Chevy Chase for $1.3 million. Bartlett resigned as White House counselor in 2007; he is now a senior strategist at the Austin, Texas, office of Public Strategies, a public-affairs firm. Sold by Gerlach real estate agent, Laura McCaffrey

Washington Wizards forward/center Andray Blatche bought a house in Mitchellville for $1.4 million. Built in 2007, the 7,000-square-foot house sits on more than an acre of land. Blatche was drafted by the Wizards directly from high school in the second round of the 2005 NBA draft.

Piedmont, Calif., atop the Oakland Hills, boasts good schools, plenty of parks, and safe streets where the local kids gather and most of the police's attention goes to errant skateboarders.

These important barometers of an area's worth are difficult to measure.

That's why Forbes.com compiled a list of the best standard of living suburbs for the country's 15 largest cities. We created a model using data from NeighborhoodScout.com, a Rhode Island-based real estate research firm, which analyzed school quality, crime rates, income and education levels and homeownership rates for every incorporated and unincorporated town, city and village within 25 miles of the major city.

No matter what, living in a city's finest suburb will cost you some coin. In terms of property values and income levels, each one of the suburbs we found was in the top 10% by both measures.

Behind The Numbers
School quality and crime are obvious indicators. School rankings come from Department of Education data on graduation rates, per-pupil spending and student-to-teacher ratio. By most measures of school quality, California ranks toward the bottom of the barrel, so it's a huge benefit for residents of Ross, Beverly Hills or Belvedere when they can send their kids to public schools. The same goes for University Park and Highland Park, in Dallas, which operate their own school systems.

Crime data come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and include only per capita violent crimes and property crimes. Washington, D.C., and Detroit are both famous for high violent-crime rates, which in turn makes places such as Chevy Chase, Md., or Bloomfield Hills, Mich., all the more valuable.

But income and education level of the neighbors are also important. Those with higher incomes and education levels are more likely to demand top restaurants, shops, entertainment venues and parks, say demographers. Evanston, Ill., and Cambridge, Mass., are two examples of college towns that made our list as great examples of places where you'll find high-quality restaurants, parks and entertainment, with local residents flocking to lecture series, art galleries and music venues. And financial savvy should not be overlooked, since a foreclosure on your block can reduce surrounding property values. Data for these measures was provided by the Census Bureau.

Homeownership makes a big difference in a community, as those tied to an area by a mortgage are more likely to improve it, maintain it and invest in it. We also relied on Census Bureau data for this measure. If there's an uptick in crime, problems with schools or deterioration of public services, homeowners are more likely to try and fix the problem, instead of simply moving to another town.

In our list, each city has three listed suburbs. It's how those cities stack up against local alternatives, not nationwide ones, that determined if they'd make the cut. There are countless Minneapolis suburbs with better schools and a lower crime rate than most Miami suburbs, but since people are more likely to move across town than across the country, we kept the list localized.

Often the exceptional enclaves are in small towns that are purposefully isolated, such as Kenilworth, Ill., outside Chicago, for example, which was a planned community founded by Joseph Sears, or Paradise Valley, Ariz., outside of Phoenix, where median home prices are more than a million dollars higher than the surrounding city. And even in one of the nation's fastest-growing population centers, Paradise Valley maintains a small population at approximately 15,000 people.

Not surprisingly, billionaires tend to turn up in many of our suburb picks. Paul Allen lives on Mercer Island, Wash., Ted Lerner resides in Chevy Chase, Md., Carl Pohlad lives in Edina, Minn., and Bill Gates lives in Medina, Wash.

Given the size of their houses, and the tenure of their stays, they're not moving out anytime soon.