63 North Texas towns ranked. Which came out on top? Which sank to the bottom? And where does your community fall on the list?
During the last decade, Plano has been raking in the magazine-bestowed accolades. In 2005, Money named Plano the best place to live in the Western United States (though it's slipped off the list since). In 2008, Forbes rated it one of the top three suburbs of Dallas. In 2010 and 2011, Forbes named Plano the safest city in America with a population greater than 250,000. In 2011, Men's Health rated it the third-healthiest city in the nation. And this is all besides the fact that in 2008 the Census Bureau noted that Plano had the highest median income in the U.S. among cities of its size. (These honors are, understandably, what residents prefer to focus on, rather than rehashing stories of the rash of heroin overdoses by Plano teenagers in the 1990s, or the high-school steroid headlines in the early part of the last decade.) Plano’s historic downtown has bricked streets and West Village-like housing. It has Legacy, a modern, walkable community with everything from Frito-Lay to luxury apartments and Taco Diner. Former Mayor Pat Evans says “It was easy to say this is a wealthy, successful place and look at the problems they’ve had. The schools tried to do their job of taking care of the kids. Our police pioneered a new way of prosecuting the drug dealers, holding the dealers responsible for the deaths that took place. And at the same time, we were building a city."