Where to Live Inexpensively: Durham-Chapel Hill

Recently Forbes.com looked across the nation to come up with a list of what metro areas offered the best "bang for the buck" or where to live inexpensively. Coming in at #8 on their list was the Durham-Chapel Hill area.

To form the Forbes.com list, they looked at America's 380 metropolitan statistical areas and metropolitan divisions (or metros)--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics--and picked out the 100 least expensive. In order to do that, they ranked all on cost of living data from Moody's Economy.com and home affordability figures from the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo.
Once the 100 cheapest metro areas were established, they rated them across four quality-of-life measures: violent crime rate, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; unemployment rate, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; average salary for college grads, from Payscale.com; and cultural opportunity, based on the leisure index from Sperling's Best Places.
Among the regions of the South, Fort Worth, Texas, Knoxville, Tenn., and Durham, N.C., offer the best value. The story points out that many of the best cheap cities like Minneapolis and Ann Arbor are benefiting from the shift of technology research and development away from Silicon Valley. Though companies aren't completely abandoning California, some, like Cisco Systems, are starting East Coast branches in smaller university towns like Durham because of the low cost and high concentration of engineers.
In these particular areas, I think the technology imprint is an important underpinning," says Eduardo Martinez, senior economist at Moody's Economy.com. "A lot of these towns have top-tier research universities. From a salary and income perspective, there are going to be more opportunities. It's all part of a larger shift with tech that you're going to see in the U.S."
"Durham is the less expensive side of the Raleigh-Durham area; Fort Worth is the same with Dallas," he says. "You're in a strong constellation, but you're living on the cheap side."

To see the slideshow of the top 3 from each region, including the Durham-Chapel Hill slide, click on Durham-Chapel Hill Rank #8 Nationally

For more information about the area and to see Homes for Sale in Chapel Hill and Durham visit The Home Team website today. For the full story from Forbes, click here.

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