WI Town Among Money’s 50 Best Places To Live

WISCONSIN — La Crosse is among the 50 Best Places to Live in America, according to a recent report from Money.

Money said the 50 places on the list, released earlier this month, offer affordability, good schools and strong job markets, and are places with “a palpable spirit, nurtured and sustained by engaged citizens and receptive public officials.”

Of La Crosse, Money said:

In the eastern bank of the Mississippi River lies the small city of La Crosse, a picturesque slice of Midwest Americana with a healthy job market, thriving arts scene and some of the best freshwater fishing in the country.

In a departure from previous years, Money did not rank the places but instead grouped them into five categories highlighting their strengths: suburbs with soul, best-kept secrets, new boomtowns, not just college towns, and culture hubs.

Outdoor recreation is a huge draw here — hiking, climbing, boating and the like fill up many local weekend agendas — but there’s also plenty to do in town, too. La Crosse has three universities, so there’s no shortage of nightlife. (Local favorites like Pearl Street Brewery, 608 Brewing and Turtle Stack are all worthy stops along the region’s Craft Beverage Trail). A slew of galleries and small theaters — plus the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra — offer plenty for the artistically inclined.

La Crosse has a lot to offer in terms of jobs, with decent wages to boot. The city is headquarters to the convenience store chain Kwik Trip, which recently invested $151 million into expanding its workforce in Wisconsin. Old Style, the iconic Midwestern beer brand previously owned by Pabst, just moved production back to La Crosse last year, after more than two decades in Milwaukee.

Best of all, the cost of living in this charming hidden gem puts most of the country to shame: Homes in La Crosse have a median listing price of just $265,000.

Collectively, the cities and towns on the list are a “blueprint for the future,” Money said.

The report is based on data on such things as the health of the job market, average housing costs, the percentage of residents living in poverty and the quality of public schools, as well as reader polls. But, the editors acknowledged, things that make a town or a city worth living in can’t always be quantified.

To expand the report, Money also considered a breadth of research from public policy and advocacy groups, such as the American Planning Association, Brookings, Main Street America and the Project for Public Spaces, supplemented by data from Moody’s Analytics, SchoolDigger, Realtor.com, the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and others.