...As in "Most Affordable Suburb in U.S." According to a March 2 article in Bloomberg Business Week magazine, Berkley is the most affordable suburb in the U.S. For its 2010 report , the magazine evaluated 863 communities according to a range of factors developed with the New York-based real estate data company Onboard Informatics. These components included cost of living, average income, crime rate, local economy, public school district, racial diversity, and green space.
[[Woodward Talk, March, 31)

Fascinating......After growing up in Detroit, and living in Boston and Madison, WI, my wife and I have raised our son in Berkley. It's a nice, quiet little town, but I challenge some of the findings, particularly regarding the school district and the notion of any kind of real racial diversity. There are 14,000 citizens in a community just under 3 square miles that is rough around the edges, has too many dogs [[it is now a law that you have to own at least two dogs in order to buy a house in Berkley), and has the best example of a poorly executed and engineered brick pattern intersection at 12 Mile and Coolidge that has never held up and just appears to have been a bad idea.

The report cites the low cost of housing, and that there is a good stock of entry level starter homes. Well that's fine if you are looking to buy your first home, but not so great if you are selling after living in Berkley for 17 years. The schools score well on a number of statistical measures [[for example, the high school offers as many AP courses as humanly possible, but that doesn't mean that the sections fill up or are offered every semester, but "statistically" these AP offerings count), and the high school's white kids and black kids haven't always clicked. I will mention only the hallway exchanges between classes that are highly stressful and menacing situations reminding adult observers of a pen full of ornery cattle.

But good for my little town. Positive national attention is never a bad thing, but with a local unemployment rate of about 17%, a school district that has major infrastructure challenges, minority citizens who seem to live only on the fringes, and a downtown area that is more thrift shoppers paradise than a lively destination scene, one should be careful of the hype. Come to Berkley and buy a house [[and put your "savings" back into it.) Bring your dogs. Avoid 12 Mile and Coolidge, and act responsibly, and I will even let you be my neighbor.