Samuel Scheer and his wife, Rosetta Cohen, are long-time residents of western Massachusetts. But they love the arts and culture scene in New York City so much that they recently bought a more spacious apartment in the Big Apple with the thought that eventually it might become their primary retirement home. “We haven’t made up our minds yet,” says Scheer. “But we wanted a larger space because we plan to spend more time in the city.” Both had long and challenging careers—Scheer, now 72, as a high school English teacher, and Cohen, now 69, as a Smith College professor of education and American studies.
Rather than overpriced Manhattan or trendy but expensive Brooklyn, they chose Riverdale, a pleasant neighborhood in the New York City borough of The Bronx, where housing money goes a lot further. The two walk seven minutes from their pre-war apartment building to the Van Cortlandt Park subway station for the half-hour ride on the No. 1 line to Lincoln Center. Three more quick stops, and they’re at Times Square, the heart of Broadway.
After a five-year absence, New York City is enjoying a revival on Forbes’ list of the 25 Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement. Our new 2024 edition, the eighth, contains choices in 16 states, as well as Washington, D.C. The idea is to identify prime places to pursue any of the following six passions: arts/culture, fine dining, lifelong learning, outdoor activities on water, outdoor activities on land, and in its own category, golf. The full list can be found here.
Yes, most of the four million or so Americans who retire each year stay put, move a short distance to downsize, or move a longer way to be near family or to cut costs. (The main Forbes list of Best Places To Retire in 2024 focuses heavily on affordable retirement places that offer a high quality of life.) But a sizable minority do follow their dreams, by either moving abroad (see our new Best Places To Retire Abroad list) or domestically to somewhere that better fits their leisure time interests. Indeed, thanks to pandemic-induced work-from-home freedom, the years leading up to retirement can present a great opportunity to relocate somewhere that’s suits your passions.
It’s not just the work-from-home crowd, of course. Buying a second home, if you can swing it, is a fine way for older still-employed couples to try out a place they’re considering for retirement. Since 1991, Samuel Scheer and Rosetta Cohen have owned a four-bedroom house in Northampton, Mass., 150 miles north of New York City, where they lived and raised their daughter. But their cultural heart was always in New York, where they love going to museums and galleries as well as the performing arts. So in 2016, while both were still working, the couple bought a one-bedroom apartment in Riverdale (on the Northampton side of New York City). Because it was in The Bronx, they were able to close the deal without a loan on the property. “At first it was sort of a pied-à-terre,” says Scheer.
But in 2022, as New York loomed larger in their retirement thinking, they sold that unit and bought a larger, two-bedroom apartment in the same building on the same floor. Both times they used the same real estate broker, Chintan Trivedi, of RE/MAX in the City, whom they found by asking around. Trivedi says he has worked with a number of clients moving to the city for a “cultural” retirement.
If you’re not as sure as Scheer and Cohen of where your heart is, our new list of The Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement is a great starting point for your research. Here’s our overall methodology. We looked at more than 800 places around the country—including a number suggested by Forbes readers—compiling a ton of data we put through our evaluative metrics. We excluded places with populations below 10,000 on the theory there would be an inadequate supply of housing if everyone rushed in. We also filtered candidates for other quality-of-retirement-life issues. These included primary care physicians per capita in the county of the particular place, air quality and serious crime rates (axing places more than several times the national average).
Climate change/natural hazard risk is also an important factor in the selection process. For the last four years, Forbes has weighed such risks in its methodology for picking retirement spots. We generally use the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk Index for Natural Hazards. It calculates for every county in the nation a relative vulnerability measure for 18 natural hazards, including wildfires, heat, hurricanes, flooding, landslides and earthquakes, and also factors in a community’s ability to deal with those threats. We exclude places that have a very high risk rating from FEMA, but not those with a high risk—given how common that now is. Natural hazard risk explains why only one place in Florida—Sarasota—is on this list, as well as the omission of other inviting passion pursuit-filled places like Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Only then, with our winnowed down list, do we focus on top places for various passions, using scores of published evaluations by experts and enthusiasts. We also review information on how walkable and bikeable a place is—both activities contribute to a healthy lifestyle. Then we apply our editorial judgment.
While not dispositive to our selections, we include an overview of state taxation because, well, relocating folks want to know about this, and it does vary. Four places on the list have no general state income tax: Austin, Texas; Dallas; Sarasota; and Walla Walla, Washington (although Washington State now levies a 7% “excise tax” on certain high-end asset sales). Three places, all in Oregon, have no sales tax: Ashland, Bend and Eugene. No place on this year’s list now taxes Social Security earnings at the state level. But some tax portions of other retirement or pension income while levying duties on estates and inheritances. Take a close look at our individual write-ups.
So where do we get the hard data? Median home prices come primarily from the National Association of Realtors, zillow.com and redfin.com. Cost of living information is drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and bestplaces.net. Serious crime stats spring from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, neighborhoodscout.com, and, occasionally, official local tabulations. Primary care doctor ratios on a county-wide basis come from countyhealthrankings.org. Air quality metrics are collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Tax data comes from taxfoundation.org and websites of individual state tax agencies.
Assessments of walkability (the ability to stroll easily to basic retail businesses and mass transit for everyday needs) and bikeability (same idea using pedaling) are made by walkscore.com and the League of American Bicyclists. Riverdale, where Scheer and Cohen moved to, ranks high in both those metrics.