Vienna Is Rated a Great Place to Stop — Permanently – The Post
Vienna, Va., my hometown for 22 of my 28 years was ranked #4 in Money magazine’s annual best places to live. Theoretically, this is great news for my parents as it should help raise the value of their home.

I find it hard to believe that Vienna could be the fourth best town in the U.S., but then again, I don’t read Money so I am not viewing it through the same lens. It is a pretty good place to raise a family though and compared with the rest of Fairfax County it is incredibly quaint.

My last semester at Penn State, I did a term paper on the local weekly, The Vienna Times (which seems to be the only Times Community Newspaper without a Web presence) and interviewed the editor. She believed that it was “the best located smalltown in the country.” There is something to that statement. How many other small towns are located next to a high concentration of jobs as Tysons Corner?

One friend of mine, now currently in law school out in Frisco, is baffled by the results. I am not perplexed, but I have to think if it were a suburb of Chicago or New York, it would not place this high on the list. Vienna is exceptional because it does not have the soulless “just built” (as Money put it) aesthetic that most of Fairfax County has.

I have to wonder why Falls Church did not make the list though. It has great schools, more charm, is closer to D.C. and has a downtown that is almost walkable.

While I feel spending 22 years in Vienna was long enough for me, there are certainly some excellent reasons for families to live in Vienna.