The Best Places to Live

A real estate connoisseur's guide to the Hub's best streets.

By Michael Blanding

What makes a street a great street? Is it leafy verdure, or honking-big houses? Proximity to lip-smacking vittles? Or bragging rights over the next neighborhood.s schools? Well...yes, yes, yes, and yes.

To determine which roads, lanes, avenues, drives, circles, and courts best fulfill those qualifications and rank as the area.s most desired addresses, we started by polling hundreds of Hub real estate brokers. (Thanks to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors for distributing our survey to its members.) Working from their nominations, our judge then logged 1,200 miles on Greater Boston asphalt to check out the candidates, tease out subtle distinctions, and make some hard choices. Streets were graded on six criteria—aesthetics, environment, amenities, public services, affordability, and access to transit—and when a town or neighborhood had more than one high-ranking thoroughfare, we chose only the top scorer. In some cases, a street had a certain extra something—an "X-factor," in our system—that helped bump it up in the standings.

Three months and one "check engine" light later, we have our winners. Oh, and by the way: Professional ethics precluded us from including streets currently inhabited by our editorial staffers. But if any readers want to express gratitude for a spike in their property values, they should feel free to send checks to the author, care of Boston magazine.